Taxes

[Ricorocks]

I have 3 laptops 'dedicated' to folding only, pretty much 24/7. It's $50.00 per year for one. So it costs me approx $150.00 year. It would be nice to deduct this from my US taxes.

see w w w.energyusecalculator.c o m/electricity_laptop.h t m

Notice the spaces, do not include them.

Some form of tax break/incentive would be helpful recruiting tool.

[Joe_H]

Your question/suggestion has come up many times in the past, the basic consensus is that making such a deduction would be disallowed. If you donated a sum of money to the folding program which is part of a non-profit organization, that could be deductible. However the IRS code is very restrictive on the type of in-kind donation that is represented by persons providing computational resources for distributed computing projects like F@H. There are rules for what is considered allowable, and it gets even harder to deduct for anything that might be shared between the donation and personal use.

You are welcome to run your idea past a tax professional, they will probably agree iy is not possible to deduct such costs as extra electrical usage. One thing you might also consider, with there being a history of distributed computing projects going back at least a couple decades, none of the projects have such a tax break or incentive connected to them.

[Ricorocks]

Thanks Joe!

[PS3EdOlkkola]

Last year as I was about to file my 2014 return, I checked with my tax accountant/attorney to see if it was possible to deduct any portion of the expense associated with running FAH. The conclusion on the hardware purchased was "No" with several reasons given, mostly having to do with the fact that purchasing the hardware is still an asset you own and not contributed to Stanford's 501(c)(3) registered non-profit entity. The analogy given was using your car for charitable purposes and trying to deduct the total cost of the car, instead of just the gas/mileage charge for trips related to the charitable activity. However, the conclusion my CPA/attorney reached concerning the electricity used to power the systems was that electricity charges are deductible if the systems are 100% dedicated to the charitable activity, the taxpayer claiming the deduction can accurately determine the electrical power used to run the system in terms of the cost per kilowatt hour, notify Stanford of the KWH cost in your area to run your systems, accurately log all the work units a donor completes and confirmation they were sent to Stanford, and ideally a Stanford-issued IRS form 990 sent to the donor at the end of the tax year with the number of work units donated as a "non-cash contribution". The donor fills out their SS# and includes it as part of their tax return for that tax year. You have to have enough tax deductions to itemize (i.e. 1040 long form) in order to use form 990.

Needless to say, it isn't an easy process to keep track of all that information, but I'm going to try to take a tax deduction for my 2016 taxes by doing the following over the next few months of 2015:

• 1. Have the electric company install separate metered circuits in both of my data centers (at home and at my office). Doing so will allow me to exactly measure the amount of electricity consumed on systems which are 100% dedicated to FAH. That will solve the "capturing the exact cost" problem.
  
  2. Since HFM.Net now has the ability to export a csv file, I'm looking for a developer to write a script to that can execute the csv file export and run a "net new" work unit completion calculation and enter the daily work units completed into a database. That will provide the data needed on my end to ensure I'm capturing completed work units sent to Stanford.
  
  3. The official FAH stats page only shows the running total of WUs completed, so since I have a PDF printout from the baseline of January 1st of 2016, I just need to remember to print out a PDF of the December 31, 2016 page. That's what I will rely upon from Stanford to confirm the WUs I contributed match up with the work units my own system indicates. Hopefully they are the same, but whichever is less is the one I'll use.
  
  4. Here is the tricky part: I'd like to have Stanford issue an IRS Form 990 with their part of the form filled out, but I honestly don't hold out much hope for that. It would be ideal if they would send out an IRS form 990 in PDF form to every registered FAH participant (those with a passkey) that reflects the number of work units received, which only requires a simple mail-merge in Word that pulls WUs completed from 1/1/16 to 12/31/16 and the email address and then sends it out, but I'm pretty sure they won't do that. Instead, I'll keep close track of everything and use only standard Stanford-reported results and see if the IRS accepts the documentation behind the contribution, following the rules regarding notifying Stanford of my $/KWH cost and the number of WUs I believe I processed.

Worst case is they deny the deduction, but it's certainly worth a try since the deduction for the cost of electricity to run all my systems would be almost $10,000.

[Ricorocks]

Howdy neighbor Georgetown TX here. I'll have to see what tax form my guy used. The way I'm set up now, I figure it will cost me ~150.00 for the year.

Thanks

[CygnusXI]

This applies to a couple options that exist today.

There are a couple choices that even allow you to fold for any team, and still write off both cost of "hardware deprecation" and electric costs.

This page has all the sub links and us gov info to understand how this works. https://www.reddit.com/r/curecoin/comme ... lications/

Since any crypto currency hobby is now officially a tax write-off for the hobby level (most folders) or business level ( in the future soon Im sure ).

Please ask your accountant to confirm these items for you state /region , this info is provided to try to surface some help on the subject.

Plenty of reading and official gov links to follow there.