Best Bitcoin Cloud Mining Contract Reviews and Comparisons. Become the best Bitcoin miner and learn how to mine Bitcoins with the best Bitcoin mining hardware. Have you decided to start bitcoin mining in South Africa? Are you wanting to make lots of money mining bitcoin? You might need think carefully about how much money you are willing to risk, as bitcoin mining is a very risky business. (Please also see our articles on and, and ) After getting countless emails and cries for help from people who have tried and failed at bitcoin mining, this article is to warn people that while you can make money, you can also lose a lot of money. Everyone writes posts about why you should mine bitcoin, so this one is about why maybe you should not.a little balance is good ? New users of bitcoin are the most excited about possibly earning a living from mining bitcoin, or even just to have it as another stream of income. The reality is though, that bitcoin mining is expensive, requires adequate technical knowledge of bitcoin and the mining process, as well as some level of computer skills and possible troubleshooting or problem solving skills. You can tell if someone is new to bitcoin, if they ask you how they can start mining bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is kind of the digital equivalent of the analog mining for gold. In the old days, if you were a gold miner, and were lucky, you could make a fortune. The problem was then that everybody decided to also start mining gold, and soon all the easy to find gold was gone. The harder to find gold was deeper in the ground or rock, or needed bigger and more specialized equipment to mine it. This is sort of the same with bitcoin mining. The easy to get bitcoins were mined years ago when you could use your laptop or home computer to mine a few bitcoins a day. These days you need the top of the range ASIC miners to stand a chance of mining any bitcoin, and they dont come cheap, or with a guarantee of being profitable. This is especially true since the bitcoin halving, when mining profitability was cut in half, an event that happens roughly every 4 years. Calculating profitability No matter how much bitcoin you can mine each day, and how much it is worth, you are not profitable until you have earned MORE bitcoin than you have spent on your hardware, electricity, internet, or any other costs you might have like rent, customs fees, or even petrol. You need to FIRST cover the cost of your mining hardware and all running costs before you are profitable. Profit calculator websites on the internet generally do not offer the full picture, and many times they are completely wrong. The amount of bitcoin you mine each day is generally on a constant downward trend due to the increases in the mining difficulty. Most profit calculators will tell you what you can earn with bitcoin mining today, and then they multiply that figure by days over time, without reducing the daily amount of bitcoin you earn due to the mining difficulty increases. The fact is that your mining hardware will generate LESS and LESS bitcoin over time. Every time the bitcoin difficulty increases (it is recalculated roughly every 14 days), you generate less bitcoin, and therefore less profit. Once the bitcoin you are generating each day is worth less than your running costs, its time to turn off the bitcoin miner as it would be cheaper for you to just buy bitcoin. You need to have already covered the cost of your mining hardware and all other costs by this time, otherwise you would have made a loss. Most miners only realize they might not get a return on their investment when it is too late, because in the beginning, the first 6 months or so, the profits look good. After the 6 month window, the declines in profit are far more noticeable. Most computer hardware has a lifespan of around 3 to 5 years, and bitcoin miners are much shorter than that. You would be lucky to get 2 years of no problems or parts needing to be replaced, even the manufacturers themselves only offer a 90 day warranty on the hardware which does not instill confidence it will last for a very long time. Bitcoin difficulty affects your profit. The increase in the bitcoin difficulty over the last 2 years A major curve ball in the profitability of bitcoin mining, is the ‘bitcoin difficulty’. If blocks are being mined quicker than every 10 minutes, the difficulty is adjusted, making it harder to mine bitcoin. The more miners there are, the higher the hash rate, and the quicker the blocks are mined. This results in the difficulty getting adjusted to be harder, to keep the block generation time at 10 minutes per block. So the higher the difficulty goes, the less profit you make. This year alone, there has been some large jumps in the difficulty recalculation every 2016 blocks (roughly every 14 days). Below is a chart showing the changes in the difficulty so far this year. The Change column shows you how much the difficulty has gone up (green) or down (red) in 2016. The difficulty going up 7.67% on 15 August means as a miner, you earn 7.67% LESS bitcoin from that moment onward, and are that much less profitable. This is a big problem for you if you still need to cover your costs, and every 2 weeks you are 6% less, 3% less, etc. On average, the difficulty goes up.there might be some occasional times when it goes down, but usually its up, meaning less profit. When it comes to the bitcoin difficulty, there is not really any way to be sure what the change will be month to month, so how can you work out how profitable you will be in 6 months time? The answer is you don’t really, some miners will take the average difficulty increase over time over a few months and apply that number to their calculations to work out future profits. This is a huge gamble to take, and is also affected by the price of bitcoin. If the price of bitcoin skyrockets, then it is suddenly more profitable, and many more miners suddenly turn on their previously unprofitable miners to make a few bucks. This again, means the difficulty will adjust accordingly, and in a short while, things are back to what they were again. Often you can see the correlation in the difficulty increases and decreases with the price of bitcoin. How much does it cost to run bitcoin mining hardware? Electricity prices in South Africa from 1 April 2016 One of the current popular bitcoin miners out there is the ANTMINER S9 11.85TH/s bitcoin miner, currently selling for around $1442 or around R21000 on the manufacturers website and around R45000 locally in South Africa. This miner uses a 1500W power supply and needs to be running 24 hours a day, so costs a lot to run. Depending on what your total monthly use what you pay per kWh is on a sliding scale, but you will probably be on the top end of the sliding scale once you start mining bitcoin! 1500 W consumes 1.5kWh per hour, so 1.5 kWh x 24 hours a day x 30 (average-ish days in a month) = 1080 kWh per month in electricity consumption for this miner, give or take a little. The price of electricity varies in South Africa, but the guideline average including VAT is 147.50 c/kWh. So using this guideline average with the amount of electricity the miner will use, you can say 1080kWh per month x 145.50 per kWh / 100 = around R1600 per month in electricity costs. Your cost could be more or less depending on what you pay per kWh. Unless you have a lot of money to keep putting into your mining operation, you will most likely need to sell all the bitcoin you mine immediately to cover your costs of electricity. This can also be problematic if the price of bitcoin is fluctuating, and you get less than expected, but it can also help if the price is up and you get more than expected. Most mining pools that you join when you start mining bitcoin charge you a fee, for example a popular bitcoin mining pool called F2Pool charges 3% fee of your profits. This also needs to be accounted for when you are working out how long it will take you to get your return on investment. How profitable is the Antminer S9 11.85TH in South Africa? The Antminer S9 11.85TH bitcoin miner is able to mine in the region of between 0.4BTC and 0.45 BTC per month at the current bitcoin difficulty. So at a current Rand value of around R9000 per bitcoin, that means you will be mining bitcoin to the value of about R4500 for the first month (If we are being generous). This amount will decrease gradually each month as the bitcoin difficulty increases. The bigger the jumps in bitcoin difficulty, the bigger the cuts in your mining profits. Factor in the cost of the bitcoin miner into the equation too now. Based on previous price we used for electricity, your costs for the miner and electricity for a year would be at least R45000 + (R1600 x 12) = R64200, not including internet, mining pool fees etc. If you were mining bitcoin to the value of R4500 per month for a year, you would have R4500 x 12 = R54000. Of course you would not be making exactly R4500 every month as over time that amount would be decreasing with each increase in the bitcoin difficulty. It is quite possible and likely that it would take you over a year to break even, if you are lucky enough to break even. Sometimes big jumps in the bitcoin difficulty force miners to stop mining and sell their hardware before they have broken even in an effort to stop their losses. Sometimes unforeseen problems can mean you will never break even, such as increases in the price of electricity, forced down time with load shedding which causes loss in mining time and profits, increased costs of generators or other hardware to make your mining operation work better, hardware failure, replacements and repairs to hardware etc. What happens if the price of bitcoin skyrockets If the price of bitcoin goes up drastically, then technically, the value of the bitcoin you are mining is worth more! This will work for you if you paid for your bitcoin miner using a credit card, or bank transfer. Every day when you sell your bitcoin to cover your electricity costs etc, you will be able to cover those costs and more of the cost of the miner faster! This will not work in your favour if you paid for your bitcoin miner using BTC! If you paid 5 bitcoin for your bitcoin miner for example, and now the price of bitcoin skyrockets, you might be making more money in Rand value than the bitcoin was worth when you bought the miner, but if you had simply kept those bitcoin, you would have more Rand value in your pocket. The problem with this is also that if you are selling your mined bitcoin each day to cover costs, then if the price skyrockets over night, you can only benefit on the new price with the new bitcoin you mine. Some people are who believe the price of bitcoin will go up, think that it is a wiser investment to therefore not spend it, and rather keep your bitcoin for that future date. The theory is that by simply investing the money you would have used for a miner into buying bitcoin, you will save yourself the hassle and stress of mining bitcoin and possibly not breaking even. You will not have worries or problems with electricity, internet, hardware problems and troubleshooting, noise and heat from the miners, buying and selling bitcoin to cover costs and possibly losing a lot of money. By just investing in buying bitcoin, you are also able to sell your bitcoin at any time to get back your investment instantly, while with mining, you are stuck, and dont have a cent profit until you have covered all your costs. If the price of bitcoin skyrockets while you are holding bitcoins, you will have a lot more value in your pocket immediately, while if you are mining, you might miss out. Should you mine bitcoin? You can make money mining bitcoin, and you can lose money too, so the best thing to do is to not rush into it. Do your research thoroughly, and learn as much as you can first. If you are confident that you can make a profit, and will have the skills to run a bitcoin miner properly, it can be a lot of fun, and make you some money at the same time. Just dont go into it blind to the possibility that you might lose money. Learn about bitcoin, and the mining process before you rush out and buy a bitcoin miner, learn how to trade bitcoin so that you can pay for your running costs, learn all you can first. Hopefully you will get back your return on investment BEFORE that happens! Good luck ?. Dragon mining is a known ponzi scheme being pushed hard in South Africa by guys who have a history of signing up people to ponzi schemes disguised as ‘bitcoin mining’. We still get people contacting us from their last ‘bitcoin mining’ push who have lost hundreds of thousands of Rands, wanting us to help get it back. They lay it on thick, but at the end of the day, you are not mining, its all a facade to make you think you are mining bitcoin. If you want to be sure you are mining bitcoin, buy your own bitcoin mining hardware and plug it into the electricity in your own wall. I suggest you learn about cloud mining here If you see the checklist at the bottom and put dragon mining against it, they fail almost every point. The guys pushing it locally contacted me to try to get us to advertise it on our website (of course using their affiliate link so that they can make profit from every sign up) and when I gave them a list of things I needed them to provide to prove dragon mining was real, they were unable to do so. They eventually said they would get back to me with all the information in the next week.that was in October 2016, never hear from them again. Draw your own conclusions. See @BitcoinZAR’s comment above. Any mining activity that has a recruitment model attached to it is highly suspicious. The process of mining and running a full node is mainly to keep the entire bitcoin and blockchain process secure and functioning. The more miners there are, the more the difficulty increases and you get less for your investment, so you’d expect miners would want less miners as competition instead of more. Watch the rest of the comments here and the promoters of Dragon Mine go to extreme length to try and convince everyone that the scheme is legit. If they are, why would they have to do so, unless its to convince another sucker to join their scheme, where the real income is from the investments of new investors to pay out old and existing ones. Do a search for “asicboost” and read a bit about the latest controversy around the scaling debate and ask yourself why you’d want to be part of all the drama when you can simply buy some bitcoin from, and wait for the price to rise before making a profit. Simple is sometimes best ? •. For the record for anyone here, I launched Dragon Mine here in 2016. I sent this mail to the moderator of this site 4 days ago and have not received a response. Hi there Your opinion piece and advice to people on Dragon Mine refers. 1. You refer to us as a cloud mine. We are a REAL MINE with REAL EQUIPMENT and I have personally been in the mine and have video and photographic evidence to prove it. 2. You say the people running it here in South Africa have been known to push Ponzi schemes. Seeing as I launched it here, I would very much like to know what Ponzi scheme I have been involved in. 3. Your checklist you refer to that you say we fail at almost every point, is incredibly untrue. I can prove that too. You have told a few people that the people who started it here have many times approached you to advertise on your website. I find that strange seeing as I only heard of you today and I am the person who launched it here. Or is it just your perception and assumption that the people who approached you are the people who launched it? I send this mail in good faith; not to argue. Having said that I would ask you to respond to me with what PROPER due diligence have you done on us? In order to satisfy my answers could you please simply respond to the following questions ( remember you have set yourself up as an expert and one to which people turn to for advice. Therefore I would encourage you to do this proper due diligence) 1. Have you asked to visit our mine or seen live footage of several South Africans in it? 2. Have you visited our MINING website to see said footage? If so, can you say what that website address is? 3. Have you ever asked to speak to any of the proper leaders and myself ( Andrew Eaton) who launched it here before giving people your advice? 4. Have you ever asked to speak to any of our executive team like David Martin our founder, Ken Brough, our CEO, or Randy Prince, our CFO? 5. Are you aware that ONE HUNDRED percent of money spent on our mining contracts go towards the actual contract and that ZERO commission gets paid out from it? If your answers to above are “No” then can I highly suggest you do this seeing as though you are handing out advice to people? I welcome you to reach out to me, but also respectfully request that you refrain from calling us a Ponzi scheme until you have done so. Is that a fair suggestion and request? Regards Andrew With above being said I also welcome the opportunity to have a PUBLIC WEBINAR debate with both, the moderator of this site handing out poor advice on us, as well as Mr Haroun Kola. I will bring my A game and invite them to bring their A game. We can then let the public decide if we are fake or a ponzi. Just to let everyone know I sent this mail to BitcoinZAR but he has not had the decency to respond, yet still feels it his right to judge our operation without any REAL facts. I HAVE the FACTS and am happy to have a public debate and let people decide for themselves. Hi there Your opinion piece and advice to people on Dragon Mine refers. 1. You refer to us as a cloud mine. We are a REAL MINE with REAL EQUIPMENT and I have personally been in the mine and have video and photographic evidence to prove it. 2. You say the people running it here in South Africa have been known to push Ponzi schemes. Seeing as I launched it here, I would very much like to know what Ponzi scheme I have been involved in. 3. Your checklist you refer to that you say we fail at almost every point, is incredibly untrue. I can prove that too. You have told a few people that the people who started it here have many times approached you to advertise on your website. I find that strange seeing as I only heard of you today and I am the person who launched it here. Or is it just your perception and assumption that the people who approached you are the people who launched it? I send this mail in good faith; not to argue. Having said that I would ask you to respond to me with what PROPER due diligence have you done on us? In order to satisfy my answers could you please simply respond to the following questions ( remember you have set yourself up as an expert and one to which people turn to for advice. Therefore I would encourage you to do this proper due diligence) 1. Have you asked to visit our mine or seen live footage of several South Africans in it? 2. Have you visited our MINING website to see said footage? If so, can you say what that website address is? 3. Have you ever asked to speak to any of the proper leaders and myself ( Andrew Eaton) who launched it here before giving people your advice? 4. Have you ever asked to speak to any of our executive team like David Martin our founder, Ken Brough, our CEO, or Randy Prince, our CFO? 5. Are you aware that ONE HUNDRED percent of money spent on our mining contracts go towards the actual contract and that ZERO commission gets paid out from it? If your answers to above are “No” then can I highly suggest you do this seeing as though you are handing out advice to people? I welcome you to reach out to me, but also respectfully request that you refrain from calling us a Ponzi scheme until you have done so. Is that a fair suggestion and request? Regards Andrew Eaton •. Dear Webmaster, please stand up and defend your statement. I am busy trying to form an opinion and was about to kick Dragon/GalaxyLifestyle out the door till i read their response. They all provide contact numbers, names, where you are still anonymous. I saw the footage, and yes it could have been anyone’s miner farm, it is still a lot more evidence than what i saw in your post. Please don’t read my post as an attack on you, i don’t expect you to post your name or cell no here, but i would like to see your response, evidence, research, even a copy of the email you sent last year, the previous contact persons, anything. Full disclosure, i am NOT a miner or a current bitcoin user, yet, trying to form an opinion about Dragon vs Genesis, the problem is too many cloud mining scams have stained the market for the true mining companies. Dear Mr Eaton, would you mind responding to the list referred too (). I read it and it does not seem unreasonable. I am not asking to defend yourself, simply a courtesy to help me and others form our own opinions. I have been to one of the seminars, i personally think they overcompensated for the networking scheme instead of focusing on the core, BitCoin mining, but after all my questions was answered I am about 90% convinced of the concept, just deciding if Dragon is the partner i want to use. If anyone want to contact me personally I am open to it, my email is or my number is 072 437 7620. With due respect, I have responded with my questions to you. You are the one who has publicly accused our operation of being a scam without ANY PROPER due diligence, basing ALL your reasons on the ASSUMPTIONS that we tick all the boxes on your check list. You have NOT visited the mine like myself and several other South Africans have, and you have NOT bothered to contact me or any of the leaders to request to speak to our executive team. Something that could easily be arranged. With respect, having to defend ourselves against your baseless ASSUMPTIONS and accusations is also not on my priority list. It is not on my priority list because regardless of your baseless accusations I know who we are and know that we are a REAL mine with REAL equipment. I did NOT write my original post to you because I felt the need to defend ourselves. I wrote it to let people know that your write up on us is based 100% on assumptions and that you did ZERO due diligence on us. That is rather scary seeing as though you feel yourself fit to be handing advice on us out to people. I have asked you to answer my questions and I await a response. Telling someone (that you have accussed of being a scam artist) to relax, frankly, smacks of arrogance of the highest degree. I would like you to answer my questions. 1.You refer to us as a cloud mine. We are a REAL MINE with REAL EQUIPMENT and I have personally been in the mine and have video and photographic evidence to prove it. Firstly, a real mine with real equipment does not mean the hashing power covers the payouts, profits and costs of all the members, remember that. This is where most cloud mining companies start the ponzi / scam side of their business. The real money comes from recruiting other members, and building a matrix / binary tree / pyramid shaped funnel of ‘income’. These days with these type of ponzi schemes, there sometimes really is some token mining might be taking place, but they cant ever seem to prove they have enough hashing power to cover all the members. Most blockchain detective work on any payouts made by these companies prove the bitcoin made in payments to customers was NOT recently mined at all, is not new bitcoin, and is traced to a payment made to the company (probably from another user joining). Typically most payments going out to members can be traced to payments coming in from members.all your proof will help with this. Secondly, you ARE cloud mining. Bitcoin cloud mining usually refers to the process of Bitcoin mining using the shared processing power of a bitcoin miners at a remote data center. Instead of owning your own physical bitcoin mining hardware on your premises, you pay for bitcoin mining power provided by a bitcoin cloud mining company. This is basically what you are selling. If the miner is not in your house, if it is in a remote data center, its cloud mining. 2.You say the people running it here in South Africa have been known to push Ponzi schemes. Seeing as I launched it here, I would very much like to know what Ponzi scheme I have been involved in. I know of some South Africans pushing this scheme, who HAVE been previously involved in the same type of mining scams in the past, where people lost a lot of money. These are the SAME people who had the same type of videos on youtube before encouraging people to join past failed scams. These are the same people / teams who when I would often comment on their videos and explain in great detail how they are wrong and are either being scammed, or they are scamming people, would disable the comments of the videos completely so that nobody else could read them. The same guy who is on what I think is the proper website for drangon mining as one of the directors, and is the same guy who refused to listen to reason, and thousands lost their money believing a previous bitcoin mining venture he was doing. Obviously it was not in his interestes to listen to reason and facts, when his paycheck is depending on people to continue putting in their money right? The same guy / group claims to OWN the mine in youtube videos, so yes, I ASSUME since they say they own the mine, the guy is in the videos, and his face is on the website, they are the people running it. Your checklist you refer to that you say we fail at almost every point, is incredibly untrue. I can prove that too. Please do prove it, starting with all the company information and official website etc, just so that we are all on the same page. Please can you do your best for all the points, so that we can all see which ones you pass and fail. You might not fail all, you might not pass all, but it will give an indicationeven though that post is old, it has some valid points today. In addition, can you explain how you guys own the mine? How many PH do you have, and can you prove it? Can you provide an invoice showing the order of all the ASIC units, and or a letter from Jihan Wu for example saying they have provided X amount of power? What mining pool are you using, and what is username or user setup so that this can be verified? Can you provide your electricity bill to prove the power consumption corresponding to the amount of hashing power claimed? How many blocks are you mining per day on average? What is the bitcoin address the mined blocks are going to? Can you please sign a transaction from the address the bitcoin is getting paid to by the pool? You have told a few people that the people who started it here have many times approached you to advertise on your website. I find that strange seeing as I only heard of you today and I am the person who launched it here. Or is it just your perception and assumption that the people who approached you are the people who launched it? I said “The guys pushing it locally contacted me to try to get us to advertise it on our website”. My perception and assumption, is that the guy who I have seen in videos PUSHING it locally, and who has in the past been in other vidoes of KNOWN SCAM and PONZI websites, who disregarded warnings and sound advice to rather carry on pushing the scams until they collapsed, and who’s face is on what I think is the official website, is heavily involved in another scam / ponzi / MLM / pyramid scheme to get peoples money. I send this mail in good faith; not to argue. Having said that I would ask you to respond to me with what PROPER due diligence have you done on us? In order to satisfy my answers could you please simply respond to the following questions ( remember you have set yourself up as an expert and one to which people turn to for advice. Therefore I would encourage you to do this proper due diligence) My response is not a lot of PROPER due diligence on you, actually never heard of you. I really only know one face well, that is the one of the directors who I have referred to already. If you dont know already about these multiple bitcoin ponzi / scam websites this person has been involved in before, I suggest YOU do some proper due diligence on who you associate with. If you do know about all of the previous dubious dealings. If you do know about this past, then can you explain how you still have confidence to have a business venture with someone like this? 1 Have you asked to visit our mine or seen live footage of several South Africans in it? No I have nor will ever ask to visit your mine. I have seen youtube footage of South Africans in what is supposed to be the same minespecifically the same person who removed comments on their previous mine videos we made, who then removed all their videos on that cloud mining operation completely when everyone lost their money. Same guy who has his face on the website I saw for dragon mining. 