Recently, I again saw someone hard-linking ETF fund flows with the risk appetite of the U.S. stock market to interpret crypto market ups and downs. While I listened, I felt uneasy in my gut: whether it goes up or down can be put aside for now—what really hits hard is the end-of-year tax statement.

Honestly, what I do now is pretty basic: every time I make a deposit or withdrawal, swap on-chain, or trade on a CEX, I just quickly export a CSV and drop it into a cloud drive—wallet addresses, tx hashes, and notes all written clearly (otherwise, after more than three months, I won’t even recognize it myself).

Put simply, keeping records isn’t to prove how professional you are; it’s so you don’t end up arguing until past midnight about whether “this transaction” is truly a cost or just a transfer. In any case, I’d rather spend an extra couple of minutes bookkeeping right now than face a pile of small swaps at year-end and end up questioning everything.