A quick google search will make it clear that US citizens are required by law to pay taxes on any forked crypto coins/ tokens (example link below followed by some quotes from that link).
The revenue ruling gives two examples: one of a taxpayer whose cryptocurrency undergoes a hard fork, creating a new cryptocurrency, but units of the new cryptocurrency are not airdropped or otherwise transferred into an account that the taxpayer owns or controls. Because the taxpayer receives no units of the new cryptocurrency, that taxpayer does not at that point have gross income for federal tax purposes.
The second example is similar to the first, except that in addition to the hard fork, units of the new cryptocurrency are airdropped into the taxpayer’s distributed ledger address, and the taxpayer is able to immediately dispose of the new units. In this case, because the taxpayer receives units of the new cryptocurrency, the taxpayer has an accession to wealth and ordinary income in the tax year in which the new cryptocurrency units are received. The amount of the ordinary income is the fair market value of the new units when the airdrop is recorded on the distributed ledger.
My question to you is:
What was the "fair market value" of HIVE when it was "birthed" out of the STEEM blockchain?
I mean, it wasn't tradeable on any exchange at the moment of the hard-fork, right? Or am I misinformed? If so, there was effectively no "fair market value" (FMV) at the time that the HIVE blockchain started operating, correct? Would that effectively make the FMV $0?
Do we simply use the quoted price of the "mother chain" (STEEM) at the time of the hard-fork as the FMV?
Or do we use the first quoted price of HIVE on an exchange as the FMV, in regards to federal income taxes? Any exchange? Even if it's some mostly unknown, laughably low liquidity exchange, that doesn't even exist in the eyes of the IRS? Or do we quote the first "major exchange" to list a price as the FMV? If so, what are considered major exchanges?
Is there any "professional guidance" on how to treat this type of situation?
Any help on this would be majorly appreciated.
interesting many whales would be needing this to take a look into now