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When selling your coin for the purposes of tax harvesting, would it be sufficient to transfer the coin into another wallet, and then back again, or does the coin have to be exchanged for fiat, and then new coin purchased with the fiat? I would love to minimize the transactional cost of this procedure.

Background, tax loss harvesting:

Recently became aware of "Tax Loss Harvesting" for crypto currency, the process by which you can sell an equity at a loss, and then re-purchase a similar equity in order to "reset" the cost basis of that equity for tax purposes. Basically, if I bought bitcoin for $100, its current market value is $50, then I could sell the bitcoin and claim the loss of $50 against my earnings for this year. According to other sites I've read, due to the nature of crypto I wouldn't have to wait 30 days and could immediately re-purchase the coin at a wash, but now would have $50 (instead of $100) as cost basis for tax purposes, meaning that future me will have to pay those saved taxes rather than current me.

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I am not a tax advisor, and you probably want to seek professional advice in your jurisdiction instead.

That said, it would seem very strange to me that merely transferring funds within wallets/accounts of your own would be considered a trade for tax purposes. I would expect that some conversion to another asset type is needed for that.

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  • My feeling too, in my case I felt it would be good to have a paper trail to fiat, so I sent to Coinbase, sold, and then repurchased. But there are a lot of extra fees down that route. It does seem that something like changelly, or a coin exchange service could possibly be cheaper but wouldn't go to USD (but some other crypto).
    – BadPirate
    Oct 18 '21 at 15:00

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