2 Have you visited our MINING website to see said footage? If so, can you say what that website address is? I dont know if I have visited the official website, hence me asking you for the address. The one I have seen is dragonminingsystems. Com 3 Have you ever asked to speak to any of the proper leaders and myself (Andrew Eaton) who launched it here before giving people your advice? No, based on my past experience with the director listed on the website I didnt see the point. You I have never heard of before. 4 Have you ever asked to speak to any of our executive team like David Martin our founder, Ken Brough, our CEO, or Randy Prince, our CFO? No, and I don’t care to. 5 Are you aware that ONE HUNDRED percent of money spent on our mining contracts go towards the actual contract and that ZERO commission gets paid out from it? That can be easily proven if you can prove a link from a customer buying hashing power, to the factory in China where their equipment they are buying is being shipped from. The bitcoin transaction details can be tracked to the purchase since it is so easily traceable. Can you also explain the licence to use the mine, different levels of affiliate commissions, and how / where that money all comes from? Great “A game”, great public debate, thanks for answering all my questions, as I took the time to answer all yours. I have a whole bunch more when you finally decide to try and offer your proof. My advice is based on experience in the bitcoin space since 2011, being a bitcoin miner in the early days mining on pc, gpu mining, fpga, and also asic mining, and even early cloud mining. I know what I am talking about when it comes to mining bitcoin. My assumptions are based on my experience with bitcoin, past exposed scams, shady ‘leaders’ I contacted, (like the one on the website of yours I mentioned, which you did not dispute was yours), and the unhappy people who contacted me to try and get back their investments. If you are really a ‘good guy’ and this really a legitimate operation, there should be no problem at all providing all the proof, especially when it comes to the bitcoin transactions and blockchain forensics that can be done on the payments since we will be able to track all the payments on the blockchain. You should be incredibly eager to so, and it should be really easy to do it. Why you choose NOT to prove anything when you have the opportunity to on a bitcoin website, makes me think that you actually cant. This especially when a potential customer has come forward and asked you to please do that (Schalk). Pardon me to say something from the sideline again, kindly elaborate on your definition of a “cloud mining”. According to me (and from what is see many others also) cloud mining is derived from cloud hosting it is where numerous servers/mines are hosted in a central location, specifically where resources are shared/pooled as in your case. Similar to your product where i can reinvest my earnings and buy more hash power, it is referred to as a cloud or virtual mine. The opposite being a physical solution where if i buy a device and you put a sticker with my name on it i cannot get more output than the physical capacity of the device, if i want more i have to buy another device. Although you might dedicate a device to a user on purchase, all bonus and re-invested hashpower comes from pooled devices, the very definition of a cloud solution. I do find it unlikely that you give users dedicated devices since newer devices has an output of TH/s, not GH/s per your product. I am sorry that so many cloud solutions has been associated with Ponzi schemes, but referring to you as a cloud mine should in no way be seen as an insult.
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Let us mine for you with our hardware in the cloud - Immediate results, mining updates every 60 seconds - Can own fractions of cloud instances, if desired - No heat or hardware to maintain - Choose payout in any displayed cryptocurrency - 5 year and 24 hour rental lengths available - No returns/exchanges - (Cloud SHA-256) SHA-256 algorithm, 1.0 GHS per 1.0 cloud instance owned - (Cloud SHA-256) Follows Bitcoin difficulty, which in the past has increased exponentially. This means payouts will likely be reduced over time, unless the price of Bitcoin rises to keep pace - (Cloud Scrypt) Scrypt algorithm, 1.0 MHS per 1.0 cloud instance owned - (Cloud Scrypt) Follows Litecoin difficulty, which in the past has increased exponentially. This means payouts will likely be reduced over time, unless the price of Litecoin rises to keep pace - For electricity and maintenance, we take a fee. Please on the fee. Cloud Mining Inventory SHA-256 5 Year Contracts Sold SHA-256 Available Total Supply Sold Out Ratio Fee 960 THS 4.0 8488 THS 4.0 113.2% 31% Cloud Mining Calculator Number of GHS 4.0 (SHA-256) Number of GHS 3.0 (SHA-256) Cryptocurrency Estimated Mining Payouts* $0 $0 Daily: 0.00000000 BTC Monthly: 0.00000000 BTC Examples for Cloud SHA-256 4.0 instance. *Cloud mining should be considered as a fun, recreational activity and not a source of income or investment. The above numbers reflect no difficulty increase. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. In addition to the normal risks associated with investing and mining, cryptocurrency mining investments and related instruments may involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuation in cryptocurrency values, exchange-related risks, policy risks, liquidity, and market price fluctuation and demand. The strategies discussed are strictly for illustrative and educational purposes and should not be construed as a recommendation to purchase. There is no guarantee that any strategies discussed will be effective. The information provided is not intended to be a complete analysis of every material fact respecting any strategy. The examples presented do not take into consideration commissions, tax implications, or other transactions costs, which may significantly affect the economic consequences of a given strategy. Estimated Expected Bitcoin Earnings The estimated expected Bitcoin earnings are based on a statistical calculation using the values entered and do not account for difficulty and exchange rate fluctuations, stale/reject/orphan rates, and a pool's efficiency. If you are mining using a pool, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on the pool's efficiency, stale/reject/orphan rate, and fees. If you are mining solo, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on your luck and stale/reject/orphan rate. Currency Converter Calculator; Website Widgets (BTCS) Bitcoin Scrypt. 0.00002971 BTC (5.69%) Market Cap. 5,723,065 USD 493 BTC. Volume (24h) 30,642 USD 2.64 BTC. If you are already in that position, you probably know how the process works and are intending to mine bitcoin. However, those of you on a more moderate budget are probably looking at building a GPU miner for scrypt currencies, or a buying a small ASIC machine for bitcoin or other SHA-256. Bitcoin specific calculators. • Tax laws enacted by Congress, • Treasury regulations, and • Court decisions. However, the information given does not cover every situation and is not intended to replace the law or change its meaning. This publication covers some subjects on which a court may have made a decision more favorable to taxpayers than the interpretation by the IRS. Until these differing interpretations are resolved by higher court decisions or in some other way, this publication will continue to present the interpretations by the IRS. All taxpayers have important rights when working with the IRS. These rights are described in in the back of this publication. • The credit for nonbusiness energy property, • Parts of the credit for residential energy property, • The deduction for mortgage insurance premiums, • 7.5% of adjusted gross income threshold for deducting medical and dental expenses, • The credit for alternative fuel vehicle refueling property, and • The deduction for tuition and fees. • Change certain other tax provisions. To learn whether this legislation was enacted resulting in changes that affect your 2017 tax return, go to Recent Developments. Casualty and theft losses. Disaster relief enacted for those impacted by Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria includes a provision that modified the calculation of casualty and theft losses. 976, Disaster Relief, for more information. Earned income credit (EIC) and additional child tax credit (ACTC). Disaster relief enacted for those impacted by Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria allows prior year earned income to be elected as 2017 earned income when figuring both the 2017 EIC and the 2017 ACTC. Top 10 bitcoin miners 2015 1099 misc no way IRS is gonna know about my six pockets, I'm home free! Check its website for up-to-date prices. You can view the most up-to-date pricing and availability on Hashnest's website. I will agree that BTC might make some of mmining cross-border or mners transfer issues easier for. Nov 21, 2017 - Cloud mining bitcoin 2017 1099 distortion Bitcoin Exchanges experiencing periods unusual. In theory, then, the IRS rules seem to bring advantages to those who invest in bitcoin as a long-term property-class financial asset, while discouraging those that want to use it as a form of digital currency. IRS 1099-MISC form 1.1. The 1099 MISC form application allows you to fill out the Miscellaneous Income Form for free without. Bitcoin Cloud Mining. 976 for more information. Increased standard deduction. In addition to the annual increase due to inflation adjustments, your 2017 standard deduction is increased by any net disaster loss due to Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria. To claim the increased standard deduction, you must file Form 1040. 976 for more information. Due date of return. File your tax return by April 17, 2018. The due date is April 17, instead of April 15, because of the Emancipation Day holiday in the District of Columbia—even if you do not live in the District of Columbia. Secure access. To combat identity fraud, the IRS has upgraded its identity verification process for certain self-help tools on IRS.gov. To find out what types of information new users will need, go to. Childless EIC. You may be able to qualify for the EIC under the rules for taxpayers without a qualifying child if you have a qualifying child for the EIC who is claimed as a qualifying child by another taxpayer. For more information, see. Access your online account. You must authenticate your identity. To securely log in to your federal tax account, go to. View the amount you owe, review 18 months of payment history, access online payment options, and create or modify an online payment agreement. You can also access your tax records online. Personal exemption amount increased for certain taxpayers. Your personal exemption is $4,050. But the amount is reduced if your adjusted gross income is more than. • $156,900 if married filing separately, • $261,500 if single, • $287,650 if head of household, or • $313,800 if married filing jointly or qualifying widow(er). Standard mileage rates. The 2017 rate for business use of your vehicle is 53.5 cents a mile. The 2017 rate for use of your vehicle to get medical care or to move is 17 cents a mile. 521, Moving Expenses. Adoption credit. The adoption credit and the exclusion for employer-provided adoption benefits have both increased to $13,570 per eligible child in 2017. The amount begins to phase out if you have modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) in excess of $203,540 and is completely phased out if your MAGI is $243,540 or more. Exemption amount for alternative minimum tax (AMT). The exemption amount for the AMT has increased to $54,300 ($84,500 if married filing jointly or qualifying widow(er); $42,250 if married filing separately). Standard deduction. For 2017, the standard deduction has increased to $6,350 if single; $12,700 if married filing jointly or qualifying widow(er); $6,350 if married filing separate returns; and $9,350 if head of household. Mailing your return. If you live in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, or West Virginia and you are mailing in your return, you will need to mail it to a different address this year. See near the end of this publication. Employer identification number (EIN) needed to claim the American opportunity credit. To claim the American opportunity credit, you need to have the EIN of the institution to which your qualified expenses were paid. Reminders Listed below are important reminders and other items that may help you file your 2017 tax return. Many of these items are explained in more detail later in this publication. Enter your social security number (SSN). Enter your SSN in the space provided on your tax form. If you filed a joint return for 2016 and are filing a joint return for 2017 with the same spouse, enter your names and SSNs in the same order as on your 2016 return. Secure your tax records from identity theft. Identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information, such as your name, SSN, or other identifying information, without your permission, to commit fraud or other crimes. An identity thief may use your SSN to get a job or may file a tax return using your SSN to receive a refund. For more information about identity theft and how to reduce your risk from it, see. Taxpayer identification numbers. You must provide the taxpayer identification number for each person for whom you claim certain tax benefits. This applies even if the person was born in 2017. Generally, this number is the person's SSN. Foreign-source income. If you are a U.S. Citizen with income from sources outside the United States (foreign income), you must report all such income on your tax return unless it is exempt by law or a tax treaty. This is true whether you live inside or outside the United States and whether or not you receive a Form W-2 or Form 1099 from the foreign payer. This applies to earned income (such as wages and tips) as well as unearned income (such as interest, dividends, capital gains, pensions, rents, and royalties). If you live outside the United States, you may be able to exclude part or all of your foreign earned income. For details, see Pub. 54, Tax Guide for U.S. Citizens and Resident Aliens Abroad. Foreign financial assets. If you had foreign financial assets in 2017, you may have to file Form 8938 with your return. Check Form 8938 and its instructions or for details. Automatic 6-month extension to file tax return. You can get an automatic 6-month extension of time to file your tax return. Include your phone number on your return. To promptly resolve any questions we have in processing your tax return, we would like to be able to call you. Please enter your daytime telephone number on your tax form next to your signature and occupation. If you are filing a joint return, you can enter either your or your spouse's daytime phone number. Payment of taxes. You can pay your taxes online, by phone, by mobile device, in cash, or by check or money order. You can make a direct transfer from your bank account or use a credit or debit card. Faster ways to file your return. The IRS offers fast, accurate ways to file your tax return information without filing a paper tax return. You can use IRS e-file (electronic filing). Free electronic filing. You may be able to file your 2017 taxes online for free. Change of address. If you change your address, notify the IRS. Refund on a late filed return. If you were due a refund but you did not file a return, you generally must file your return within 3 years from the date the return was due (including extensions) to get that refund. Frivolous tax returns. The IRS has published a list of positions that are identified as frivolous. The penalty for filing a frivolous tax return is $5,000. Filing erroneous claim for refund or credit. You may have to pay a penalty if you file an erroneous claim for refund or credit. Privacy Act and paperwork reduction information. The IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 require that when we ask you for information we must first tell you what our legal right is to ask for the information, why we are asking for it, how it will be used, what could happen if we do not receive it, and whether your response is voluntary, required to obtain a benefit, or mandatory under the law. A complete statement on this subject can be found in your tax form instructions. Preparer e-file mandate. Most paid preparers must e-file returns they prepare and file. Your preparer may make you aware of this requirement and the options available to you. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. If you want to confidentially report misconduct, waste, fraud, or abuse by an IRS employee, you can call 1-800-366-4484 (call 1-800-877-8339 if you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability, and are using TTY/TDD equipment). You can remain anonymous. Photographs of missing children. The IRS is a proud partner with the. Photographs of missing children selected by the Center may appear in this publication on pages that would otherwise be blank. You can help bring these children home by looking at the photographs and calling 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) if you recognize a child. How this publication is arranged. This publication closely follows Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return. It is divided into six parts which cover different sections of Form 1040. Each part is further divided into chapters which generally discuss one line of the form. Do not worry if you file Form 1040A or Form 1040EZ. Anything included on a line of either of these forms is also included on Form 1040. The table of contents inside the front cover and the index in the back of the publication are useful tools to help you find the information you need. • Who must file a return, • Which tax form to use, • When the return is due, • How to e-file your return, and • Other general information. It will help you identify which filing status you qualify for, whether you can claim any dependents, and whether the income you receive is taxable. The publication goes on to explain the standard deduction, the kinds of expenses you may be able to deduct, and the various kinds of credits you may be able to take to reduce your tax. Throughout the publication are examples showing how the tax law applies in typical situations. Also throughout the publication are flowcharts and tables that present tax information in an easy-to-understand manner. Many of the subjects discussed in this publication are discussed in greater detail in other IRS publications. References to those other publications are provided for your information. • Provide additional tax relief for those affected by Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria, and tax relief for those affected by other 2017 disasters, such as the California wildfires. • Extend certain tax benefits that expired at the end of 2016 and that currently can't be claimed on your 2017 tax return. • Change certain other tax provisions. To learn whether this legislation was enacted resulting in changes that affect your 2017 tax return, go to Recent Developments. Due date of return. The due date to file your tax return is April 17, 2018. The due date is April 17 because April 15 is a Sunday and the Emancipation Day holiday in the District of Columbia is observed on April 16—even if you do not live in the District of Columbia. Who must file. Generally, the amount of income you can receive before you must file a return has been increased. See,, and for the specific amounts. Secure access. To combat identity fraud, the IRS has upgraded its identity verification process for certain self-help tools on IRS.gov. To find out what types of information new users will need, go to. Access your online account. You must authenticate your identity. To securely log in to your federal tax account, go to. View the amount you owe, review 18 months of payment history, access online payment options, and create or modify an online payment agreement. You can also access your tax records online. Mailing your return. If you live in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, or West Virginia and you are mailing in your return, you will need to mail it to a different address this year. See near the end of this publication. Reminders File online. Rather than filing a return on paper, you may be able to file electronically using IRS e-file. For more information, see, later. Change of address. If you change your address, you should notify the IRS. You can use Form 8822 to notify the IRS of the change. See, later, under What Happens After I File. Enter your social security number. You must enter your social security number (SSN) in the spaces provided on your tax return. If you file a joint return, enter the SSNs in the same order as the names. Direct deposit of refund. Instead of getting a paper check, you may be able to have your refund deposited directly into your account at a bank or other financial institution. See under Refunds, later. If you choose direct deposit of your refund, you may be able to split the refund among two or three accounts. Pay online or by phone. If you owe additional tax, you may be able to pay online or by phone. Installment agreement. If you can’t pay the full amount due with your return, you may ask to make monthly installment payments. See, later, under Amount You Owe. You may be able to apply online for a payment agreement if you owe federal tax, interest, and penalties. Automatic 6-month extension. You can get an automatic 6-month extension to file your tax return if, no later than the date your return is due, you file Form 4868. Service in combat zone. You are allowed extra time to take care of your tax matters if you are a member of the Armed Forces who served in a combat zone, or if you served in a combat zone in support of the Armed Forces. See, later, under When Do I Have To File. Adoption taxpayer identification number. If a child has been placed in your home for purposes of legal adoption and you won't be able to get a social security number for the child in time to file your return, you may be able to get an adoption taxpayer identification number (ATIN). For more information, see, later. Taxpayer identification number for aliens. If you or your dependent is a nonresident or resident alien who doesn't have and isn't eligible to get a social security number, file Form W-7, Application for IRS Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, with the IRS. For more information, see, later. Individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) renewal. Some ITINs must be renewed. If you haven't used your ITIN on a U.S. Tax return at least once for tax years 2014, 2015 or 2016, or if your ITIN has the middle digits 70, 71, 72, or 80 (9NN-70-NNNN), it will expire at the end of 2017 and must be renewed if you need to file a U.S. Federal tax return in 2018. You don't need to renew your ITIN if you don't need to file a federal tax return. You can find more information. Frivolous tax submissions. The IRS has published a list of positions that are identified as frivolous. The penalty for filing a frivolous tax return is $5,000. Also, the $5,000 penalty will apply to other specified frivolous submissions. For more information, see, later. • You were married, filing a separate return, and you lived with your spouse at any time during 2017; or • Half of your social security benefits plus your other gross income and any tax-exempt interest is more than $25,000 ($32,000 if married filing jointly). If either (1) or (2) applies, see the instructions for Form 1040 or 1040A, or Pub. 915, Social Security and Equivalent Railroad Retirement Benefits, to figure the social security benefits you must include in gross income. Common types of income are discussed in of this publication. * If you were born on January 1, 1953, you are considered to be age 65 at the end of 2017. (If your spouse died in 2017 or if you are preparing a return for someone who died in 2017, see Pub. 501.) ** Gross income means all income you received in the form of money, goods, property, and services that isn't exempt from tax, including any income from sources outside the United States or from the sale of your main home (even if you can exclude part or all of it). Don't include any social security benefits unless (a) you are married filing a separate return and you lived with your spouse at any time during 2017 or (b) one-half of your social security benefits plus your other gross income and any tax-exempt interest is more than $25,000 ($32,000 if married filing jointly). If (a) or (b) applies, see the instructions for Form 1040 or 1040A or Pub. 915 to figure the taxable part of social security benefits you must include in gross income. Gross income includes gains, but not losses, reported on Form 8949 or Schedule D. Gross income from a business means, for example, the amount on Schedule C, line 7, or Schedule F, line 9. But, in figuring gross income, don't reduce your income by any losses, including any loss on Schedule C, line 7, or Schedule F, line 9. *** If you didn't live with your spouse at the end of 2017 (or on the date your spouse died) and your gross income was at least $4,050, you must file a return regardless of your age. Residents of Puerto Rico If you are a U.S. Citizen and also a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico, you generally must file a U.S. Income tax return for any year in which you meet the income requirements. This is in addition to any legal requirement you may have to file an income tax return with Puerto Rico. If you are a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico for the entire year, your U.S. Gross income doesn't include income from sources within Puerto Rico. It does, however, include any income you received for your services as an employee of the United States or a U.S. If you receive income from Puerto Rican sources that isn't subject to U.S. Tax, you must reduce your standard deduction. As a result, the amount of income you must have before you are required to file a U.S. Income tax return is lower than the applicable amount in. For more information, see Pub. • Carry on a trade or business as a sole proprietor, • Are an independent contractor, • Are a member of a partnership, or • Are in business for yourself in any other way. Self-employment can include work in addition to your regular full-time business activities, such as certain part-time work you do at home or in addition to your regular job. You must file a return if your gross income is at least as much as the filing requirement amount for your filing status and age (shown in ). Also, you must file Form 1040 and Schedule SE (Form 1040), Self-Employment Tax, if. See to find out if someone can claim you as a dependent. If your parents (or someone else) can claim you as a dependent, use this table to see if you must file a return. (See for other situations when you must file.) In this table, unearned income includes taxable interest, ordinary dividends, and capital gain distributions. It also includes unemployment compensation, taxable social security benefits, pensions, annuities, and distributions of unearned income from a trust. Earned income includes salaries, wages, tips, professional fees, and taxable scholarship and fellowship grants. (See in chapter 12.) Gross income is the total of your earned and unearned income. Caution If your gross income was $4,050 or more, you