Sell at a loss, buy it back, keep the loss

No. Under current US law, the wash sale rule covers stock and securities, and the IRS treats crypto as property. Sell bitcoin at a loss, buy it back an hour later, and the loss still counts on your return.

Compare that with a stock. Sell 100 shares at a 2,000 dollar loss and buy them back within 30 days, and the loss is disallowed. It moves into the cost basis of the new shares instead. The window runs 30 days before the sale and 30 days after.

Coins you hold directly have no such window today. That's why selling losers in December and rebuying them is a known crypto tactic.

Two caveats apply. The law can change, and general anti-abuse doctrines still exist. A sale whose only purpose is the tax loss is weaker ground than one you'd make anyway.

The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act in September 2026. It would apply wash sale rules to digital assets, with an exception for qualified dollar stablecoins. A Senate bill introduced the same month takes a similar line.

The date in the House text is the part to watch. Reporting on the committee version says it would cover sales after mid-September 2026, when it was introduced. If that survives, a December harvest-and-rebuy could be caught once the bill becomes law.

None of this is law yet. The House was expected to take it up after the November elections, and the Senate had not scheduled its version. Bills change between committee and floor, and plenty never reach a vote.

Check the status again on the day you make the trade. A news search for the bill name takes two minutes.

In practice, missing data hurts more than the rule does. Without a clean record of every buy and sell, you can't prove a loss, wash sale or no wash sale.

Custodial platforms now send Form 1099-DA. Gross proceeds were reported for 2025 sales. Cost basis reporting starts with assets bought in 2026 on the same platform. Coins moved between wallets and exchanges break that chain. The receiving platform has no idea what you paid.

Transfers between your own wallets are not sales, but they look like them in an export. Label them as you go, or you'll be guessing next spring.

If the wash sale bill passes, records get stricter still. You'd need to match each losing sale against buys of the same coin 30 days either side. That is a lookup on a clean ledger and an afternoon of misery on a messy one.

Keep these for each transaction from the day you make it. A spreadsheet works if you update it the same day.

The rule you can ignore on coins applies in full to anything that trades as stock. Shares of a crypto miner or an exchange operator are stock. Sell at a loss, rebuy within 30 days, and the loss is deferred.

Spot crypto ETFs sit in a grey area. You buy them through a broker and they arrive on a 1099-B like other shares. Their exact status under the rule hasn't been settled. The cautious path is to treat them as covered.

That creates an easy mistake. Say you sell an ETF at a loss and buy the coin it holds. You've just crossed between two regimes. Under current law that may work. Under the pending bill, a substantially identical test could reach across them.

If you trade both, keep the two sets of records separate and dated.

Start with the losses you'd sell anyway. A sale you'd make for trading reasons is the cleanest place to book a loss. A sale made only to rebuy is the one a new law could catch.

Next, check the bill's status in early December, then again before any year-end sale. If the September effective date is still in the text, assume a rebuy inside 30 days could be disallowed later.

Then tidy the ledger. Match every platform export against your own records, and label every transfer. Do it now, while you still remember which wallet was which.

The rule is moving, and your situation has details no article can see. Check with a tax professional before you book a large year-end loss.