My CPA wants me to provide her with the value of the bitcoin when I mined it vs when I sold it. It doesn't have to be the same btc, that's a daunting task to calculate. She just needs a number for the books. She needs a basis value for when it was mined vs when it was sold. And she's treating it like short term gains, like stocks. I'll use the difficulty vs my hash rate to calculate what I mined. I can look at my payout history on btcguild, but that doesn't reflect the date mined, just the date it moved it from btcguild to my wallet. My CPA doesn't know what to do, we're really just guessing. There are simply some huge deposits into my checking from coinbase that need accounted for, that's what we're doing. If you never sell any btc, you need not report anything.
That's what I thought prior to the IRS guidelines, but unfortunately you are wrong. I suggest you bone up on it before making statements presented as fact.
Are you mining with ASIC gear? If so, is the cost being expensed as one-time payments?
FYI, here's a summary of the IRS guidance: You are supposed to log the BTC as you mined it as INCOME, at the value of BTC on the day it was paid to your wallet. Then that income also serves as your cost basis for what you are already doing. So it sounds like you have half of the math done. FWIW, I wanted it to be like the way your CPA thinks it is, but unfortunately it didn't end up like that.