usually can’t be claimed as a dependent unless you are a qualifying child. For details, see Exemptions for Dependents in chapter 3. Single dependents—Were you either age 65 or older or blind? You must file a return if any of the following apply. • Your unearned income was more than $1,050. • Your earned income was more than $6,350. • Your gross income was more than the larger of: • $1,050, or • Your earned income (up to $6,000) plus $350. You must file a return if any of the following apply. • Your unearned income was more than $2,600 ($4,150 if 65 or older and blind). • Your earned income was more than $7,900 ($9,450 if 65 or older and blind). • Your gross income was more than the larger of: • $2,600 ($4,150 if 65 or older and blind), or • Your earned income (up to $6,000) plus $1,900 ($3,450 if 65 or older and blind). Married dependents—Were you either age 65 or older or blind? You must file a return if any of the following apply. • Your unearned income was more than $1,050. • Your earned income was more than $6,350. • Your gross income was at least $5 and your spouse files a separate return and itemizes deductions. • Your gross income was more than the larger of: • $1,050, or • Your earned income (up to $6,000) plus $350. You must file a return if any of the following apply. • Your unearned income was more than $2,300 ($3,550 if 65 or older and blind). • Your earned income was more than $7,600 ($8,850 if 65 or older and blind). • Your gross income was at least $5 and your spouse files a separate return and itemizes deductions. • Your gross income was more than the larger of: • $2,300 ($3,550 if 65 or older and blind), or • Your earned income (up to $6,000) plus $1,600 ($2,850 if 65 or older and blind). You must file a return if any of the six conditions below apply for 2017. You owe any special taxes, including any of the following. Alternative minimum tax. Additional tax on a qualified plan, including an individual retirement arrangement (IRA), or other tax-favored account. But if you are filing a return only because you owe this tax, you can file Form 5329 by itself. Household employment taxes. But if you are filing a return only because you owe this tax, you can file Schedule H by itself. Social security and Medicare tax on tips you didn't report to your employer or on wages you received from an employer who didn't withhold these taxes. Recapture of first-time homebuyer credit. Write-in taxes, including uncollected social security and Medicare or RRTA tax on tips you reported to your employer or on group-term life insurance and additional taxes on health savings accounts. Recapture taxes. You (or your spouse, if filing jointly) received health savings account, Archer MSA, or Medicare Advantage MSA distributions. You had net earnings from self-employment of at least $400. You had wages of $108.28 or more from a church or qualified church-controlled organization that is exempt from employer social security and Medicare taxes. Advance payments of the premium tax credit were made for you, your spouse, or a dependent who enrolled in coverage through the Marketplace. You or whoever enrolled you should have received Form(s) 1095-A showing the amount of the advance payments. Advance payments of the health coverage tax credit were made for you, your spouse, or a dependent. You or whoever enrolled you should have received Form(s) 1099-H showing the amount of the advance payments. • You had federal income tax withheld or made estimated tax payments. • You qualify for the earned income credit. See for more information. • You qualify for the additional child tax credit. See for more information. • You qualify for the premium tax credit. See for more information. • You qualify for the health coverage tax credit. See for more information. • You qualify for the American opportunity credit. See for more information. • You qualify for the credit for federal tax on fuels. See for more information. • Your filing status is single or married filing jointly. If you were a nonresident alien at any time in 2017, your filing status must be married filing jointly. • You (and your spouse if married filing a joint return) were under age 65 and not blind at the end of 2017. If you were born on January 1, 1953, you are considered to be age 65 at the end of 2017. • You don't claim any dependents. • Your taxable income is less than $100,000. • Your income is only from wages, salaries, tips, unemployment compensation, Alaska Permanent Fund dividends, taxable scholarship and fellowship grants, and taxable interest of $1,500 or less. • You don't claim any adjustments to income, such as a deduction for IRA contributions or student loan interest. • You don't claim any credits other than the earned income credit. • You don't owe any household employment taxes on wages you paid to a household employee. • If you earned tips, they are included in boxes 5 and 7 of your Form W-2. • You are not a debtor in a chapter 11 bankruptcy case filed after October 16, 2005. You must meet all of these requirements to use Form 1040EZ. If you don't, you must use Form 1040A or Form 1040. • Wages, salaries, and tips; • Interest; • Ordinary dividends (including Alaska Permanent Fund dividends); • Capital gain distributions; • IRA distributions; • Pensions and annuities; • Unemployment compensation; • Taxable social security and railroad retirement benefits; and • Taxable scholarship and fellowship grants. If you receive a capital gain distribution that includes unrecaptured section 1250 gain, section 1202 gain, or collectibles (28%) gain, you can’t use Form 1040A. You must use Form 1040. • Your taxable income is less than $100,000. • Your adjustments to income are for only the following items. • The credit for child and dependent care expenses. (See.) • The credit for the elderly or the disabled. (See.) • The education credits. (See.) • The retirement savings contributions credit. (See.) • The child tax credit. (See.) • The earned income credit. (See.) • The additional child tax credit. (See.) • The premium tax credit. (See.) • You didn't have an alternative minimum tax adjustment on stock you acquired from the exercise of an incentive stock option. 525.) You can also use Form 1040A if you received employer-provided dependent care benefits or if you owe tax from the recapture of an education credit or the alternative minimum tax. You must meet all these requirements to use Form 1040A. If you don't, you must use Form 1040. • Your taxable income is $100,000 or more. • You itemize your deductions on Schedule A. • You had income that can’t be reported on Form 1040EZ or Form 1040A, including tax-exempt interest from private activity bonds issued after August 7, 1986. • You claim any adjustments to gross income other than the adjustments listed earlier under Form 1040A. • Your Form W-2, box 12, shows uncollected employee tax (social security and Medicare tax) on tips (see ) or group-term life insurance (see ). • You received $20 or more in tips in any 1 month and didn't report all of them to your employer. (See.) • You were a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico and exclude income from sources in Puerto Rico. • You claim any credits other than the credits listed earlier under Form 1040A. • You owe the excise tax on insider stock compensation from an expatriated corporation. • Your Form W-2 shows an amount in box 12 with a code Z. • You had a qualified health savings account funding distribution from your IRA. • You are an employee and your employer didn't withhold social security and Medicare tax. • You have to file other forms with your return to report certain exclusions, taxes, or transactions, such as Form 8959 or Form 8960. • You are a debtor in a bankruptcy case filed after October 16, 2005. • You must repay the first-time homebuyer credit. • You have adjusted gross income of more than $156,900 and must reduce the dollar amount of your exemptions. • You received a Form W-2 that incorrectly includes in box 1 amounts that are payments under a Medicaid waiver program, and you can’t get a corrected Form W-2. • You received Olympic or Paralympic medals or United States Olympic Committee prize money on account of your participation in the Olympic or Paralympic Games. IRS e-file uses automation to replace most of the manual steps needed to process paper returns. As a result, the processing of e-file returns is faster and more accurate than the processing of paper returns. However, as with a paper return, you are responsible for making sure your return contains accurate information and is filed on time. If your return is filed with IRS e-file, you will receive an acknowledgment that your return was received and accepted. If you owe tax, you can e-file and pay electronically. The IRS has processed more than one billion e-filed returns safely and securely. Using e-file doesn't affect your chances of an IRS examination of your return. Self-Select PIN. The Self-Select PIN method allows you to create your own PIN. If you are married filing jointly, you and your spouse will each need to create a PIN and enter these PINs as your electronic signatures. A PIN is any combination of five digits you choose except five zeros. If you use a PIN, there is nothing to sign and nothing to mail—not even your Forms W-2. To verify your identity, you will be prompted to enter your adjusted gross income (AGI) from your originally filed 2016 federal income tax return, if applicable. Don't use your AGI from an amended return (Form 1040X) or a math error correction made by the IRS. AGI is the amount shown on your 2016 Form 1040, line 38; Form 1040A, line 22; or Form 1040EZ, line 4. If you don't have your 2016 income tax return, you can request a transcript by using our automated self-service tool. (If you filed electronically last year, you may use your prior year PIN to verify your identity instead of your prior year AGI. The prior year PIN is the five-digit PIN you used to electronically sign your 2016 return.) You will also be prompted to enter your date of birth. Use Free File for free tax software and free e-file. • IRS partners offer name-brand products for free. • Many taxpayers are eligible for Free File software. • Everyone is eligible for Free File Fillable Forms, an electronic version of IRS paper forms. • Free File software and Free File Fillable Forms are available only. Use VITA/TCE for free tax help from volunteers and free e-file. • Volunteers prepare your return and e-file it for free. • Some sites also offer do-it-yourself software. • You are eligible based either on your income or age. • Sites are located nationwide. Find one near you by visiting. You can have a refund check mailed to you, or you can have your refund deposited directly to your checking or savings account or split among two or three accounts. With e-file, your refund will be issued faster than if you filed on paper. As with a paper return, you may not get all of your refund if you owe certain past-due amounts, such as federal tax, state income tax, state unemployment compensation debts, child support, spousal support, or certain other federal nontax debts, such as student loans. See under Refunds, later. Free Help With Your Return Free help in preparing your return is available nationwide from IRS-trained volunteers. The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program is designed to help low-to-moderate income taxpayers, and the Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) program is designed to assist taxpayers age 60 or older with their tax returns. Many VITA sites offer free electronic filing and all volunteers will let you know about the credits and deductions you may be entitled to claim. To find a site near you, call 1-800-906-9887. Or to find the nearest AARP TaxAide site, visit AARP's website at or call 1-888-227-7669. For more information on these programs, go to. Citizens and residents who file returns on a calendar year. For Most Taxpayers For Certain Taxpayers Outside the U.S. No extension requested April 17, 2018 June 15, 2018 Automatic extension October 15, 2018 October 15, 2018 If you use a fiscal year (a year ending on the last day of any month except December, or a 52-53-week year), your income tax return is due by the 15th day of the 4th month after the close of your fiscal year. When the due date for doing any act for tax purposes—filing a return, paying taxes, etc.—falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the due date is delayed until the next business day. Filing paper returns on time. Your paper return is filed on time if it is mailed in an envelope that is properly addressed, has enough postage, and is postmarked by the due date. If you send your return by registered mail, the date of the registration is the postmark date. The registration is evidence that the return was delivered. If you send a return by certified mail and have your receipt postmarked by a postal employee, the date on the receipt is the postmark date. The postmarked certified mail receipt is evidence that the return was delivered. • United Parcel Service (UPS): UPS Next Day Air Early AM, UPS Next Day Air, UPS Next Day Air Saver, UPS 2nd Day Air, UPS 2nd Day Air A.M., UPS Worldwide Express Plus, and UPS Worldwide Express. • Federal Express (FedEx): FedEx First Overnight, FedEx Priority Overnight, FedEx Standard Overnight, FedEx 2 Day, FedEx International Next Flight Out, FedEx International Priority, FedEx International First, and FedEx International Economy. • DHL Express 9:00, DHL Express 10:30, DHL Express 12:00, DHL Express Worldwide, DHL Express Envelope, DHL Import Express 10:30, DHL Import Express 12:00, and DHL Import Express Worldwide. To check for any updates to the list of designated private delivery services, go to. For the IRS mailing addresses to use if you’re using a private delivery service, go to. The private delivery service can tell you how to get written proof of the mailing date. Filing electronic returns on time. If you use IRS e-file, your return is considered filed on time if the authorized electronic return transmitter postmarks the transmission by the due date. An authorized electronic return transmitter is a participant in the IRS e-file program that transmits electronic tax return information directly to the IRS. The electronic postmark is a record of when the authorized electronic return transmitter received the transmission of your electronically filed return on its host system. The date and time in your time zone controls whether your electronically filed return is timely. • You are living outside the United States and Puerto Rico, and your main place of business or post of duty is outside the United States and Puerto Rico; or • You are in military or naval service on duty outside the United States and Puerto Rico. However, if you pay the tax due after the regular due date (April 15 for most taxpayers), interest will be charged from that date until the date the tax is paid. If you served in a combat zone or qualified hazardous duty area, you may be eligible for a longer extension of time to file. See, later, for special rules that apply to you. • The last day you are in a combat zone or the last day the area qualifies as a combat zone, or • The last day of any continuous qualified hospitalization for injury from service in the combat zone. In addition to the 180 days, your deadline is also extended by the number of days you had left to take action with the IRS when you entered the combat zone. For example, you have 3½ months (January 1 – April 15) to file your tax return. Any days left in this period when you entered the combat zone (or the entire 3½ months if you entered it before the beginning of the year) are added to the 180 days. See Extension of Deadlines in Pub. 3 for more information. The rules on the extension for filing your return also apply when you are deployed outside the United States (away from your permanent duty station) while participating in a designated contingency operation. If you were an employee, you should receive Form W-2 from your employer. You will need the information from this form to prepare your return. See under Credit for Withholding and Estimated Tax in chapter 4. Your employer is required to provide or send Form W-2 to you no later than January 31, 2018. If it is mailed, you should allow adequate time to receive it before contacting your employer. If you still don't get the form by February 15, the IRS can help you by requesting the form from your employer. When you request IRS help, be prepared to provide the following information. Accounting Periods Most individual tax returns cover a calendar year—the 12 months from January 1 through December 31. If you don't use a calendar year, your accounting period is a fiscal year. A regular fiscal year is a 12-month period that ends on the last day of any month except December. A 52-53-week fiscal year varies from 52 to 53 weeks and always ends on the same day of the week. You choose your accounting period (tax year) when you file your first income tax return. It can’t be longer than 12 months. Check received or available. A valid check that was made available to you before the end of the tax year is constructively received by you in that year. A check that was 'made available to you' includes a check you have already received, but not cashed or deposited. It also includes, for example, your last paycheck of the year that your employer made available for you to pick up at the office before the end of the year. It is constructively received by you in that year whether or not you pick it up before the end of the year or wait to receive it by mail after the end of the year. Social Security Number (SSN) You must enter your SSN on your return. If you are married, enter the SSNs for both you and your spouse, whether you file jointly or separately. If you are filing a joint return, include the SSNs in the same order as the names. Use this same order in submitting other forms and documents to the IRS. Check that both the name and SSN on your Form 1040, W-2, and 1099 agree with your social security card. If they don't, certain deductions and credits on your Form 1040 may be reduced or disallowed and you may not receive credit for your social security earnings. If your Form W-2 shows an incorrect SSN or name, notify your employer or the form-issuing agent as soon as possible to make sure your earnings are credited to your social security record. If the name or SSN on your social security card is incorrect, call the SSA at 1-800-772-1213. File Form SS-5, Application for a Social Security Card, with your local SSA office to get an SSN for yourself or your dependent. It usually takes about 2 weeks to get an SSN. If you or your dependent isn't eligible for an SSN, see, later. If you are a U.S. Citizen or resident alien, you must show proof of age, identity, and citizenship or alien status with your Form SS-5. If you are 12 or older and have never been assigned an SSN, you must appear in person with this proof at an SSA office. Form SS-5 is available at any SSA office, on the Internet at, or by calling 1-800-772-1213. If you have any questions about which documents you can use as proof of age, identity, or citizenship, contact your SSA office. If your dependent doesn't have an SSN by the time your return is due, you may want to ask for an extension of time to file, as explained earlier under. If you don't provide a required SSN or if you provide an incorrect SSN, your tax may be increased and any refund may be reduced. • You have a child living with you who was placed in your home for legal adoption. • You can’t get the child's existing SSN even though you have made a reasonable attempt to get it from the birth parents, the placement agency, and other persons. • You can’t get an SSN for the child from the SSA because, for example, the adoption isn't final. • You are eligible to claim the child as a dependent on your tax return. After the adoption is final, you must apply for an SSN for the child. You can’t continue using the ATIN. See Form W-7A for more information. Individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN). The IRS will issue you an ITIN if you are a nonresident or resident alien and you don't have and aren’t eligible to get an SSN. This also applies to an alien spouse or dependent. To apply for an ITIN, file Form W-7 with the IRS. It usually takes about 7 weeks to get an ITIN. Enter the ITIN on your tax return wherever an SSN is requested. Make sure your ITIN hasn’t expired. If you haven't used your ITIN on a U.S. Tax return at least once for tax years 2014, 2015 or 2016, or if your ITIN has the middle digits 70, 71, 72, or 80 (9NN-70-NNNN), it will expire at the end of 2017 and must be renewed if you need to file a U.S. Federal tax return in 2018. You don't need to renew your ITIN if you don't need to file a federal tax return. You can find more information. • Give information that is missing from your return to the IRS; • Call the IRS for information about the processing of your return or the status of your refund or payments; • Receive copies of notices or transcripts related to your return, upon request; and • Respond to certain IRS notices about math errors, offsets (see, later), and return preparation. The authorization will automatically end no later than the due date (without any extensions) for filing your 2018 tax return. This is April 15, 2019, for most people. See your form instructions for more information. Paid Preparer Generally, anyone you pay to prepare, assist in preparing, or review your tax return must sign it and fill in the other blanks, including their Preparer Tax Identification Number (PTIN), in the paid preparer's area of your return. Many preparers are required to e-file the tax returns they prepare. They sign these e-filed returns using their tax preparation software. However, you can choose to have your return completed on paper if you prefer. In that case, the paid preparer can sign the paper return manually or use a rubber stamp or mechanical device. The preparer is personally responsible for affixing his or her signature to the return. If the preparer is self-employed (that is, not employed by any person or business to prepare the return), he or she should check the self-employed box in the Paid Preparer Use Only space on the return. The preparer must give you a copy of your return in addition to the copy filed with the IRS. If you prepare your own return, leave this area blank. If another person prepares your return and doesn't charge you, that person shouldn't sign your return. If you have questions about whether a preparer must sign your return, contact any IRS office. Instead of getting a paper check, you may be able to have your refund deposited directly into your checking or savings account, including an individual retirement arrangement. Follow the form instructions to request direct deposit. If the direct deposit can’t be done, the IRS will send a check instead. Don't request a deposit of any part of your refund to an account that isn't in your name. Don't allow your tax preparer to deposit any part of your refund into his or her account. The number of direct deposits to a single account or prepaid debit card is limited to three refunds a year. After this limit is exceeded, paper checks will be sent instead. Refund more or less than expected. If you receive a check for a refund you aren’t entitled to, or for an overpayment that should have been credited to estimated tax, don't cash the check. Call the IRS. If you receive a check for more than the refund you claimed, don't cash the check until you receive a notice explaining the difference. If your refund check is for less than you claimed, it should be accompanied by a notice explaining the difference. Cashing the check doesn't stop you from claiming an additional amount of refund. If you didn't receive a notice and you have any questions about the amount of your refund, you should wait 2 weeks. If you still haven’t received a notice, call the IRS. If the injured spouse's residence was in a community property state at any time during the tax year, special rules may apply. See the Instructions for Form 8379. If you haven’t filed your joint return and you know that your joint refund will be offset, file Form 8379 with your return. You should receive your refund within 14 weeks from the date the paper return is filed or within 11 weeks from the date the return is filed electronically. If you filed your joint return and your joint refund was offset, file Form 8379 by itself. When filed after offset, it can take up to 8 weeks to receive your refund. Don't attach the previously filed tax return, but do include copies of all Forms W-2 and W-2G for both spouses and any Forms 1099 that show income tax withheld. The processing of Form 8379 may be delayed if these forms aren’t attached, or if the form is incomplete when filed. A separate Form 8379 must be filed for each tax year to be considered. An injured spouse claim is different from an innocent spouse relief request. An injured spouse uses Form 8379 to request the division of the tax overpayment attributed to each spouse. An innocent spouse uses Form 8857, Request for Innocent Spouse Relief, to request relief from joint liability for tax, interest, and penalties on a joint return for items of the other spouse (or former spouse) that were incorrectly reported on the joint return. For information on innocent spouses, see under Filing a Joint Return in chapter 2. Interest due to IRS error or delay. All or part of any interest you were charged can be forgiven if the interest is due to an unreasonable error or delay by an officer or employee of the IRS in performing a ministerial or managerial act. A ministerial act is a procedural or mechanical act that occurs during the processing of your case. A managerial act includes personnel transfers and extended personnel training. A decision concerning the proper application of federal tax law isn't a ministerial or managerial act. The interest can be forgiven only if you aren’t responsible in any important way for the error or delay and the IRS has notified you in writing of the deficiency or payment. For more information, see Pub. Interest and certain penalties may also be suspended for a limited period if you filed your return by the due date (including extensions) and the IRS doesn't provide you with a notice specifically stating your liability and the basis for it before the close of the 36-month period beginning on the later of. Installment Agreement If you can’t pay the full amount due with your return, you can ask to make monthly installment payments for the full or a partial amount. However, you will be charged interest and may be charged a late payment penalty on the tax not paid by the date your return is due, even if your request to pay in installments is granted. If your request is granted, you must also pay a fee. To limit the interest and penalty charges, pay as much of the tax as possible with your return. But before requesting an installment agreement, you should consider other less costly alternatives, such as a bank loan or credit card payment. To apply for an installment agreement online, go to. You can also use Form 9465. In addition to paying by check or money order, you can use a credit or debit card or direct payment from your bank account to make installment agreement payments. See, earlier. You can make a contribution (gift) to reduce debt held by the public. If you wish to do so, make a separate check payable to 'Bureau of the Fiscal Service.' Send your check to: Bureau of the Fiscal Service ATTN: Department G P.O. Box 2188 Parkersburg, WV Or, enclose your separate check in the envelope with your income tax return. Don't add this gift to any tax you owe. For information on making this type of gift online, go to and click on 'How To Make a Contribution to Reduce the Debt.' You may be able to deduct this gift as a charitable contribution on next year's tax return if you itemize your deductions on Schedule A (Form 1040). You must keep records so that you can prepare a complete and accurate income tax return. The law doesn't require any special form of records. However, you should keep all receipts, canceled checks or other proof of payment, and any other records to support any deductions or credits you claim. If you file a claim for refund, you must be able to prove by your records that you have overpaid your tax. This part doesn't discuss the records you should keep when operating a business. For information on business records, see Pub. 583, Starting a Business and Keeping Records. • Identify sources of income. Your records can identify the sources of your income to help you separate business from nonbusiness income and taxable from nontaxable income. • Keep track of expenses. You can use your records to identify expenses for which you can claim a deduction. This helps you determine if you can itemize deductions on your tax return. • Keep track of the basis of property. You need to keep records that show the basis of your property. This includes the original cost or other basis of the property and any improvements you made. • Prepare tax returns. You need records to prepare your tax return. • Support items reported on tax returns. The IRS may question an item on your return. Your records will help you explain any item and arrive at the correct tax. If you can’t produce the correct documents, you may have to pay additional tax and be subject to penalties. Kinds of Records To Keep The IRS doesn't require you to keep your records in a particular way. Keep them in a manner that allows you and the IRS to determine your correct tax. You can use your checkbook to keep a record of your income and expenses. You also need to keep documents, such as receipts and sales slips, that can help prove a deduction. In this section you will find guidance about basic records that everyone should keep. The section also provides guidance about specific records you should keep for certain items. Copies of tax returns. You should keep copies of your tax returns as part of your tax records. They can help you prepare future tax returns, and you will need them if you file an amended return or are audited. Copies of your returns and other records can be helpful to your survivor or the executor or administrator of your estate. If necessary, you can request a copy of a return and all attachments (including Form W-2) from the IRS by using Form 4506. There is a charge for a copy of a return. For information on the cost and where to file, see the Instructions for Form 4506. If you just need information from your return, you can order a transcript in one of the following ways. Your basic records should enable you to determine the basis or adjusted basis of your home. You need this information to determine if you have a gain or loss when you sell your home or to figure depreciation if you use part of your home for business purposes or for rent. Your records should show the purchase price, settlement or closing costs, and the cost of any improvements. They also may show any casualty losses deducted and insurance reimbursements for casualty losses. For detailed information on basis, including which settlement or closing costs are included in the basis of your home, see. When you sell your home, your records should show the sales price and any selling expenses, such as commissions. For information on selling your home, see. Proof of Payment One of your basic records is proof of payment. You should keep these records to support certain amounts shown on your tax return. Proof of payment alone isn't proof that the item claimed on your return is allowable. You also should keep other documents that will help prove that the item is allowable. Generally, you prove payment with a cash receipt, financial account statement, credit card statement, canceled check, or substitute check. If you make payments in cash, you should get a dated and signed receipt showing the amount and the reason for the payment. If you make payments using your bank account, you may be able to prove payment with an account statement. How Long To Keep Records You must keep your records as long as they may be needed for the administration of any provision of the Internal Revenue Code. Generally, this means you must keep records that support items shown on your return until the period of limitations for that return runs out. The period of limitations is the period of time in which you can amend your return to claim a credit or refund or the IRS can assess additional tax. Contains the periods of limitations that apply to income tax returns. Unless otherwise stated, the years refer to the period beginning after the return was filed. Returns filed before the due date are treated as being filed on the due date. Keep records relating to property until the period of limitations expires for the year in which you dispose of the property in a taxable disposition. You must keep these records to figure your basis for computing gain or loss when you sell or otherwise dispose of the property. Generally, if you received property in a nontaxable exchange, your basis in that property is the same as the basis of the property you gave up. You must keep the records on the old property, as well as the new property, until the period of limitations expires for the year in which you dispose of the new property in a taxable disposition. Refund Information You can go online to check the status of your 2017 refund 24 hours after the IRS receives your e-filed return, or 4 weeks after you mail a paper return. If you filed Form 8379 with your return, allow 14 weeks (11 weeks if you filed electronically) before checking your refund status. Be sure to have a copy of your 2017 tax return handy because you will need to know the filing status, the first SSN shown on the return, and the exact whole-dollar amount of the refund. To check on your refund, do one of the following. Interest on Refunds If you are due a refund, you may get interest on it. The interest rates are adjusted quarterly. If the refund is made within 45 days after the due date of your return, no interest will be paid. If you file your return after the due date (including extensions), no interest will be paid if the refund is made within 45 days after the date you filed. If the refund isn't made within this 45-day period, interest will be paid from the due date of the return or from the date you filed, whichever is later. Accepting a refund check doesn't change your right to claim an additional refund and interest. File your claim within the period of time that applies. If you don't accept a refund check, no more interest will be paid on the overpayment included in the check. Change of Address If you have moved, file your return using your new address. If you move after you filed your return, you should give the IRS clear and concise notification of your change of address. The notification may be written, electronic, or oral. Send written notification to the Internal Revenue Service Center serving your old address. You can use Form 8822, Change of Address. If you are expecting a refund, also notify the post office serving your old address. This will help in forwarding your check to your new address (unless you chose direct deposit of your refund). For more information, see Revenue Procedure 2010-16, 2010-19 I.R.B. 664, available. Be sure to include your SSN (and the name and SSN of your spouse if you filed a joint return) in any correspondence with the IRS. • You didn't report some income, • You claimed deductions or credits you shouldn't have claimed, • You didn't claim deductions or credits you could have claimed, or • You should have claimed a different filing status. (Once you file a joint return, you can’t choose to file separate returns for that year after the due date of the return. However, an executor may be able to make this change for a deceased spouse.) If you need a copy of your return, see under Kinds of Records To Keep, earlier, in this chapter. Completing Form 1040X. On Form 1040X, enter your income, deductions, and credits as you originally reported them on your return; the changes you are making; and the corrected amounts. Then figure the tax on the corrected amount of taxable income and the amount you owe or your refund. If you owe tax, pay the full amount with Form 1040X. The tax owed won't be subtracted from any amount you had credited to your estimated tax. If you can’t pay the full amount due with your return, you can ask to make monthly installment payments. See, earlier. If you overpaid tax, you can have all or part of the overpayment refunded to you, or you can apply all or part of it to your estimated tax. If you choose to get a refund, it will be sent separately from any refund shown on your original return. Filing Form 1040X. When completing Form 1040X, don't forget to show the year of your original return and explain all changes you made. Be sure to attach any forms or schedules needed to explain your changes. Mail your Form 1040X to the Internal Revenue Service Center serving the area where you now live (as shown in the instructions to the form). However, if you are filing Form 1040X in response to a notice you received from the IRS, mail it to the address shown on the notice. File a separate form for each tax year involved. Time for filing a claim for refund. Generally, you must file your claim for a credit or refund within 3 years after the date you filed your original return or within 2 years after the date you paid the tax, whichever is later. Returns filed before the due date (without regard to extensions) are considered filed on the due date (even if the due date was a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday). These time periods are suspended while you are, discussed later. If the last day for claiming a credit or refund is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, you can file the claim on the next business day. If you don't file a claim within this period, you may not be entitled to a credit or a refund. Protective claim for refund. Generally, a protective claim is a formal claim or amended return for credit or refund normally based on current litigation or expected changes in tax law or other legislation. You file a protective claim when your right to a refund is contingent on future events and may not be determinable until after the statute of limitations expires. A valid protective claim doesn't have to list a particular dollar amount or demand an immediate refund. However, a valid protective claim must. • Be in writing and signed; • Include your name, address, SSN or ITIN, and other contact information; • Identify and describe the contingencies affecting the claim; • Clearly alert the IRS to the essential nature of the claim; and • Identify the specific year(s) for which a refund is sought. Mail your protective claim for refund to the address listed in the instructions for Form 1040X under Where To File. Generally, the IRS will delay action on the protective claim until the contingency is resolved. You made estimated tax payments of $500 and got an automatic extension of time to October 15, 2014, to file your 2013 income tax return. When you filed your return on that date, you paid an additional $200 tax. On October 15, 2017, you filed an amended return and claimed a refund of $700. Because you filed your claim within 3 years after you filed your original return, you can get a refund of up to $700, the tax paid within the 3 years plus the 6-month extension period immediately before you filed the claim. The situation is the same as in Example 1, except you filed your return on October 30, 2014, 2 weeks after the extension period ended. You paid an additional $200 on that date. On October 31, 2017, you filed an amended return and claimed a refund of $700. Although you filed your claim within 3 years from the date you filed your original return, the refund was limited to $200, the tax paid within the 3 years plus the 6-month extension period immediately before you filed the claim. The estimated tax of $500 paid before that period can’t be refunded or credited. If you file a claim more than 3 years after you file your return, the credit or refund can’t be more than the tax you paid within the 2 years immediately before you file the claim. Financially disabled. The time periods for claiming a refund are suspended for the period in which you are financially disabled. For a joint income tax return, only one spouse has to be financially disabled for the time period to be suspended. You are financially disabled if you are unable to manage your financial affairs because of a medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or which has lasted or can be expected to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months. However, you aren’t treated as financially disabled during any period your spouse or any other person is authorized to act on your behalf in financial matters. To claim that you are financially disabled, you must send in the following written statements with your claim for refund. • You are filing a claim for a credit or refund based solely on contested income tax or on estate tax or gift tax issues considered in your previously examined returns, and • You want to take your case to court instead of appealing it within the IRS. When you file your claim with the IRS, you get the direct method by requesting in writing that your claim be immediately rejected. A notice of claim disallowance will be sent to you. You have 2 years from the date of mailing of the notice of claim disallowance to file a refund suit in the United States District Court having jurisdiction or in the United States Court of Federal Claims. Paying tax late. You will have to pay a failure-to-pay penalty of ½ of 1% (0.50%) of your unpaid taxes for each month, or part of a month, after the due date that the tax isn't paid. This penalty doesn't apply during the automatic 6-month extension of time to file period if you paid at least 90% of your actual tax liability on or before the due date of your return and pay the balance when you file the return. The monthly rate of the failure-to-pay penalty is half the usual rate (0.25% instead of 0.50%) if an installment agreement is in effect for that month. You must have filed your return by the due date (including extensions) to qualify for this reduced penalty. If a notice of intent to levy is issued, the rate will increase to 1% at the start of the first month beginning at least 10 days after the day that the notice is issued. If a notice and demand for immediate payment is issued, the rate will increase to 1% at the start of the first month beginning after the day that the notice and demand is issued. This penalty can’t be more than 25% of your unpaid tax. You won't have to pay the penalty if you can show that you had a good reason for not paying your tax on time. • You show negligence or disregard of the rules or regulations, • You substantially understate your income tax, • You claim tax benefits for a transaction that lacks economic substance, or • You fail to disclose a foreign financial asset. The penalty is equal to 20% of the underpayment. The penalty is 40% of any portion of the underpayment that is attributable to an undisclosed noneconomic substance transaction or an undisclosed foreign financial asset transaction. The penalty won't be figured on any part of an underpayment on which the fraud penalty (discussed later) is charged. Filing erroneous claim for refund or credit. You may have to pay a penalty if you file an erroneous claim for refund or credit. The penalty is equal to 20% of the disallowed amount of the claim, unless you can show a reasonable basis for the way you treated an item. However, any disallowed amount due to a transaction that lacks economic substance won't be treated as having a reasonable basis. The penalty won't be figured on any part of the disallowed amount of the claim that relates to the earned income credit or on which the accuracy-related or fraud penalties are charged. Frivolous tax submission. You may have to pay a penalty of $5,000 if you file a frivolous tax return or other frivolous submissions. A frivolous tax return is one that doesn't include enough information to figure the correct tax or that contains information clearly showing that the tax you reported is substantially incorrect. For more information on frivolous returns, frivolous submissions, and a list of positions that are identified as frivolous, see Notice 2010-33, 2010-17 I.R.B. 609, available. You will have to pay the penalty if you filed this kind of return or submission based on a frivolous position or a desire to delay or interfere with the administration of federal tax laws. This includes altering or striking out the preprinted language above the space provided for your signature. This penalty is added to any other penalty provided by law. Failure to supply SSN. If you don't include your SSN or the SSN of another person where required on a return, statement, or other document, you will be subject to a penalty of $50 for each failure. You will also be subject to a penalty of $50 if you don't give your SSN to another person when it is required on a return, statement, or other document. For example, if you have a bank account that earns interest, you must give your SSN to the bank. The number must be shown on the Form 1099-INT or other statement the bank sends you. If you don't give the bank your SSN, you will be subject to the $50 penalty. (You also may be subject to 'backup' withholding of income tax. See.) You won't have to pay the penalty if you are able to show that the failure was due to reasonable cause and not willful neglect. • Protect your SSN, • Ensure your employer is protecting your SSN, and • Be careful when choosing a tax preparer. If your tax records are affected by identity theft and you receive a notice from the IRS, respond right away to the name and phone number printed on the IRS notice or letter. If your SSN has been lost or stolen or you suspect you are a victim of tax-related identity theft, visit to learn what steps you should take. For more information, see Pub. Victims of identity theft who are experiencing economic harm or a systemic problem, or are seeking help in resolving tax problems that have not been resolved through normal channels, may be eligible for Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) assistance. You can reach TAS by calling the National Taxpayer Advocate helpline at 1-877-777-4778 or TTY/TDD at 1-800-829-4059. Deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals can also contact the IRS through relay services such as the Federal Relay Service available. Protect yourself from suspicious emails or phishing schemes. Phishing is the creation and use of email and websites designed to mimic legitimate business emails and websites. The most common form is the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The IRS doesn't initiate contacts with taxpayers via emails. Also, the IRS doesn't request detailed personal information through email or ask taxpayers for the PIN numbers, passwords, or similar secret access information for their credit card, bank, or other financial accounts. If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from the IRS, forward the message to. You may also report misuse of the IRS name, logo, forms, or other IRS property to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration toll-free at 1-800-366-4484. You can forward suspicious emails to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at or report them. You can contact them at or 1-877-IDTHEFT (1-877-438-4338). If you have been a victim of identity theft, see or Pub.5027. People who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability and who have access to TTY/TDD equipment can call 1-866-653-4261. Go to to learn more about identity theft and how to reduce your risk. Annulled marriages. If you obtain a court decree of annulment, which holds that no valid marriage ever existed, you are considered unmarried even if you filed joint returns for earlier years. You must file Form 1040X, Amended U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, claiming single or head of household status for all tax years that are affected by the annulment and not closed by the statute of limitations for filing a tax return. Generally, for a credit or refund, you must file Form 1040X within 3 years (including extensions) after the date you filed your original return or within 2 years after the date you paid the tax, whichever is later. If you filed your original return early (for example, March 1), your return is considered filed on the due date (generally April 15). However, if you had an extension to file (for example, until October 15) but you filed earlier and we received it on July 1, your return is considered filed on July 1. Spouse died during the year. If your spouse died during the year, you are considered married for the whole year for filing status purposes. If you didn't remarry before the end of the tax year, you can file a joint return for yourself and your deceased spouse. For the next 2 years, you may be entitled to the special benefits described later under. If you remarried before the end of the tax year, you can file a joint return with your new spouse. Your deceased spouse's filing status is married filing separately for that year. Married Filing Jointly You can choose married filing jointly as your filing status if you are considered married and both you and your spouse agree to file a joint return. On a joint return, you and your spouse report your combined income and deduct your combined allowable expenses. You can file a joint return even if one of you had no income or deductions. If you and your spouse decide to file a joint return, your tax may be lower than your combined tax for the other filing statuses. Also, your standard deduction (if you don’t itemize deductions) may be higher, and you may qualify for tax benefits that don’t apply to other filing statuses. If you file as married filing jointly, you can use Form 1040. If you and your spouse have taxable income of less than $100,000, you may be able to file Form 1040A. If, in addition, you and your spouse have no dependents, are both under 65 and not blind, and meet other requirements, you can file Form 1040EZ. If you file Form 1040 or Form 1040A, show this filing status by checking the box on line 2. Use the Married filing jointly column of the Tax Table or Section B of the Tax Computation Worksheet to figure your tax. Joint responsibility. Both of you may be held responsible, jointly and individually, for the tax and any interest or penalty due on your joint return. This means that if one spouse doesn't pay the tax due, the other may have to. Or, if one spouse doesn't report the correct tax, both spouses may be responsible for any additional taxes assessed by the IRS. One spouse may be held responsible for all the tax due even if all the income was earned by the other spouse. You may want to file separately if. Injury or disease prevents signing. If your spouse can’t sign because of disease or injury and tells you to sign for him or her, you can sign your spouse's name in the proper space on the return followed by the words 'By (your name), Husband (or Wife).' Be sure to also sign in the space provided for your signature. Attach a dated statement, signed by you, to the return. The statement should include the form number of the return you are filing, the tax year, and the reason your spouse can’t sign, and should state that your spouse has agreed to your signing for him or her. Spouse in combat zone. You can sign a joint return for your spouse if your spouse can’t sign because he or she is serving in a combat zone (such as the Persian Gulf Area, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, or Afghanistan), even if you don’t have a power of attorney or other statement. Attach a signed statement to your return explaining that your spouse is serving in a combat zone. For more information on special tax rules for persons who are serving in a combat zone, or who are in missing status as a result of serving in a combat zone, see Pub. 3, Armed Forces' Tax Guide. Married Filing Separately You can choose married filing separately as your filing status if you are married. This filing status may benefit you if you want to be responsible only for your own tax or if it results in less tax than filing a joint return. If you and your spouse don’t agree to file a joint return, you must use this filing status unless you qualify for head of household status, discussed later. You may be able to choose head of household filing status if you are considered unmarried because you live apart from your spouse and meet certain tests (explained under, later). This can apply to you even if you aren't divorced or legally separated. If you qualify to file as head of household, instead of as married filing separately, your tax may be lower, you may be able to claim the earned income credit and certain other credits, and your standard deduction will be higher. The head of household filing status allows you to choose the standard deduction even if your spouse chooses to itemize deductions. See, later, for more information. If you file a separate return, you generally report only your own income, exemptions, credits, and deductions. You can claim an exemption for your spouse only if your spouse had no gross income, isn't filing a return, and wasn't the dependent of another person. You can file Form 1040. If your taxable income is less than $100,000, you may be able to file Form 1040A. Select this filing status by checking the box on line 3 of either form. Enter your spouse's full name and SSN or ITIN in the spaces provided. If your spouse doesn't have and isn't required to have an SSN or ITIN, enter 'NRA' in the space for your spouse's SSN. Use the Married filing separately column of the Tax Table or Section C of the Tax Computation Worksheet to figure your tax. • Your tax rate generally is higher than on a joint return. • Your exemption amount for figuring the alternative minimum tax is half that allowed on a joint return. • You can’t take the credit for child and dependent care expenses in most cases, and the amount you can exclude from income under an employer's dependent care assistance program is limited to $2,500 (instead of $5,000). However, if you are legally separated or living apart from your spouse, you may be able to file a separate return and still take the credit. For more information about these expenses, the credit, and the exclusion, see. • You can’t take the earned income credit. • You can’t take the exclusion or credit for adoption expenses in most cases. • You can’t take the education credits (the American opportunity credit and lifetime learning credit), or the deduction for student loan interest. • You can’t exclude any interest income from qualified U.S. Savings bonds you used for higher education expenses. • If you lived with your spouse at any time during the tax year. Rental activity losses. If you actively participated in a passive rental real estate activity that produced a loss, you generally can deduct the loss from your nonpassive income, up to $25,000. This is called a special allowance. However, married persons filing separate returns who lived together at any time during the year can’t claim this special allowance. Married persons filing separate returns who lived apart at all times during the year are each allowed a $12,500 maximum special allowance for losses from passive real estate activities. See in chapter 9. • You file a separate return. A separate return includes a return claiming married filing separately, single, or head of household filing status. • You paid more than half of the cost of keeping up your home for the tax year. • Your spouse didn't live in your home during the last 6 months of the tax year. Your spouse is considered to live in your home even if he or she is temporarily absent due to special circumstances. See under Qualifying Person, later. • Your home was the main home of your child, stepchild, or foster child for more than half the year. (See under Qualifying Person, later, for rules applying to a child's birth, death, or temporary absence during the year.) • You must be able to claim an exemption for the child. However, you meet this test if you can’t claim the exemption only because the noncustodial parent can claim the child using the rules described in under Qualifying Child in chapter 3, or referred to in under Qualifying Relative in chapter 3. The general rules for claiming an exemption for a dependent are explained under in chapter 3. See the text of this chapter for the other requirements you must meet to claim head of household filing status. IF the person is your... THEN that person is... Qualifying child (such as a son, daughter, or grandchild who lived with you more than half the year and meets certain other tests) 2 he or she is single a qualifying person, whether or not you can claim an exemption for the person. He or she is married and you can claim an exemption for him or her a qualifying person. He or she is married and you can’t claim an exemption for him or her not a qualifying person. 3 qualifying relative 4 who is your father or mother you can claim an exemption for him or her 5 a qualifying person. 6 you can’t claim an exemption for him or her not a qualifying person. Qualifying relative 4 other than your father or mother (such as a grandparent, brother, or sister who meets certain tests) he or she lived with you more than half the year, and he or she is related to you in one of the ways listed under in chapter 3 and you can claim an exemption for him or her 5 a qualifying person. He or she didn't live with you more than half the year not a qualifying person. He or she isn't related to you in one of the ways listed under in chapter 3 and is your qualifying relative only because he or she lived with you all year as a member of your household not a qualifying person. You can’t claim an exemption for him or her not a qualifying person. 1A person can’t qualify more than one taxpayer to use the head of household filing status for the year. 2The term is defined in chapter 3. If you are a noncustodial parent, the term 'qualifying child' for head of household filing status doesn't include a child who is your qualifying child for exemption purposes only because of the rules described under under Qualifying Child in chapter 3. If you are the custodial parent and those rules apply, the child generally is your qualifying child for head of household filing status even though the child isn't a qualifying child for whom you can claim an exemption. 3This person is a qualifying person if the only reason you can’t claim the exemption is that you can be claimed as a dependent on someone else's return. 4The term is defined in chapter 3. 5If you can claim an exemption for a person only because of a multiple support agreement, that person isn't a qualifying person. See in chapter 3. 6See under Qualifying Person, earlier. Special rule for parent. If your qualifying person is your father or mother, you may be eligible to file as head of household even if your father or mother doesn't live with you. However, you must be able to claim an exemption for your father or mother. Also, you must pay more than half of the cost of keeping up a home that was the main home for the entire year for your father or mother. If you pay more than half of the cost of keeping your parent in a rest home or home for the elderly, that counts as paying more than half of the cost of keeping up your parent's main home. Qualifying Widow(er) If your spouse died in 2017, you can use married filing jointly as your filing status for 2017 if you otherwise qualify to use that status. The year of death is the last year for which you can file jointly with your deceased spouse. See, earlier. You may be eligible to use qualifying widow(er) as your filing status for 2 years following the year your spouse died. For example, if your spouse died in 2016, and you haven't remarried, you may be able to use this filing status for 2017 and 2018. This filing status entitles you to use joint return tax rates and the highest standard deduction amount (if you don’t itemize deductions). It doesn't entitle you to file a joint return. If you file as qualifying widow(er), you can use Form 1040. If you also have taxable income of less than $100,000 and meet certain other conditions, you may be able to file Form 1040A. Check the box on line 5 of either form. If the child who qualifies you for this filing status isn't claimed as your dependent on line 6c of Form 1040 or Form 1040A, enter the child's name on line 4 of the form you are filing. Use the Married filing jointly column of the Tax Table or Section B of the Tax Computation Worksheet to figure your tax. • You were entitled to file a joint return with your spouse for the year your spouse died. It doesn't matter whether you actually filed a joint return. • Your spouse died in 2015 or 2016 and you didn't remarry before the end of 2017. • You have a child or stepchild (not a foster child) whom you can claim as a dependent or could claim as a dependent except that, for 2017: a. The child had gross income of $4,050 or more, b. The child filed a joint return, or c. You could be claimed as a dependent on someone else’s return. If the child isn't claimed as your dependent on Form 1040 or Form 1040A, line 6c, enter the child's name on line 4 of the form you are filing. If you don’t enter the name, it will take us longer to process your return. • This child lived in your home all year, except for temporary absences. See, earlier, under Head of Household. There are also exceptions, described later, for a child who was born or died during the year and for a kidnapped child. • You paid more than half of the cost of keeping up a home for the year. See, earlier, under Head of Household. • Provide additional tax relief for those affected by Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria, and tax relief for those affected by other 2017 disasters, such as the California wildfires. • Extend certain tax benefits that expired at the end of 2016 and that currently can't be claimed on your 2017 tax return. • Change certain other tax provisions. To learn whether this legislation was enacted resulting in changes that affect your 2017 tax return, go to Recent Developments. Exemption phaseout. You lose at least part of the benefit of your exemptions if your adjusted gross income is more than a certain amount. For 2017, this amount is $156,900 for a married individual filing a separate return; $261,500 for a single individual; $287,650 for a head of household; and $313,800 for married individuals filing jointly or a qualifying widow(er). • Personal exemptions — You generally can take one for yourself and, if you are married, one for your spouse. • Exemptions for dependents — You generally can take an exemption for each of your dependents. A dependent is your qualifying child or qualifying relative. If you are entitled to claim an exemption for a dependent, that dependent can’t claim a personal exemption on his or her own tax return. • Phaseout of exemptions — Your deduction is reduced if your adjusted gross income is more than a certain amount. • Social security number (SSN) requirement for dependents — You must list the SSN of any dependent for whom you claim an exemption. How to claim exemptions. How you claim an exemption on your tax return depends on which form you file. If you file Form 1040EZ, the exemption amount is combined with the standard deduction amount and entered on line 5. If you file Form 1040A, complete lines 6a through 6d. The total number of exemptions you can claim is the total in the box on line 6d. Also complete line 26. If you file Form 1040, complete lines 6a through 6d. The total number of exemptions you can claim is the total in the box on line 6d. Also complete line 42. Death of spouse. If your spouse died during the year and you file a joint return for yourself and your deceased spouse, you generally can claim your spouse's exemption under the rules just explained in. If you file a separate return for the year, you may be able to claim your spouse's exemption under the rules just described in. If you remarried during the year, you can’t take an exemption for your deceased spouse. If you are a surviving spouse without gross income and you remarry in the year your spouse died, you can be claimed as an exemption on both the final separate return of your deceased spouse and the separate return of your new spouse for that year. If you file a joint return with your new spouse, you can be claimed as an exemption only on that return. • You can’t claim any dependents if you (or your spouse, if filing jointly) could be claimed as a dependent by another taxpayer. • You can’t claim a married person who files a joint return as a dependent unless that joint return is filed only to claim a refund of withheld income tax or estimated tax paid. • You can’t claim a person as a dependent unless that person is a U.S. Citizen, U.S. Resident alien, U.S. National, or a resident of Canada or Mexico. 1 • You can’t claim a person as a dependent unless that person is your qualifying child or qualifying relative. Tests To Be a Qualifying Child Tests To Be a Qualifying Relative. • The child must be your son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, brother, sister, half brother, half sister, stepbrother, stepsister, or a descendant of any of them. • The child must be (a) under age 19 at the end of the year and younger than you (or your spouse, if filing jointly), (b) under age 24 at the end of the year, a student, and younger than you (or your spouse, if filing jointly), or (c) any age if permanently and totally disabled. • The child must have lived with you for more than half of the year. 2 • The child must not have provided more than half of his or her own support for the year. • The child must not be filing a joint return for the year (unless that return is filed only to get a refund of income tax withheld or estimated tax paid). If the child meets the rules to be a qualifying child of more than one person, only one person can actually treat the child as a qualifying child. See to find out which person is the person entitled to claim the child as a qualifying child. • The person can’t be your qualifying child or the qualifying child of any other taxpayer. • The person either (a) must be related to you in one of the ways listed under, or (b) must live with you all year as a member of your household 2 (and your relationship must not violate local law). • The person's gross income for the year must be less than $4,050. 3 • You must provide more than half of the person's total support for the year. 4 1There is an exception for certain adopted children. 2There are exceptions for temporary absences, children who were born or died during the year, children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart), and kidnapped children. 3There is an exception if the person is disabled and has income from a sheltered workshop. 4There are exceptions for multiple support agreements, children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart), and kidnapped children. Example 2—Child files joint return only as claim for refund of withheld tax. Your 18-year-old son and his 17-year-old wife had $800 of wages from part-time jobs and no other income. They lived with you all year. Neither is required to file a tax return. They don’t have a child. Taxes were taken out of their pay so they filed a joint return only to get a refund of the withheld taxes. The exception to the joint return test applies, so you aren't disqualified from claiming an exemption for each of them just because they file a joint return. You can claim exemptions for each of them if all the other tests to do so are met. Example 3—Child files joint return to claim American opportunity credit. The facts are the same as in Example 2 except no taxes were taken out of your son's pay or his wife's pay. However, they file a joint return to claim an American opportunity credit of $124 and get a refund of that amount. Because claiming the American opportunity credit is their reason for filing the return, they aren't filing it only to get a refund of income tax withheld or estimated tax paid. The exception to the joint return test doesn't apply, so you can’t claim an exemption for either of them. • The custodial parent signs a written declaration, discussed later, that he or she won't claim the child as a dependent for the year, and the noncustodial parent attaches this written declaration to his or her return. (If the decree or agreement went into effect after 1984 and before 2009, see, later. If the decree or agreement went into effect after 2008, see, later.) • A pre-1985 decree of divorce or separate maintenance or written separation agreement that applies to 2017 states that the noncustodial parent can claim the child as a dependent, the decree or agreement wasn't changed after 1984 to say the noncustodial parent can’t claim the child as a dependent, and the noncustodial parent provides at least $600 for the child's support during the year. If statements (1) through (4) are all true, only the noncustodial parent can. Custodial parent and noncustodial parent. The custodial parent is the parent with whom the child lived for the greater number of nights during the year. The other parent is the noncustodial parent. If the parents divorced or separated during the year and the child lived with both parents before the separation, the custodial parent is the one with whom the child lived for the greater number of nights during the rest of the year. A child is treated as living with a parent for a night if the child sleeps. Post-2008 divorce decree or separation agreement. The noncustodial parent can’t attach pages from the decree or agreement instead of Form 8332 if the decree or agreement went into effect after 2008. The custodial parent must sign either Form 8332 or a similar statement whose only purpose is to release the custodial parent's claim to an exemption for a child, and the noncustodial parent must attach a copy to his or her return. The form or statement must release the custodial parent's claim to the child without any conditions. For example, the release must not depend on the noncustodial parent paying support. Revocation of release of claim to an exemption. The custodial parent can revoke a release of claim to exemption. For the revocation to be effective for 2017, the custodial parent must have given (or made reasonable efforts to give) written notice of the revocation to the noncustodial parent in 2016 or earlier. The custodial parent can use Part III of Form 8332 for this purpose and must attach a copy of the revocation to his or her return for each tax year he or she claims the child as a dependent as a result of the revocation. Funds Belonging to the Person You Supported 1. Enter the total funds belonging to the person you supported, including income received (taxable and nontaxable) and amounts borrowed during the year, plus the amount in savings and other accounts at the beginning of the year. Don’t include funds provided by the state; include those amounts on line 23 instead 1. Enter the amount on line 1 that was used for the person's support 2. Enter the amount on line 1 that was used for other purposes 3. Enter the total amount in the person's savings and other accounts at the end of the year 4. Add lines 2 through 4. (This amount should equal line 1.) 5. Expenses for Entire Household (where the person you supported lived) 6. Lodging (complete line 6a or 6b): a. Enter the total rent paid 6a. Enter the fair rental value of the home. If the person you supported owned the home, also include this amount in line 21 6b. Enter the total food expenses 7. Enter the total amount of utilities (heat, light, water, etc. Not included in line 6a or 6b) 8. Enter the total amount of repairs (not included in line 6a or 6b) 9. Enter the total of other expenses. Don’t include expenses of maintaining the home, such as mortgage interest, real estate taxes, and insurance 10. Add lines 6a through 10. These are the total household expenses 11. Enter total number of persons who lived in the household 12. Expenses for the Person You Supported 13. Divide line 11 by line 12. This is the person's share of the household expenses 13. Enter the person's total clothing expenses 14. Enter the person's total education expenses 15. Enter the person's total medical and dental expenses not paid for or reimbursed by insurance 16. Enter the person's total travel and recreation expenses 17. Enter the total of the person's other expenses 18. Add lines 13 through 18. This is the total cost of the person's support for the year 19. Did the Person Provide More Than Half of His or Her Own Support? Multiply line 19 by 50% (0.50) 20. Enter the amount from line 2, plus the amount from line 6b if the person you supported owned the home. This is the amount the person provided for his or her own support 21. Is line 21 more than line 20? Checkbox Yes. You don’t meet the support test for this person to be either your qualifying child or your qualifying relative. Did You Provide More Than Half? Enter the amount others provided for the person's support. Include amounts provided by state, local, and other welfare societies or agencies. Don’t include any amounts included on line 1 23. Add lines 21 and 23 24. Subtract line 24 from line 19. This is the amount you provided for the person's support 25. Is line 25 more than line 20? Foster care payments and expenses. Payments you receive for the support of a foster child from a child placement agency are considered support provided by the agency. Similarly, payments you receive for the support of a foster child from a state or county are considered support provided by the state or county. If you aren't in the trade or business of providing foster care and your unreimbursed out-of-pocket expenses in caring for a foster child were mainly to benefit an organization qualified to receive deductible charitable contributions, the expenses are deductible as charitable contributions but aren't considered support you provided. For more information about the deduction for charitable contributions, see. If your unreimbursed expenses aren't deductible as charitable contributions, they may qualify as support you provided. If you are in the trade or business of providing foster care, your unreimbursed expenses aren't considered support provided by you. Example 2—Child files joint return only as a claim for refund of withheld tax. Your 18-year-old son and his 17-year-old wife had $800 of wages from part-time jobs and no other income. They lived with you all year. Neither is required to file a tax return. They don’t have a child. Taxes were taken out of their pay so they filed a joint return only to get a refund of the withheld taxes. The exception to the joint return test applies, so your son may be your qualifying child if all the other tests are met. Example 3—Child files joint return to claim American opportunity credit. The facts are the same as in Example 2 except no taxes were taken out of your son's pay or his wife's pay. However, they file a joint return to claim an American opportunity credit of $124 and get a refund of that amount. Because claiming the American opportunity credit is their reason for filing the return, they aren't filing it only to get a refund of income tax withheld or estimated tax paid. The exception to the joint return test doesn't apply, so your son isn't your qualifying child. If a child is treated as the qualifying child of the noncustodial parent under the rules for children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart) described earlier, see, later. Sometimes, a child meets the relationship, age, residency, support, and joint return tests to be a qualifying child of more than one person. Although the child is a qualifying child of each of these persons, only one person can actually treat the child as a qualifying child to take all of the following tax benefits (provided the person is eligible for each benefit). • If only one of the persons is the child's parent, the child is treated as the qualifying child of the parent. • If the parents file a joint return together and can claim the child as a qualifying child, the child is treated as the qualifying child of the parents. • If the parents don’t file a joint return together but both parents claim the child as a qualifying child, the IRS will treat the child as the qualifying child of the parent with whom the child lived for the longer period of time during the year. If the child lived with each parent for the same amount of time, the IRS will treat the child as the qualifying child of the parent who had the higher adjusted gross income (AGI) for the year. • If no parent can claim the child as a qualifying child, the child is treated as the qualifying child of the person who had the highest AGI for the year. • If a parent can claim the child as a qualifying child but no parent does so claim the child, the child is treated as the qualifying child of the person who had the highest AGI for the year, but only if that person's AGI is higher than the highest AGI of any of the child's parents who can claim the child. Subject to these tiebreaker rules, you and the other person may be able to choose which of you claims the child as a qualifying child. Example 1—Child lived with parent and grandparent. You and your 3-year-old daughter Jane lived with your mother all year. You are 25 years old, unmarried, and your AGI is $9,000. Your mother's AGI is $15,000. Jane's father didn't live with you or your daughter. You haven't signed Form 8332 (or a similar statement) to release the child's exemption to the noncustodial parent. Jane is a qualifying child of both you and your mother because she meets the relationship, age, residency, support, and joint return tests for both you and your mother. However, only one of you can claim her. Jane isn't a qualifying child of anyone else, including her father. You agree to let your mother claim Jane. This means your mother can claim Jane as a qualifying child for all of the six tax benefits listed earlier, if she qualifies for each of those benefits (and if you don’t claim Jane as a qualifying child for any of those tax benefits). Example 6—Separated parents. You, your husband, and your 10-year-old son lived together until August 1, 2017, when your husband moved out of the household. In August and September, your son lived with you. For the rest of the year, your son lived with your husband, the boy's father. Your son is a qualifying child of both you and your husband because your son lived with each of you for more than half the year and because he met the relationship, age, support, and joint return tests for both of you. At the end of the year, you and your husband still weren't divorced, legally separated, or separated under a written separation agreement, so the rule for children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart) doesn't apply. You and your husband will file separate returns. Your husband agrees to let you treat your son as a qualifying child. This means, if your husband doesn't claim your son as a qualifying child, you can claim your son as a qualifying child for the dependency exemption, child tax credit, and exclusion for dependent care benefits (if you qualify for each of those tax benefits). However, you can’t claim head of household filing status because you and your husband didn't live apart for the last 6 months of the year. As a result, your filing status is married filing separately, so you can’t claim the earned income credit or the credit for child and dependent care expenses. Example 7—Separated parents claim same child. The facts are the same as in Example 6 except that you and your husband both claim your son as a qualifying child. In this case, only your husband will be allowed to treat your son as a qualifying child. This is because, during 2017, the boy lived with him longer than with you. If you claimed an exemption or the child tax credit for your son, the IRS will disallow your claim to both these tax benefits. If you don’t have another qualifying child or dependent, the IRS will also disallow your claim to the exclusion for dependent care benefits. In addition, because you and your husband didn't live apart for the last 6 months of the year, your husband can’t claim head of household filing status. As a result, his filing status is married filing separately, so he can’t claim the earned income credit or the credit for child and dependent care expenses. Example 8—Unmarried parents. You, your 5-year-old son, and your son's father lived together all year. You and your son's father aren't married. Your son is a qualifying child of both you and his father because he meets the relationship, age, residency, support, and joint return tests for both you and his father. Your AGI is $12,000 and your son's father's AGI is $14,000. Your son's father agrees to let you claim the child as a qualifying child. This means you can claim him as a qualifying child for the dependency exemption, child tax credit, head of household filing status, credit for child and dependent care expenses, exclusion for dependent care benefits, and the earned income credit, if you qualify for each of those tax benefits (and if your son's father doesn't claim your son as a qualifying child for any of those tax benefits). Example 9—Unmarried parents claim same child. The facts are the same as in Example 8 except that you and your son's father both claim your son as a qualifying child. In this case, only your son's father will be allowed to treat your son as a qualifying child. This is because his AGI, $14,000, is more than your AGI, $12,000. If you claimed an exemption or the child tax credit for your son, the IRS will disallow your claim to both these tax benefits. If you don’t have another qualifying child or dependent, the IRS will also disallow your claim to head of household filing status, the credit for child and dependent care expenses, and the exclusion for dependent care benefits. However, you may be able to claim the earned income credit as a taxpayer without a qualifying child. Example 10—Child didn't live with a parent. You and your 7-year-old niece, your sister's child, lived with your mother all year. You are 25 years old, and your AGI is $9,300. Your mother's AGI is $15,000. Your niece's parents file jointly, have an AGI of less than $9,000, and don’t live with you or their child. Your niece is a qualifying child of both you and your mother because she meets the relationship, age, residency, support, and joint return tests for both you and your mother. However, only your mother can treat her as a qualifying child. This is because your mother's AGI, $15,000, is more than your AGI, $9,300. Applying the tiebreaker rules to divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart). If a child is treated as the qualifying child of the noncustodial parent under the rules described earlier for, only the noncustodial parent can claim an exemption and the child tax credit for the child. However, only the custodial parent can claim the credit for child and dependent care expenses or the exclusion for dependent care benefits for the child, and only the custodial parent can treat the child as a dependent for the health coverage tax credit. Also, the noncustodial parent can't claim the child as a qualifying child for head of household filing status or the earned income credit. Instead, the custodial parent, if eligible, or other eligible person can claim the child as a qualifying child for those two benefits. If the child is the qualifying child of more than one person for these benefits, then the tiebreaker rules just explained determine whether the custodial parent or another eligible person can treat the child as a qualifying child. You and your 5-year-old son lived all year with your mother, who paid the entire cost of keeping up the home. Your AGI is $10,000. Your mother's AGI is $25,000. Your son's father didn't live with you or your son. Under the rules explained earlier for children of divorced or separated parents (or parents who live apart), your son is treated as the qualifying child of his father, who can claim an exemption and the child tax credit for him. Because of this, you can’t claim an exemption or the child tax credit for your son. However, those rules don't allow your son's father to claim your son as a qualifying child for head of household filing status, the credit for child and dependent care expenses, the exclusion for dependent care benefits, the earned income credit, or the health coverage tax credit. You and your mother didn't have any child care expenses or dependent care benefits, so neither of you can claim the credit for child and dependent care expenses or the exclusion for dependent care benefits. Also, neither of you qualifies for the health coverage tax credit. But the boy is a qualifying child of both you and your mother for head of household filing status and the earned income credit because he meets the relationship, age, residency, support, and joint return tests for both you and your mother. (Note: The support test doesn't apply for the earned income credit.) However, you agree to let your mother claim your son. This means she can claim him for head of household filing status and the earned income credit if she qualifies for each and if you don’t claim him as a qualifying child for the earned income credit. (You can’t claim head of household filing status because your mother paid the entire cost of keeping up the home.) You may be able to claim the earned income credit as a taxpayer without a qualifying child. The facts are the same as in except you and your mother both claim your son as a qualifying child for the earned income credit. Your mother also claims him as a qualifying child for head of household filing status. You, as the child's parent, will be the only one allowed to claim your son as a qualifying child for the earned income credit. The IRS will disallow your mother's claim to head of household filing status unless she has another qualifying child or dependent. Your mother can't claim the earned income credit as a taxpayer without a qualifying child because her AGI is more than $15,010. Child in Canada or Mexico. You may be able to claim your child as a dependent even if the child lives in Canada or Mexico. If the child doesn't live with you, the child doesn't meet the residency test to be your qualifying child. However, the child may still be your qualifying relative. If the persons the child does live with aren't U.S. Citizens and have no U.S. Gross income, those persons aren't 'taxpayers,' so the child isn't the qualifying child of any other taxpayer. If the child isn't the qualifying child of any other taxpayer, the child is your qualifying relative as long as the gross income test and the support test are met. You can’t claim as a dependent a child who lives in a foreign country other than Canada or Mexico, unless the child is a U.S. Citizen, U.S. Resident alien, or U.S. There is an exception for certain adopted children who lived with you all year. See, earlier. You provide all the support of your children, ages 6, 8, and 12, who live in Mexico with your mother and have no income. You are single and live in the United States. Your mother isn't a U.S. Citizen and has no U.S. Income, so she isn't a 'taxpayer.' Your children aren't your qualifying children because they don’t meet the residency test. But since they aren't the qualifying children of any other taxpayer, they are your qualifying relatives and you can claim them as dependents. You may also be able to claim your mother as a dependent if the gross income and support tests are met. • Your child, stepchild, foster child, or a descendant of any of them (for example, your grandchild). (A legally adopted child is considered your child.) • Your brother, sister, half brother, half sister, stepbrother, or stepsister. • Your father, mother, grandparent, or other direct ancestor, but not foster parent. • Your stepfather or stepmother. • A son or daughter of your brother or sister. • A son or daughter of your half brother or half sister. • A brother or sister of your father or mother. • Your son-in-law, daughter-in-law, father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, or sister-in-law. Any of these relationships that were established by marriage aren't ended by death or divorce. Joint return. If you file a joint return, the person can be related to either you or your spouse. Also, the person doesn't need to be related to the spouse who provides support. For example, your spouse's uncle who receives more than half of his support from you may be your qualifying relative, even though he doesn't live with you. However, if you and your spouse file separate returns, your spouse's uncle can be your qualifying relative only if he lives with you all year as a member of your household. Death or birth. A person who died during the year, but lived with you as a member of your household until death, will meet this test. The same is true for a child who was born during the year and lived with you as a member of your household for the rest of the year. The test is also met if a child lived with you as a member of your household except for any required hospital stay following birth. If your dependent died during the year and you otherwise qualify to claim an exemption for the dependent, you can still claim the exemption. Gross income defined. Gross income is all income in the form of money, property, and services that isn't exempt from tax. In a manufacturing, merchandising, or mining business, gross income is the total net sales minus the cost of goods sold, plus any miscellaneous income from the business. Gross receipts from rental property are gross income. Don’t deduct taxes, repairs, or other expenses to determine the gross income from rental property. Gross income includes a partner's share of the gross (not a share of the net) partnership income. Gross income also includes all taxable unemployment compensation, taxable social security benefits, and certain scholarship and fellowship grants. Scholarships received by degree candidates and used for tuition, fees, supplies, books, and equipment required for particular courses generally aren't included in gross income. For more information about scholarships, see. Disabled dependent working at sheltered workshop. For purposes of the gross income test, the gross income of an individual who is permanently and totally disabled at any time during the year doesn't include income for services the individual performs at a sheltered workshop. The availability of medical care at the workshop must be the main reason for the individual's presence there. Also, the income must come solely from activities at the workshop that are incident to this medical care. A 'sheltered workshop' is a school that. Total Support To figure if you provided more than half of a person's support, you must first determine the total support provided for that person. Total support includes amounts spent to provide food, lodging, clothing, education, medical and dental care, recreation, transportation, and similar necessities. Generally, the amount of an item of support is the amount of the expense incurred in providing that item. For lodging, the amount of support is the fair rental value of the lodging. Expenses not directly related to any one member of a household, such as the cost of food for the household, must be divided among the members of the household. Grace Brown, mother of Mary Miller, lives with Frank and Mary Miller and their two children. Grace gets social security benefits of $2,400, which she spends for clothing, transportation, and recreation. Grace has no other income. Frank and Mary's total food expense for the household is $5,200. They pay Grace's medical and drug expenses of $1,200. The fair rental value of the lodging provided for Grace is $1,800 a year, based on the cost of similar rooming facilities. Figure Grace's total support as follows. Your parents live with you, your spouse, and your two children in a house you own. The fair rental value of your parents' share of the lodging is $2,000 a year ($1,000 each), which includes furnishings and utilities. Your father receives a nontaxable pension of $4,200, which he spends equally between your mother and himself for items of support such as clothing, transportation, and recreation. Your total food expense for the household is $6,000. Your heat and utility bills amount to $1,200. Your mother has hospital and medical expenses of $600, which you pay during the year. Figure your parents' total support as follows. Support provided Father Mother Fair rental value of lodging $1,000 $1,000 Pension spent for their support 2,100 2,100 Share of food (1/6 of $6,000) 1,000 1,000 Medical expenses for mother 600 Parents' total support $4,100 $4,700 You must apply the support test separately to each parent. You provide $2,000 ($1,000 lodging + $1,000 food) of your father's total support of $4,100 — less than half. You provide $2,600 to your mother ($1,000 lodging + $1,000 food + $600 medical) — more than half of her total support of $4,700. You meet the support test for your mother, but not your father. Heat and utility costs are included in the fair rental value of the lodging, so these aren't considered separately. Fair rental value defined. Fair rental value is the amount you could reasonably expect to receive from a stranger for the same kind of lodging. It is used instead of actual expenses such as taxes, interest, depreciation, paint, insurance, utilities, and the cost of furniture and appliances. In some cases, fair rental value may be equal to the rent paid. If you provide the total lodging, the amount of support you provide is the fair rental value of the room the person uses, or a share of the fair rental value of the entire dwelling if the person has use of your entire home. If you don’t provide the total lodging, the total fair rental value must be divided depending on how much of the total lodging you provide. If you provide only a part and the person supplies the rest, the fair rental value must be divided between both of you according to the amount each provides. Your parents live rent free in a house you own. It has a fair rental value of $5,400 a year furnished, which includes a fair rental value of $3,600 for the house and $1,800 for the furniture. This doesn't include heat and utilities. The house is completely furnished with furniture belonging to your parents. You pay $600 for their utility bills. Utilities aren't usually included in rent for houses in the area where your parents live. Therefore, you consider the total fair rental value of the lodging to be $6,000 ($3,600 fair rental value of the unfurnished house + $1,800 allowance for the furnishings provided by your parents + $600 cost of utilities) of which you are considered to provide $4,200 ($3,600 + $600). Your 17-year-old son, using personal funds, buys a car for $4,500. You provide the rest of your son's support, $4,000. Because the car is bought and owned by your son, the car's fair market value ($4,500) must be included in his support. Your son has provided more than half of his own total support of $8,500 ($4,500 + $4,000), so he isn't your qualifying child. You didn't provide more than half of his total support, so he isn't your qualifying relative. You can’t claim an exemption for your son. Multiple Support Agreement Sometimes no one provides more than half of the support of a person. Instead, two or more persons, each of whom would be able to take the exemption but for the support test, together provide more than half of the person's support. When this happens, you can agree that any one of you who individually provides more than 10% of the person's support, but only one, can claim an exemption for that person as a qualifying relative. Each of the others must sign a statement agreeing not to claim the exemption for that year. The person who claims the exemption must keep these signed statements for his or her records. A multiple support declaration identifying each of the others who agreed not to claim the exemption must be attached to the return of the person claiming the exemption. Form 2120 can be used for this purpose. You can claim an exemption under a multiple support agreement for someone related to you or for someone who lived with you all year as a member of your household. You, your sister, and your two brothers provide the entire support of your mother for the year. You provide 45%, your sister 35%, and your two brothers each provide 10%. Either you or your sister can claim an exemption for your mother. The other must sign a statement agreeing not to take an exemption for your mother. The one who claims the exemption must attach Form 2120, or a similar declaration, to his or her return and must keep the statement signed by the other for his or her records. Because neither brother provides more than 10% of the support, neither can take the exemption and neither has to sign a statement. Filing Status AGI Level That Reduces Exemption Amount Married filing separately $156,900 Single 261,500 Head of household 287,650 Married filing jointly 313,800 Qualifying widow(er) 313,800 You must reduce the dollar amount of your exemptions by 2% for each $2,500, or part of $2,500 ($1,250 if you are married filing separately), that your AGI exceeds the amount shown above for your filing status. If your AGI exceeds the amount shown above by more than $122,500 ($61,250 if married filing separately), the amount of your deduction for exemptions is reduced to zero. If your AGI exceeds the level for your filing status, use to figure the amount of your deduction for exemptions. Right brace 4. Subtract line 4 from line 3. If the result is more than $122,500 ($61,250 if married filing separately), stop here. You can’t take a deduction for exemptions 5. Divide line 5 by $2,500 ($1,250 if married filing separately). If the result isn't a whole number, round it up to the next higher whole number (for example, increase.00004 to 1) 6. Multiply line 6 by 2% (0.02) and enter the result as a decimal (rounded to at least three places) 7. Multiply line 2 by line 7 8. Deduction for exemptions. Subtract line 8 from line 2. Enter the result here and on Form 1040, line 42 9. If a person for whom you expect to claim an exemption on your return doesn't have an SSN, either you or that person should apply for an SSN as soon as possible by filing Form SS-5, Application for a Social Security Card, with the Social Security Administration (SSA). You can get Form SS-5 online at or at your local SSA office. It usually takes about 2 weeks to get an SSN once the SSA has all the information it needs. If you don’t have a required SSN by the filing due date, you can file Form 4868 for an extension of time to file. • Provide additional tax relief for those affected by Hurricane Harvey, Irma, or Maria, and tax relief for those affected by other 2017 disasters, such as the California wildfires. • Extend certain tax benefits that expired at the end of 2016 and that currently can’t be claimed on your 2017 tax return. • Change certain other tax provisions. To learn whether this legislation was enacted resulting in changes that affect your 2017 tax return, go to Recent Developments. Tax law changes for 2018. When you figure how much income tax you want withheld from your pay and when you figure your estimated tax, consider tax law changes effective in 2018. For more information, see Pub. 505, Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax. • Withholding. If you are an employee, your employer probably withholds income tax from your pay. Tax also may be withheld from certain other income, such as pensions, bonuses, commissions, and gambling winnings. The amount withheld is paid to the IRS in your name. • Estimated tax. If you don't pay your tax through withholding, or don't pay enough tax that way, you may have to pay estimated tax. People who are in business for themselves generally will have to pay their tax this way. Also, you may have to pay estimated tax if you receive income such as dividends, interest, capital gains, rent, and royalties. Estimated tax is used to pay not only income tax, but self-employment tax and alternative minimum tax as well. This chapter explains these methods. In addition, it also explains the following. • Credit for withholding and estimated tax. When you file your 2017 income tax return, take credit for all the income tax withheld from your salary, wages, pensions, etc., and for the estimated tax you paid for 2017. Also take credit for any excess social security or railroad retirement tax withheld (discussed in ). • Underpayment penalty. If you didn't pay enough tax during the year, either through withholding or by making estimated tax payments, you may have to pay a penalty. In most cases, the IRS can figure this penalty for you. See at the end of this chapter. Salaries and Wages Income tax is withheld from the pay of most employees. Your pay includes your regular pay, bonuses, commissions, and vacation allowances. It also includes reimbursements and other expense allowances paid under a nonaccountable plan. See, later, for more information about reimbursements and allowances paid under a nonaccountable plan. If your income is low enough that you won't have to pay income tax for the year, you may be exempt from withholding. This is explained under, later. You can ask your employer to withhold income tax from noncash wages and other wages not subject to withholding. If your employer doesn't agree to withhold tax, or if not enough is withheld, you may have to pay estimated tax, as discussed later under. New Job When you start a new job, you must fill out Form W-4 and give it to your employer. Your employer should have copies of the form. If you need to change the information later, you must fill out a new form. If you work only part of the year (for example, you start working after the beginning of the year), too much tax may be withheld. You may be able to avoid overwithholding if your employer agrees to use the part-year method. See Part-Year Method in chapter 1 of Pub. 505 for more information. Changing Your Withholding During the year changes may occur to your marital status, exemptions, adjustments, deductions, or credits you expect to claim on your tax return. When this happens, you may need to give your employer a new Form W-4 to change your withholding status or your number of allowances. If the changes reduce the number of allowances you are claiming or changes your marital status from married to single, you must give your employer a new Form W-4 within 10 days. Generally, you can submit a new Form W-4 whenever you wish to change the number of your withholding allowances for any other reason. Checking Your Withholding After you have given your employer a Form W-4, you can check to see whether the amount of tax withheld from your pay is too little or too much. If too much or too little tax is being withheld, you should give your employer a new Form W-4 to change your withholding. You should try to have your withholding match your actual tax liability. If not enough tax is withheld, you will owe tax at the end of the year and may have to pay interest and a penalty. If too much tax is withheld, you will lose the use of that money until you get your refund. Always check your withholding if there are personal or financial changes in your life or changes in the law that might change your tax liability. Married individuals. If both you and your spouse are employed and expect to file a joint return, figure your withholding allowances using your combined income, adjustments, deductions, exemptions, and credits. Use only one set of worksheets. You can divide your total allowances any way, but you can’t claim an allowance that your spouse also claims. If you and your spouse expect to file separate returns, figure your allowances using separate worksheets based on your own individual income, adjustments, deductions, exemptions, and credits. • You are married and both you and your spouse work. • You have more than one job at a time. • You have nonwage income, such as interest, dividends, alimony, unemployment compensation, or self-employment income. • You will owe additional amounts with your return, such as self-employment tax. • Your withholding is based on obsolete Form W-4 information for a substantial part of the year. • Your earnings are more than the amount shown under Check your withholding in the instructions at the top of page 1 of Form W-4. • You work only part of the year. • You change the number of your withholding allowances during the year. Cumulative wage method. If you change the number of your withholding allowances during the year, too much or too little tax may have been withheld for the period before you made the change. You may be able to compensate for this if your employer agrees to use the cumulative wage withholding method for the rest of the year. You must ask your employer in writing to use this method. To be eligible, you must have been paid for the same kind of payroll period (weekly, biweekly, etc.) since the beginning of the year. Repaying withheld tax. If you find you are having too much tax withheld because you didn't claim all the withholding allowances you are entitled to, you should give your employer a new Form W-4. Your employer can’t repay any of the tax previously withheld. Instead, claim the full amount withheld when you file your tax return. However, if your employer has withheld more than the correct amount of tax for the Form W-4 you have in effect, you don't have to fill out a new Form W-4 to have your withholding lowered to the correct amount. Your employer can repay the amount that was withheld incorrectly. If you aren’t repaid, your Form W-2 will reflect the full amount actually withheld, which you would claim when you file your tax return. Claiming exemption from withholding. To claim exemption, you must give your employer a Form W-4. Don't complete lines 5 and 6. Enter 'Exempt' on line 7. If you claim exemption, but later your situation changes so that you will have to pay income tax after all, you must file a new Form W-4 within 10 days after the change. If you claim exemption in 2018, but you expect to owe income tax for 2019, you must file a new Form W-4 by December 1, 2018. Your claim of exempt status may be reviewed by the IRS. • You make statements or claim withholding allowances on your Form W-4 that reduce the amount of tax withheld. • You have no reasonable basis for those statements or allowances at the time you prepare your Form W-4. There is also a criminal penalty for willfully supplying false or fraudulent information on your Form W-4 or for willfully failing to supply information that would increase the amount withheld. The penalty upon conviction can be either a fine of up to $1,000 or imprisonment for up to 1 year, or both. These penalties will apply if you deliberately and knowingly falsify your Form W-4 in an attempt to reduce or eliminate the proper withholding of taxes. A simple error or an honest mistake won't result in one of these penalties. For example, a person who has tried to figure the number of withholding allowances correctly, but claims seven when the proper number is six, won't be charged a W-4 penalty. Tips The tips you receive while working on your job are considered part of your pay. You must include your tips on your tax return on the same line as your regular pay. However, tax isn't withheld directly from tip income, as it is from your regular pay. Nevertheless, your employer will take into account the tips you report when figuring how much to withhold from your regular pay. See for information on reporting your tips to your employer. For more information on the withholding rules for tip income, see Pub. 531, Reporting Tip Income. Taxable Fringe Benefits The value of certain noncash fringe benefits you receive from your employer is considered part of your pay. Your employer generally must withhold income tax on these benefits from your regular pay. For information on fringe benefits, see under Employee Compensation in chapter 5. Although the value of your personal use of an employer-provided car, truck, or other highway motor vehicle is taxable, your employer can choose not to withhold income tax on that amount. Your employer must notify you if this choice is made. For more information on withholding on taxable fringe benefits, see chapter 1 of Pub. Sick Pay Sick pay is a payment to you to replace your regular wages while you are temporarily absent from work due to sickness or personal injury. To qualify as sick pay, it must be paid under a plan to which your employer is a party. If you receive sick pay from your employer or an agent of your employer, income tax must be withheld. An agent who doesn't pay regular wages to you may choose to withhold income tax at a flat rate. However, if you receive sick pay from a third party who isn't acting as an agent of your employer, income tax will be withheld only if you choose to have it withheld. If you receive payments under a plan in which your employer doesn't participate (such as an accident or health plan where you paid all the premiums), the payments aren’t sick pay and usually aren’t taxable. • A traditional individual retirement arrangement (IRA); • A life insurance company under an endowment, annuity, or life insurance contract; • A pension, annuity, or profit-sharing plan; • A stock bonus plan; and • Any other plan that defers the time you receive compensation. The amount withheld depends on whether you receive payments spread out over more than 1 year (periodic payments), within 1 year (nonperiodic payments), or as an eligible rollover distribution (ERD). Income tax withholding from an ERD is mandatory. Gambling winnings from bingo, keno, and slot machines generally aren’t subject to income tax withholding. However, you may need to provide the payer with a social security number to avoid withholding. See Backup withholding on gambling winnings in chapter 1 of Pub. If you receive gambling winnings not subject to withholding, you may need to pay estimated tax. If you don't pay enough tax, either through withholding or estimated tax, or a combination of both, you may have to pay a penalty. See at the end of this chapter. Unemployment Compensation You can choose to have income tax withheld from unemployment compensation. To make this choice, fill out Form W-4V (or a similar form provided by the payer) and give it to the payer. All unemployment compensation is taxable. If you don't have income tax withheld, you may have to pay estimated tax. If you don't pay enough tax, either through withholding or estimated tax, or a combination of both, you may have to pay a penalty. For information, see at the end of this chapter. • Your crops were destroyed or damaged by drought, flood, or any other natural disaster, or • You were unable to plant crops because of a natural disaster described in (a), and • Any other payment under federal law as determined by the Secretary. To make this choice, fill out Form W-4V (or a similar form provided by the payer) and give it to the payer. If you don't choose to have income tax withheld, you may have to pay estimated tax. If you don't pay enough tax, either through withholding or estimated tax, or a combination of both, you may have to pay a penalty. For information, see at the end of this chapter. Backup Withholding Banks or other businesses that pay you certain kinds of income must file an information return (Form 1099) with the IRS. The information return shows how much you were paid during the year. It also includes your name and taxpayer identification number (TIN). TINs are explained in chapter 1 under. These payments generally aren’t subject to withholding. However, 'backup' withholding is required in certain situations. Backup withholding can apply to most kinds of payments that are reported on Form 1099. The payer must withhold at a flat 28% rate in the following situations. • You don't give the payer your TIN in the required manner. • The IRS notifies the payer that the TIN you gave is incorrect. • You are required, but fail, to certify that you aren’t subject to backup withholding. • The IRS notifies the payer to start withholding on interest or dividends because you have underreported interest or dividends on your income tax return. The IRS will do this only after it has mailed you four notices over at least a 210-day period. See Backup Withholding in chapter 1 of Pub. 505 for more information. Estimated Tax for 2018 Estimated tax is the method used to pay tax on income that isn't subject to withholding. This includes income from self-employment, interest, dividends, alimony, rent, gains from the sale of assets, prizes, and awards. You also may have to pay estimated tax if the amount of income tax being withheld from your salary, pension, or other income isn't enough. Estimated tax is used to pay both income tax and self-employment tax, as well as other taxes and amounts reported on your tax return. If you don't pay enough tax, either through withholding or estimated tax, or a combination of both, you may have to pay a penalty. If you don't pay enough by the due date of each payment period (see, later), you may be charged a penalty even if you are due a refund when you file your tax return. For information on when the penalty applies, see at the end of this chapter. Do You Have To Pay Estimated Tax? Do You Have To Pay Estimated Tax? Summary: This flowchart is used to determine if you have to pay estimated tax. Start This is the starting of the flowchart. Decision (1) Will you owe $1,000 or more for 2017 after subtracting income tax withholding and refundable credits (see footnote 1) from your total tax? (Don't subtract any estimated tax payments.) Footnote 1: Use the refundable credits shown on the 2017 Estimated Tax Worksheet, line 13b. IF Yes Continue To Decision (2) IF No Continue To Process (a) Decision (2) Will your income tax withholding and refundable credits (see footnote 1) be at least 90% (66 2/3% for farmers and fishermen) of the tax shown on your 2016 tax return? IF Yes Continue To Process (a) IF No Continue To Decision (3) Decision (3) Will your income tax withholding and refundable credits (see footnote 1) be at least 100%** of the tax shown on your 2016 tax return? Note: Your 2016 return must have covered a 12-month period. Footnote 2: 110% if less than two-thirds of your gross income for 2016 and 2017 is from farming or fishing and your 2016 adjusted gross income was more than $150,000 ($75,000 if your filing status for 2017 is married filing a separate return). IF Yes Continue To Process (a) IF No Continue To Process (b) Process (a) You are NOT required to pay estimated tax. Continue To End Process (b) You MUST make estimated tax payment(s) by the required due date(s). See When To Pay Estimated Tax. Continue To End End This is the ending of the flowchart. Resident and nonresident aliens also may have to pay estimated tax. Resident aliens should follow the rules in this chapter unless noted otherwise. Nonresident aliens should get Form 1040-ES (NR), U.S. Estimated Tax for Nonresident Alien Individuals. You are an alien if you aren’t a citizen or national of the United States. You are a resident alien if you either have a green card or meet the substantial presence test. For more information about the substantial presence test, see Pub. Tax Guide for Aliens. • You are legally separated under a decree of divorce or separate maintenance, • You and your spouse have different tax years, or • Either spouse is a nonresident alien (unless that spouse elected to be treated as a resident alien for tax purposes (see chapter 1 of Pub. If you don't qualify to make joint estimated tax payments, apply these rules to your separate estimated income. Making joint or separate estimated tax payments won't affect your choice of filing a joint tax return or separate returns for 2018. 2017 joint return and 2018 separate returns. If you plan to file a separate return for 2018 but you filed a joint return for 2017, your 2017 tax is your share of the tax on the joint return. You file a separate return if you file as single, head of household, or married filing separately. To figure your share of the tax on the joint return, first figure the tax both you and your spouse would have paid had you filed separate returns for 2017 using the same filing status as for 2018. Then multiply the tax on the joint return by the following fraction. How To Figure Estimated Tax To figure your estimated tax, you must figure your expected adjusted gross income (AGI), taxable income, taxes, deductions, and credits for the year. When figuring your 2018 estimated tax, it may be helpful to use your income, deductions, and credits for 2017 as a starting point. Use your 2017 federal tax return as a guide. You can use Form 1040-ES and Pub. 505 to figure your estimated tax. Nonresident aliens use Form 1040-ES (NR) and Pub. 505 to figure estimated tax (see chapter 8 of Pub. 519 for more information). You must make adjustments both for changes in your own situation and for recent changes in the tax law. For a discussion of these changes, visit. For more complete information on how to figure your estimated tax for 2018, see chapter 2 of Pub. When To Start You don't have to make estimated tax payments until you have income on which you will owe income tax. If you have income subject to estimated tax during the first payment period, you must make your first payment by the due date for the first payment period. You can pay all your estimated tax at that time, or you can pay it in installments. If you choose to pay in installments, make your first payment by the due date for the first payment period. Make your remaining installment payments by the due dates for the later periods. How To Figure Each Payment You should pay enough estimated tax by the due date of each payment period to avoid a penalty for that period. You can figure your required payment for each period by using either the regular installment method or the annualized income installment method. These methods are described in chapter 2 of Pub. If you don't pay enough during each payment period, you may be charged a penalty even if you are due a refund when you file your tax return. If the earlier discussion of or the later discussion of applies to you, you may benefit from reading Annualized Income Installment Method in chapter 2 of Pub. 505 for information on how to avoid a penalty. Credit an Overpayment If you show an overpayment of tax after completing your Form 1040 or Form 1040A for 2017, you can apply part or all of it to your estimated tax for 2018. On line 77 of Form 1040, or line 49 of Form 1040A, enter the amount you want credited to your estimated tax rather than refunded. Take the amount you have credited into account when figuring your estimated tax payments. You can’t have any of the amount you credited to your estimated tax refunded to you until you file your tax return for the following year. You also can’t use that overpayment in any other way. • IRS Direct Pay for online transfers directly from your checking or savings account at no cost to you, go to. • Pay by Card. To pay by debit or credit card, go to. A convenience fee is charged by these service providers. • Electronic Funds Withdrawal (EFW) is an integrated e-file/e-pay option offered when filing your federal taxes electronically using tax preparation software, through a tax professional, or the IRS. • Online Payment Agreement. If you can’t pay in full by the due date of your tax return, you can apply for an online monthly installment agreement. Once you complete the online process, you will receive immediate notification of whether your agreement has been approved. A user fee is charged. • IRS2GO is the mobile application of the IRS. You can access Direct Pay or Pay By Card by downloading the application. • made at least one estimated tax payment but not by electronic means, • didn't use software or a paid preparer to prepare or file your return, then you should receive a copy of the 2018 Form 1040-ES/V. The enclosed payment vouchers will be preprinted with your name, address, and social security number. Using the preprinted vouchers will speed processing, reduce the chance of error, and help save processing costs. Use the window envelopes that came with your Form 1040-ES package. If you use your own envelopes, make sure you mail your payment vouchers to the address shown in the Form 1040-ES instructions for the place where you live. No checks of $100 million or more accepted. The IRS can’t accept a single check (including a cashier’s check) for amounts of $100,000,000 ($100 million) or more. If you are sending $100 million or more by check, you’ll need to spread the payment over 2 or more checks with each check made out for an amount less than $100 million. This limit does not apply to other methods of payment (such as electronic payments). Please consider a method of payment other than check if the amount of the payment is over $100 million. Form W-2 Your employer is required to provide or send Form W-2 to you no later than January 31, 2018. You should receive a separate Form W-2 from each employer you worked for. If you stopped working before the end of 2017, your employer could have given you your Form W-2 at any time after you stopped working. However, your employer must provide or send it to you by January 31, 2018. If you ask for the form, your employer must send it to you within 30 days after receiving your written request or within 30 days after your final wage payment, whichever is later. If you haven't received your Form W-2 by January 31, you should ask your employer for it. If you don't receive it by early February, call the IRS. Form W-2 shows your total pay and other compensation and the income tax, social security tax, and Medicare tax that was withheld during the year. Include the federal income tax withheld (as shown in box 2 of Form W-2) on. 10+ best Bitcoin mining pools you can join. Before you join a mining pool you will also need Bitcoin mining software and a Bitcoin wallet. Mining Pools vs Cloud. Best Bitcoin Cloud Mining Contract. Pools and cloud mining. Hashflare is a large Ether cloud mining provider with reasonably priced Ethereum cloud mining. Ethereum mining can be difficult, I know! However, you shouldn’t worry! In this guide, I’ve covered everything from the bottom up so whether you’re a beginner or a pro you should be able to glean some useful insight and learn something new. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to do mining using Linux, ethOS or Windows. I’ve made sure to cover the steps for each. You will also find some great tips, tricks, optimizations, and solutions to common troubleshooting issues. If you don’t have time to read all of it today, then bookmark this page, or sign up to our email list and receive it as a free ebook! • • • • • • • • • • • • • What is Ethereum? Is an open blockchain platform similar to Bitcoin but with additional in-built flexibilities. With Ethereum, the blockchain can be considered to be intelligent thanks to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and Whereas with Bitcoin it’s a glorified ledger. Smart Contracts With Ethereum you can execute code on the blockchain in a distributed way. These are called Smart Contracts. These allow you to set up a system, whereby a person will only receive payment under certain conditions. As Ethereum grows, the scale and complexities of these contracts are expected to increase. Smart Contracts is what has given Ethereum such a solid footing, as like with the blockchain has a functional use. If you’re interested in about how Ethereum came about and wanted to find out more about it, then. Ethereum Mining Profitability Before you determine if you should go on your Ethereum mining adventure; you’ll need to decide whether it’s going to be profitable or not. While, on the surface, this is incredibly easy, as I’ll show below, you must be aware that mining is very much like trading. Cryptocurrency prices fluctuate, your equipment might break, and so on. For example, when I started putting this project together, the rough number estimate was that I’d recoup my investment within six months. Now, with the same calculations, it would take eight months. The advantage of mining over trading is that coin prices can be somewhat more stable, and at the end of the day, you’ll still have the equipment. Which, if you’ve chosen wisely, wouldn’t have lost too much of its value. Calculate your expected hashrate and Payout First, you must calculate how much you’re hashing power will be. If you already have some GPUs that you’re planning to use, then you can use Google to find out its hash rate. Alternatively, you can use a site such as to determine what the best value for money GPU is. However, I’ve not yet found a database with a full list so you may wish to start your own excel file and compare the hashrate you get per dollar spent. GPU prices can also vary significantly, country to country, so make sure you take this into consideration as well. I’ve chosen to go with the RX480 as it’s expected to give 25MH/s at stock settings with a price of $200. Therefore, I’m paying $8/MHs, and the aim is to get this price as low as possible. Therefore, if you see second-hand GPUs where you’re paying less than that, then they might be worth a high consideration. Based on your hashrate you can use to calculate your expected payout, this would be 4.2Eth/month at the moment. This is worth approximately $42 at the moment. Calculate your Electricity Cost However, once you have your GPU cards, they will need power. Therefore, the second most important factor is how much your card will consume, and how much you’ll need to pay for this. In order, to calculate this, you’ll need to find out how much power it uses and how much you need to pay per KW/h. These are respectively 150W and $0.10 per KW/h for me. To calculate the per hour cost just convert W to kW (by diving by 1000) and multiply together, so for me the rig would cost 0.15*0.1= $0.015/hour to keep alive. This amounts to $0.36/ day or $10.80/month. Calculate your Profit and Loss, and Return So now you know how much money your making and how much you’re spending. With the above numbers, I’ll be making $42-$10.80= $31.20 a month with one RX480. The calculations neglect the electricity used by the other computer components, but these are usually negligible, especially if you have multiple GPUs in a single rig. In my case, I am mining with multiple RX480s, and expect to generate around $200 a month. Since all the equipment cost me $2000, I will break even after ten months, and make $400 profit or 20% by the end of the year. Unlock the internet with a VPN today Ethereum Mining Hardware To start mining, all you need is an incredibly simple computer. You will need a mouse, a keyboard and a screen for it as well, but this is only required for the setup, so you should be able to use any existing ones that you may have. Below, I have outlined the considerations you need to keep in mind when choosing these base component and the popular options for each. You can use a website such as to ensure that the parts you have chosen will work together. Also, if you’d like you can buy complete CPU, RAM and Motherboard bundles from. Motherboard The motherboard is the most important aspect to any mining rig. The reason for this is that it needs to be able to support all of your GPUs. If you only plan on having one or two, then it’s not so important. However, most people will aim to maximize and have 6 GPUs in a single rig. There are very few motherboards that will support the running of 6 GPUs. The big advantage with mining is that you can run the GPUs from x1 PCIe slots, so you don’t need to find a. Since the mining ‘craze’ has started, ASRock has produced motherboard aimed exactly at mining. It’s for this reason that arguably the best, and most popular motherboard to buy is the or the Other popular motherboards are:,, MSI and the. You can also find further recommendations. CPU When choosing the CPU, you only need the bare minimum. I wouldn’t recommend getting the absolute cheapest, but one or two points above. The reason for this, is that some extra processing power is useful when setting up and makes reboots slightly quicker. I chose to go with the. RAM Again, you will need the bare minimum, 4GB will do. I chose to go with 8GB just in case. Also, if you’re going to be doing solo mining, it’s a good idea to have as much as possible at the start as this will make syncing the block chain a lot faster. Of course, once that’s finished, you can remove the excess. GPU I’ve outlined choosing the GPU above. Currently, the RX480s are one of the most popular mining cards, but if you look around the, you’ll be sure to find plenty of more recommendations. PSU To calculate the size of the PSU you require you will need to add together the power requirements of all of your components. A site like PCPartPicker will do this for you perfectly. Add 20% on to the required as a safety factor. Also, make sure you’re using a high-quality, well recognized, and high-standard PSU, as if it blows, you could say goodbye to some very expensive equipment. Harddrive For the hard drive, using an SSD is essential. While SSDs are more expensive, you will only need a 16GB one, which will set you back less than $30. If you’re planning to solo mine, it’s recommended that you buy a 32 or 64GB one, but again this will only be a few dollars more. Other Components Apart from the main components, you will also need GPU risers. I’d recommend getting USB powered 1x to 16x risers, which you can get from, for a few dollars. With some motherboard models, you will need to short some pins for the motherboard to recognize the riser. You can find. It’s also recommended that you buy some additional PCIe to Molex (or SATA) connectors so that you can connect the risers to different rails on your PSU. Again, you can find these on Amazon, and will only cost a few dollars. On the whole, your hardware, excluding GPUs, shouldn’t cost you more than $500, and the large part of this will be your PSU. Below is a recommended purchase list from Amazon. The total without the GPUs comes to $472.21. While with 6 RX480s your total cost would be $1702.15 sans shipping costs. – $89.99 – $43.88 – $204.99 – $49.95 – $24.99 – $224.42 – $28.99 – $9.99 Ethereum Mining Guide So now that we have covered profitability and hardware, it’s time to get mining. However, even with mining, there are three important considerations to make: operating system, solo or pool, and mining software. Which OS to choose? When it comes to choosing your Ethereum mining operating software, there are three main contenders: Windows, Linux, and. If you’re a Mac fanboy, it is possible, but it’s advised for numerous reasons. Windows If you’re used to and haven’t ever gone near Linux, then stay with Windows. If you’re planning on using 6 GPUs, then Windows 10 is recommended as it has support built in naturally. Windows 7 & 8 will require some playing around with. If you are used to command line style systems, and mining will be the only aim of the rig, then I’d highly recommend looking at ethOS. Additionally, Windows has the benefit of more universal support and generally speaking, better. Furthermore, accessing it is an absolute ease with something like TeamViewer. It does have the downside of slightly more complicated setup but nothing too difficult, especially if you don’t plan on tweaking the GPUs performance. Furtheremore, if you’re only looking to mine Ethereum as a hobby with your normal PC, then allows you to do this extremely easily. EthOS ethOS is a stripped down version of Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 to be specific) that has the simple aim of mining Ethereum (and a few other cryptocurrencies). Not only is it incredibly easy to set-up, but it’s also easy to use and maintain. I’ve also noticed that it runs more optimally than Windows. It does have the downsides that you won’t be able to use your rig for much else, but most people don’t tend to anyway. Furthermore, remote access is only through SSH so you should be comfortable with not having a GUI. However, for $39, it’s a no-brainer in my opinion. Linux Some mining enthusiast swear that Linux is the best operating system for mining. While this did use to be the case, there are stronger disagreements on the topic then previously. While I do prefer Windows, Linux does have it’s advantages and being a slimmer system it can have its upsides. Furthermore, Windows usually comes with a price tag, so if you’re looking for a free option, then Linux is the one for you. Pool Mining When it comes to cryptocurrency mining, the situation is very similar to a real mine when you consider each GPU to be a person that is mining. Solo Mining is when you mine by yourself. The advantage of this is that anything you find is completely yours to keep. Unfortunately, if you only have a few miners it might take a very long amount of time to find “gold.” Furthermore, the frequency of finding gold can also vary extensively. You may have a week where you hit gold thrice, but then nothing for a whole month. Clearly, if you have a lot of miners (GPUs), then the outcome will be more stable, but below 1GH/s mining rate, Solo mining is not advisable if you want a stable return. If you’re not worried about shifts in when you find Eth, then Solo mining is a good option above 100Mh/s as you do not need to pay fees to anyone. Pool Mining With Pool mining, many miners join forces to try and find the coin. The found coins are then equally distributed between the miners, though with some pools the ratios can vary on a few factors. However, you do need to pay a small fee (usually less than 1%) to the pool operator for maintaining the service. The upside is that you’ll have consistent payout and thereby make money related calculations more accurate. If you’re reading this guide, you probably want to mine on a single rig, so I’ll primarily cover Pool mining, but will touch upon Solo mining as well. Ethereum Mining Pools • – 0.8% fees. Payouts released 2 times a day for balances higher than 0.5 ETH. Payouts released 4-6 times a day for balances higher than 1 ETH. Payouts released every 24 hours for balances higher than 1 ETH. • – Predictable Solo Mining pool. Payouts after 10 confirmations. More info on comments below. • – PPLNS 1% fees. Payouts released 2 times a day for balances higher than 0.1 ETH. Payout every 30 minutes for balances over 0.2ETH. Requires registration • – 1% fees. Payouts are up to the miner (Manual or Automatic from 0.01 ETH). Mining Software Going back to the analogy of real-world mining, in cryptocurrency mining you can use different tools to find the gold, so-called mining software. Each mining software has evolved over the years, but some have developed more than others. The primary contenders for Ethereum mining are Claymore and Genoil. Geth is the original software from the Ethereum team. If you wish to solo mine, this will be your best option. It’s simple and straightforward to use. It can also create your wallet for you, but as discussed below, you should get Mist/Ethereum Wallet as well if you prefer a GUI option. Isn’t recommended if you plan to have dedicated mining rigs. If, however, you wish to mine on an existing computer as a hobby, or out of interest, it’s perfect. While it does take a fee from your mining, it’s GUI is quick and simple to use and once install you can be mining instantaneously. It also has some challenges that encourage you to mine, and if you’re an absolute beginner, then the simplicity of this software will have you jumping for joy. If simplicity is something you prefer, then is also a very solid option. Genoil is a continually developing and very optimized miner for Ethereum. It runs smoothly, and you can get up and running with it very quickly. Personally, I’ve had a few issues with DAG generation, but a few tweaks quickly solved this. If you’re only planning on mining Ethereum, then Ethminer by Genoil is a strong contender. Claymore Personally, I’ve found to be the strongest and best all round miner. It’s easy to set up, I’ve never had any issues with it, and it has a ton of added functionality (e.g. Fan management), that I haven’t seen with other miners. It also has the bonus that it can mine two coins at once, which some people have found very useful to optimize their income. There have been reports of anywhere between 3 and 10 percent extra income. For each operating system, I will give the setup instructions for the preferred miner. Ethereum Wallet Once you start mining, you will also need to keep your Ethereum in a safe location. This is possible in two ways, a local wallet or an online wallet. A local wallet, has better safety as it always remains in your control. However, if you do use a local wallet, then either install it on a computer that’s not your miner or regularly transfer funds elsewhere. The reason for this is that should your computer crash; it could be hard to recover any Ether that is kept on there. Mist / Ethereum Wallet are the official developments by the Ethereum team. While at the heart of it it’s straightforward to use, it does pack a lot of extra features. Since it’s integrated with, you can also accept payments from Bitcoin other altcoin accounts as well. It also allows you to develop Ethereum based apps and services – a.k.a. Smart Contracts. Geth (with Etherwall) is the underlying code for the Mist wallet and is the core service for syncing the Ethereum blockchain. Unfortunately, it is a command line service, which can make it hard and annoying to use. Adds a GUI front-end to it, making it easier to use. My EtherWallet is an open-source client-side Ether wallet running on Javascript. MyEtherWallet makes it easy to create secure wallets without the command line or the need to run an Ethereum client on your computer. By running MyEtherWallet on an offline computer, you can create secure paper wallets for your ether holdings. Is a similar development that is also worth taking a look. Poloniex and Kraken and are online cryptocoin trading platforms. You can use the deposit addresses there to transfer any Ether you make directly there. Windows So now that I’ve discussed all the prerequisites, here are all the steps that you will need to start mining on Windows. Install Windows and C++ Redistributables This is pretty much a given. However, I thought I would mention it as it’s always best to start off with a clean installation. If you’re using more than 4 GPUs, then I’d recommend using Windows 10, or you will need to do some tweaks. If you’re going to use Windows 7 or 8, then also install the software. An important fact to remember with fresh installations is that you should disable your computer from ever going to sleep or hibernating. You will also need to install the. Download Drivers and Packages Download the drivers and control packages for your GPUs. While it is possible to have a rig with both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, this is ill-advised as it can lead to several issues. For driver and the OpenCL CUDA package, which is CUDA 8.0 at the time of writing. For AMD, install and the. Depending on your GPU, this might not be the correct driver. So if you’re having issues, check the Ethereum Forum for advice. Install Additional Software Before you start mining, it’s recommended that you install some additional software that will help monitor and optimize the performance of your system. DDU helps create clean uninstalls of display drivers. This can help if you are having issues with the video drivers. In Windows 10 it also disables the automatic display driver updates that can cause compatibility and mining issues. GPU-Z is a tool for monitoring the stats of your GPUs and displaying core details about it. You can easily plot the stats, and log/export them should you wish to. If you’re planning on remotely accessing your rig to monitor it and control it, then the free version of TeamViewer will be the easiest to use. Overclocking Tool. If you’re planning to optimize the performance of your rig (which you should be), it’s recommended that you get an overclocking tool of some kind. Most GPU manufacturers will provide one for you to use. Also, depending on which mining software you will use, you will need it to control the fan speed on the GPUs. Furthermore, AMDs new has proven to be a very well designed software tweaking your GPU settings. Set-up your Wallet Decide on which service you will like to use for your wallet, and sign up to it. I’ve created a Poloniex account, as I plan on doing some trading with the Ether I mine to try and further increase my profits. Make a note of your address. It should look something like this: 0x7b5eff562ee17b9e27a7af6afc26944266c8b025. If you want a local address, then download the Mist wallet, let the blockchain sync and create your account there. Alternatively, download Geth, and save it to a folder such as C:Ether. Then type “ geth account new“. Whichever method you go for, make sure that you save your password with a secure software such as KeePass. Set-up Geth (Optional for Solo Mining) If you’d like to Solo mine, you will need to be in sync with the blockchain. To do this, you will need to download Geth and save it to a folder such as C:Ether. Then open a command prompt, and navigate to this folder using the cd command. First, if you’re not using a local wallet, you will need to sync the blockchain. The quickest way is using the command: geth --fast --cache=1024 --jitvm console The cache value is the amount of RAM you have, 1GB in the example above. The more RAM you have, the faster you can sync the blockchain. In Notepad create a file with the below text and save it as a gethsync.bat, in your Ether folder. Launch this bat file every time before you start mining. You can also create a shortcut to it on your homescreen. Geth --rpc 6. Set-up your Miner For Windows, the Genoil miner has proven to be the most effective, and I’ll show you how to set this up. However, if you’re interested in other alt-coins, then you should also consider looking at Claymore miner. Once you have downloaded Genoil, save and extract it to a suitable folder, e.g. Open Notepad and create a file called genoil.bat with the following text, in the same folder. These settings will optimize your mining capability and launch the mining itself. Make sure to replace the pool and wallet address by what you’re using. If you’re Solo mining, then replace the last line by using the command “ethminer.exe -G”. Setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0 setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100 setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1 setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 ethminer.exe -F -G --farm-recheck 200 --cl-local-work 256 --cl-global-work 8192 Launch genoil.bat, and you will start mining. Every time you start it, there will be a small while where the system will say 0Mh/s as your hashrate. Do not worry. Usually, this means that your DAG file is still being generated. The more GPUs you have, the longer it will take. Monitor your Rig Once you’re mining, make sure you watch your rig. The first 24-48hours are essential and will determine if your system is stable or not. If it runs without problems during that period, then you should be fine. I’d recommend staying within reachable distance of your rig during this time as all sorts of issues can occur, and if you’re extremely unlucky, you could end up burning a building down. You can remotely keep an eye out on your rig by checking it’s hashing status on the pool of your choice and also by logging in using TeamViewer. Improving Performance If you wish to improve your hash rate, then read the section on this at the end. Install Ubuntu 16.04 and the AMD Driver. And install it. Once you’re set up, download the, unzip and install that as well. Install the Ethereum Software First, you will need to add the repository. Use the commands below for this. Sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum sudo apt-get update Now install the software preferred Ethereum software, the miner, and Geth. These will help you with syncing with the blockchain and then starting to mine. Sudo apt-get install ethereum sudo apt-get install ethminer sudo apt-get install geth If you’d like, you can use Geth to create your wallet, but as discussed previously it’s more ideal if you use an online wallet. Benchmark and start mining You can now test that your rig is mining using the first command, and then start mining using the second. It’s a simple as that. If you want to use a pool different to Nanopool, then, of course, replace it with your chosen one. Ethminer -G -M ethminer -G -F --farm-recheck 200 If your having an issue with one of your miners, you can use the below commands to help you try and find which GPU is the problem ethminer -G -M --opencl-device x (where x is your GPU id starting at 0) list--devices (shows all the GPUs you have available) ethOS ethOS is possibly the simplest way of setting up a mining rig and is my go-to option when creating a new one. While it does cost $39, the amount of time it saves on troubleshooting is more than worth it. Arguably, it’s also easier and more streamlined to monitor as you can access it simply through SSH or look at your custom dashboard. You can read my, or head over to to purchase it. Purchase, Download and Install ethOS Once you have bought a license, you will be given a download link. Download it, and install according to their instructions on a small SSD. Initial Boot-up & Set-up When you first boot it up, you must have a single GPU connected to the x16 slot closest to the CPU. The initial boot up will take a few minutes. Once that’s done, you will need to change the remote and local config files. To help with this, gpuShack has a fantastic knowledge base. Of course, if you haven’t yet, then you will need to get yourself an Ethereum Wallet/ address. Add GPUs Add each GPU one by one, making sure that the system runs stable each time. By doing so, you’ll ensure that the system recognises each one correctly, and if there are any issues, it will be easier to pinpoint. Monitor your rig To monitor your rig, you have two options. You can either log in through SSH or look at the generated stats panel. The stats panel has the advantage that it’s a simple web page and you can easily view it from anywhere. SSH poses the advantage, that should you have any issues, you can easily remotely manage the system (as long as you’re happy with Linux command line operations). Improving Performance If you wish to improve your hash rate, then read the section on this at the end. Tips for ethOS Change your password: Use the below commands to change both the root, and main ethOS user passwords. This is important especially if you’re planning to remotely access through SSH. Otherwise, your machine could be maliciously taken over. Sudo passwd sudo passwd ethos Set up SSH: If you’re going to set up SSH, there are two important things you need to do. Firstly, set up on your router, so that traffic redirects to your rig. Secondly, use the below commands, to change the SSH port to something different e.g. While this won’t stop an attack if there is a port scan, it will reduce the possibility of an attack by a crawler. You can also consider using to 100% ensure that only you can access the rig. Sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config Change the line that says ‘# Port 22’ to ‘Port 2221’, or your prefered port. Cloud Mining It is possible to mine Ethereum, using online services such as AWS, or DigitalOcean. However, no-one has managed to make this real-time profitable, and you should only take this root if you don’t wish to build your own rig and want to speculate on the pricing. There are also Ethereum Mining Contracts such as. These companies provide you with your own dedicated mining rig, and you have to pay for this up front. Again, unless you’re speculating heavily on the pricing, these don’t tend to be worth it. General Tips Improving Mining Performance Motherboard Settings In some cases, your motherboard BIOS might not be set-up correctly straight away. If you’re adding your GPUs one by one, and at one point your rig crashes, and you’ve eliminated GPU related issues, then it’s likely that your motherboard is the issue. Have a look around the forums for help, but often you will need a few settings changing. Personally, I’ve had experience with having to disable switch off some BIOS features and altering allocations, but system setups vary largely so I would say Google is your best friend. Fan and temperature: control and monitoring Always, always make sure you have a system in place for monitoring your fans and temperature, and you can check on these remotely. If you’re using Genoil, then the system will try and correct itself, and if you’re using ethOS, it will shut down a GPU if there is an overheat issue. However, not all miners are created equal, and if you’re not careful, you could burn your house down. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to continuously monitor your rig and ensure that it runs stable within the first 24 hours. Also, bare in mind the heat fluctuations during summer and winter months as those few degrees difference can have a huge impact. Improving Performance If you wish to improve performance, you have two options: overclocking and custom BIOS. A custom BIOS usually has overclocking built into it, as well as a few other tweaks. Overclocking: Overclocking is the simpler of the two methods. Windows and ethOS support these easily through Wattman and ethos-overclocking respectively. The general rule of thumb is that increasing the mem clock by 10% increases your hashrate by 10%. You can also change the core clock. However, this has a smaller effect. Also, reducing core clock can be beneficial because it can reduce your power use and while your hashrate will be slightly lower, you could be positive overall as you’ll be using less power. The right core/mem balance will depend on your electricity cost and hashrate. Custom BIOS. Custom BIOS’ are trickier. While it’s easy to use a tool such as to flash your GPU, bare in mind that it is risky. You will also need to find a BIOS that is suitable for your GPU unless you’re proficient at tweaking it yourself with a tool like However, this can have the largest gain. For example, for the RX480 a custom BIOS can raise its hash rate to 30Mhs+ which is a considerable 30% improvement! Extra Fans. Especially if you have multiple rigs, then make sure you attach some additional fans to your case/ housing. Some people also use normal desk fans or in some cases high-power industrial fans., to get some creative ideas about how to create a useful but attractive mining rig at the same time! Ethereum Mining Conclusion So that’s it. I hope you enjoyed reading this Ethereum mining guide, now go ahead and start building your rig so you can start mining as quickly as possible! Have any feedback, questions, comments? Let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure to keep this article up to date. Great guide, I wish I had this a few months ago before I started mknkn. I’ve gone through all this the hard way which is good but this guide is very clear and straightforward. Having said that I wonder if you would have any idea how to fix the issue I have come across. After mining for two weeks on windows 10 with claymore on nanopool @ 6 x 1070 GeForce. My miner went offline. It says “ cannot write a buffer for DAG” CUDA error 77. It also says “an illegal instruction was encountered” and “calc DAG failed” I have increased the virtual memory but that did not work. My hard drive says it has not 15gb of 110. What do you recommend? I was thinking on formating the hard drive. Claymore’s miner ETH fee removed (Win 64bit only) Hello everybody. I would like to share with you my program that will help you get more ETH with Claymore miner. You can watch this youtube video where I livestreamed my mining with earlier version of this program for 11hours. Now back to Claymore. **Features:** -Removes fees from miner hence improves your hashrate -Autorestart when miner dies -Autokill other miners which could be blocking your miner **Limitations:** -Works only for ethermine.org and nanopool.org -Works only on Windows 64bit -You won’t get all fees The “ethical” issue of this thing. If you have problem with this and you think this modification is not ethical. I have to say if Claymore didn’t make milions dollars monthly of your 1-2% fees I would have agreed but in this case NO I don’t think this is problem. I doubt he could even notice! Well I left a debug feature for people just like you this feature shows Claymore’s wallets and show them in your miner console. So you can check his wallets and see for yourself how many bitcoins he make daily. He has many wallets on many pools here is just one of them there is maybe 30+ of these you can look them up yourself. **FAQ:** **1. You can upload the exe to virustotal.com yourself its clean. How does it works?** This program starts miner process and monitor it. Precisely it monitors wallets on which fees are sent. You can set your startup arguments as well as your payout wallet for fees in config file there is no need for.bat files or other scripts. How to use it?** Place this exe into same folder where you have Claymore miner and run it. It will create a default config for first run so you can test immediately and see if it works. Let it run for 15 minutes and wait for first dev fee. How do I know it works?** Best way to use it is to use same wallet for normal mining and for fees but set a worker fo your standard payout as for fees you cant set a worker it has to be “default” or “x” worker. Simply when your miner starts mining fee and find a share you should see on your pool stats “default” or “x” worker submited x amount of shares. Why did you do this?** I made it for my own use because I wanted to try if its possible or how hard it would be. It turned out to be doable so I did it and used it for few days myself and then I decided I would share it. I have rewrote it to make it useable for all users and make their mining easier. I have added about 60% code to check for stupid things users may do and much better error handling to ensure your mining will be absolutely flawless. You wont get all fees?!** Yes you won’t get everything initially. I wanted to sell this program first for little donation but over time it started to look like a worse idea. The main issue was that noone want to buy some random program which claims to do xy. It would mean that I would have to personally persuade each person to send me a little donation and thats simply not worth those 5-10 dollars I initally wanted. So I would take some of these developer fees which you wouldn’t get anyway. So what do you get?** You will get more the longer you mine. Here is small table with what I get. Basically to be honest I want just a little something I dont want to rob you especially if you like this program I want you to use it and profit from it most so in the end I would get one session daily that is 36/72 seconds based on what you mine. Mine 2 days = each 10th fee session is on me. Mine > 6 days = each 15th fee session is on me. Mine > 13 days = each 20th fee session is on me. This program show you in real time how many fees were saved and how much time it saved you. Now its good time to ask how much mining time you actually lose to Claymore when using it. When you mine just ETH you lose 36*24/60 = 14.4mim (daily) When you dual mine you lose 72*24/60 = 28.8mim (daily) For fist day of using you should get atleast additional 12.5min when mining just ETH and 25min when dual mining. NOTE: These numbers are not accurate they are an estimate it yould be off -+10% I chose this values for better readability. Where can I get it?** Link: VirusTotal: You can donate me with any amount of ETH if you like my powerplay mods or this program I would appreciate it very much! ETH: 0x951B737cc259f5d05286183b75eF8C544B4c3772 If you have any questions just ask. I’m using Genoil as per your guide on Windows with NVidia GT 650M graphics card, 2GB memory. When I run genoil.bat, it is stuck at “Received new job ” C: Users Aniket Desktop ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7>setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0 SUCCESS: Specified value was saved. C: Users Aniket Desktop ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7>setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100 SUCCESS: Specified value was saved. C: Users Aniket Desktop ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7>setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1 SUCCESS: Specified value was saved. C: Users Aniket Desktop ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7>setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 SUCCESS: Specified value was saved. C: Users Aniket Desktop ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7 ethminer-0.9.41-genoil-1.1.7>setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 SUCCESS: Specified value was saved. I don’t even know where to start “geth –fast –cache=1024 –jitvm console” Does not work. I get: flag provided but not defined: -jitvm. I downloaded Mist, so I think I have a local wallet? Not necessary? The mining command doesn’t work regardless geth –rpc seems to start a synch. Its been running for a long time now. How long should I expect this to take? You say, if mining solo, replace the “last line” with “ethminer.exe -G” So would that look like: ethminer.exe -G ethminer.exe -G //your wallet address here ethminer.exe -G //your wallet address here -G –farm-recheck 200 –cl-local-work 256 –cl-global-work 8192 I’ve tried creating a batch script with every iteration of the final line, it does nothing. The CMD prompt appears and then closes within a second. I’ve been at this for HOURS. Any help would be awesome. One of the bests tutorials, thank you so much!! I really appreciate! “ethminer.exe -F “””-G –farm-recheck 200 –cl-local-work 256 –cl-global-work 8192″ It’s in here that i put the pool address? Just that and it’s on the pool? Which apps can we install to watch the rig? Can i run with windows and comodo firewall? (since i don’t know a linux) Port forwarding is programming TCP and UDP to come and go on 2221? Thank you so much for your help, good karmas for you and your family. Hi Peter, Thanks for the sensational information. I have never mined crypto coins before. Am looking into Ethereum based on its recent rise to about $200AUD. Apparently preferred GPU RX480 are really hard to get so I guess RX 470 will do the job? I am also looking at Claymore so I can mine another coin – which one would you suggest? In Adelaide SA, our going rate for 1Kwhr is 36c, not 10c that most seem to base their calcs on. I have put these figures through the profit estimator and it still looks viable. My question is this Is Ethereum going to get ‘scarcer’ and therefore harder to mine. Take longer, need higher hashrate and cost more (power) due to time taken to find coin? Do you think ‘solo’ mining Ethereum on a rig with a hashrate of (say) 170MH/s at a cost of 36c/KWhr is still worth it? Thanks again, Peter. Hello, Peter, I`ve read your article and I found some thing that are unclear to me: 1. You published this article on January 19,2017 and you talk about RX 480, but you recommend a driver that is not for this type of video card. I know that Claymore recommends it, but I think it was long time ago, when he wrote his program. You say that “You can also change the memory clock. However, this has a smaller effect”. Is this for real? Everywhere I read about overclocking it has been said that the memory increase increases your hashrate. The core clock also increase it, but this affects the power consumption. So, my question is: is your article a little outdated or I have read thing that are not correct on this subject. BTW, a very good article. Whish I had read it at the begining of the year, but I found it just today. Hi Liviu Thanks for the compliments. 1) I’m running ethOS at the moment, but I’m fairly certain I used that driver, however, I’ll check at a later date. I will update the article to mention that you’ll need to find out the best driver for you as you’re correct it does vary from GPU to GPU. 2) You’re 100% correct, I must have switched the clocks around by accident, so again, thanks for the feedback. Let me know if you spot any other mistakes, or if there’s any additions you’d like to see Thanks Peter. Zcash Mining calculator. Here is a rudimentary mining calculator. It is based upon averages of the pools when you request it, and not predictions. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. Dec 05, 2017 NiceHash, the marketplace for cloud-based mining of cryptocurrencies, said hackers breached its systems and stole an unknown amount of bitcoin from its. Genesis Mining Bitcoin is. The digital currency is hitting highs not seen since February 2014, jumping by well over 30% in a month. It's great news for bitcoin miners, the people responsible for creating new bitcoins. Mining infrastructure is the backbone of bitcoin. Anyone who contributes computing power to help process transactions on the network is rewarded with the chance to 'mine' bitcoin. In plain English, in return for helping keep the network up and running, they have the chance of being given a newly created piece of the digital currency. This payout makes the entire process — with the right equipment — incredibly lucrative. It has helped spawned a huge and surreal industry. You can mine at home, and many people do. But companies dedicated to mining have also sprung up,. These companies build huge data centres, or mines, that consume vast amounts of power and perform insane computations on the hunt for digital gold. Here's a look inside one. Nov 20, 2017 at 9:36AM When the calendar does finally flip to 2018, there's a really good chance we'll look back and refer to 2017 as the year of the cryptocurrency. At the beginning of the year, the aggregate market cap of all cryptocurrencies was a mere $17.65 billion. 12, the 1,276 listed digital currencies had an aggregate market cap of $192 billion. You know, just your standard 988% return in 10 months and 12 days. By comparison, it's taken the S&P 500 decades to deliver the same return for long-term investors. Has been the crypto trio of bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and Ethereum. Bitcoin cash, which came into being just months ago after bitcoin's soft fork, recently exploded higher by 300% in a matter of days, briefly surpassing the market cap of Ethereum. Speaking of which, Ethereum has seen its value increase by nearly 3,700% year to date, to a market cap of $29 billion. Meanwhile, bitcoin, while 'underperforming' in a sense compared to its peers, has gained 485% this year (through Nov. 12) and has a market cap of $95 billion. Image source: Getty Images. 2017's best bitcoin stocks As you might imagine, the popularity of, and gains in, bitcoin have made it an attractive investment. Of course, decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges where bitcoin can be bought aren't for everyone. Instead, investors have been eagerly looking for bitcoin exposure in the stock market. The following three equities, which have direct and/or indirect ties to bitcoin, have been the best bitcoin stocks of 2017. Bitcoin Investment Trust: Up 623% Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top bitcoin stock in 2017 has been Grayscale's Bitcoin Investment Trust (), which is up 623% through Nov. The Bitcoin Investment Trust owns a relatively fixed amount of bitcoin, making it easy for investors to calculate its net asset value. Considering its listing on the over-the-counter boards, buying into the Bitcoin Investment Trust gives investors potentially improved liquidity, and perhaps a bit of extra transparency, over purchasing bitcoin directly on a decentralized exchange. But there's also a downside that's. Namely, its market cap has consistently ranged between 25% and 100% higher than its net asset value in recent months. In other words, investors have been willingly paying a huge premium to have a stake in an equity that holds bitcoin, rather than purchasing bitcoin from a decentralized exchange. Is added liquidity worth paying 25% or 50% more than the underlying value of the coins? I really don't think so, which is why this could be the most dangerous bitcoin investment. And should you need an added reason to keep your distance, the annual management fee for essentially sitting on bitcoin is a hearty 2% of your investment. Overstock.com: Up 199% Another company that's caught the bitcoin bug is online retailer Overstock.com (), which has gained 199% since the year began. But unlike the Bitcoin Investment Trust, bitcoin isn't directly responsible for all of Overstock's gains this year. Although Overstock is the to accept bitcoin (which it's done since 2014), as well as Ethereum, bitcoin cash, LiteCoin, Dash, and Monero, it's the company's subsidiary, tZero, that's drawing all of the attention. For months, tZero has been building out the Medici t0 blockchain. For those unfamiliar, blockchain is the technology that underlies most virtual currencies. It's the digital and decentralized ledger that records transactions without the need for a financial intermediary like a bank. Best of all, since its usually open source, tampering with the logged data is practically impossible. Blockchain could very well be the future for the financial services industry. With regard to Overstock, its Medici t0 will be a blockchain-based securities lending system that'll go toe to toe with Wall Street firms. However, the Medici t0 blockchain is expected to do so more efficiently, securely, and for a lower cost than traditional Wall Street firms. There's a lot of hype surrounding this blockchain project, which is a big reason Overstock has rallied so much. It remains to be seen if the hype can deliver tangible results. Image source: Getty Images. NVIDIA: Up 102% Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA () is another top bitcoin stock, having mustered a gain of 102% since the beginning of the year. In years' past, the high-powered graphics cards made by NVIDIA were used to mine bitcoin. Today, however, a more specialized chipset known as ASIC handles most bitcoin mining. Nonetheless, NVIDIA's graphic cards remain a staple for mining a number of burgeoning cryptocurrencies. But herein lies the dilemma for NVIDIA's shareholders: The company doesn't break out what percentage of its sales and sales growth is a direct result of digital currency mining. The company recently reported $1.56 billion in gaming revenue in the third quarter, which is 25% higher than the previous year, and the category where mining sales would be included. But there's simply no further breakdown within the gaming category, which leaves Wall Street and investors to guess. However, investors have been able to take advantage of NVIDIA's growth in data centers and the cloud, which is where its true long-term foundation lies. In just the past seven quarters, data center sales have jumped from $97 million to $501 million. Because NVIDIA has this rapidly growing enterprise and gaming foundation, this is probably the most palatable investment of all stocks with cryptocurrency ties. CryptoCompare needs javascript enabled in order to work. Follow these instructions to activate and enable JavaScript in Chrome. PC • To the right of the address bar, click the icon with 3 stacked horizontal lines. • From the drop-down menu, select Settings. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. MAC • Select Chrome from the Apple/System bar at the top of the screen. • Select Preferences. From the drop-down menu. • In the left-hand column, select Settings from the list. • At the bottom of the page, click the Show advanced settings link. • Under the Privacy section, click the Content settings button. • Under the JavaScript heading, select the Allow all sites to run JavaScript radio button. • Finally, refresh your browser. Choosing a cloud mining contract can be difficult - knowing how to price it or whether its a good deal and even if its legit - there are pitfalls left right and center. But here at CryptoCompare we've tried to make the process as seamless and easy as possible by creating a set of metrics to give you an idea of exactly how an, or mining contract works. You can buy a cloud mining contract with. Nov 24, 2017 - In order to find out Bitcoin mining profitability for different factors “mining profitability calculators” were invented. These calculators take into account the different. However, when you do the math it seems that none of these cloud mining sites are profitable in the long run. