In an audit, it would be hard to argue you didn't know about it or didn't have access to the coins, if they can show you as a prominent member of the bitcoin community and you had the expertise to access the coins.
That's messed up. Good thing I'm not under audit, and they can't show me as a prominent member of the bitcoin community. (But Bitcoin.com is the prominent community because they have the dot com domain name right? I'm not there at all.) Or that they could prove I had the expertise to access the coins.
That sucks for everyone else who is an expert.
As far as my country is concerned, I don't deal with bitcoin or crypto at all. I know as much as anyone else around these parts.
I understand, some of you guys have to pay taxes, so ... good luck with that.
"When you receive cryptocurrency from an airdrop following a hard fork, you will have ordinary income equal to the fair market value of the new cryptocurrency when it is received, which is when the transaction is recorded on the distributed ledger, provided you have dominion and control over the cryptocurrency so that you can transfer, sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of the cryptocurrency."
So, the value would be zero, if it's not listed on any exchange at the time of a fork, and it's not even listed on sites like coinmarketcap. No value = zero.
I mean, maybe 10,000 of that fork can buy a pizza, but if no merchant accepts it as payment, on the day of the fork, then it's not even worth a pizza.
On the other hands, really, guys, don't store your coins on an exchange, unless you were actually intending to trade or receive fork coins that way. That would also mean, the exchange knows you had an account with them and can use whatever reporting tools are accurate at the time with that exchange, if they are tax compliant and all that. Which means, shady exchanges that didn't do any KYC on you don't have your info anyway, so you can forget about them.