got my PayPal 1099 /// what now?

I’m definitely getting hit by this becasue I’m well over the $5K threshold. I should go check PayPal for the forms.

Playing with crypto in 2020 was kind of a nightmare for taxes - LOTS of transactions, short term vs long term gains etc. I learned the little bit of accounting necessary, chose the basis (FIFO, HIFO etc) and wrote my own code to compile the results which I fed into TurboTax. Also had my code generate the IRS forms but didn’t end up needing them - TurboTax has its own inputs for that. Carried the accounting forward the next 3 years, and now I’m finally done with that mess. I was quite proud of it anyways, haha.

At least I’m sure this should be a lot simpler. Everything was a loss (of course), and I just need to track down the "close enough" original payments for cost basis. I assume TurboTax will have another input form for this that makes it relatively simple - we’ll see.

Does bitcoin send out 1099?

If you traded through a major exchange (Binance, Coinbase etc) they should, though they did not always in the past. You’re still supposed to report and pay taxes on any trades for profit that you’ve done, regardless of a 1099. And technically if you made significant profits you’re supposed to pay estimated taxes every quarter before year end. But the risk of not reporting really has "teeth" if you were issued a 1099. Good luck with the accounting on crypto, it’s complicated if you did a lot of buy/sell - that’s on you.

If you missed a 1099 on a prior year you might be at risk. If you didn’t miss a 1099 then you might be OK depending on how much effort the IRS wants to spend on backtracking this stuff.

I used Binance and even in the years before they issued 1099’s (IIRC 2021 and earlier), you could download a file (PDF, CSV) with all your raw transactions for the year. That doesn’t include the accounting number-crunching you need to report taxable income. It’s nasty stuff; I’m a software dev by trade so I wrote my own.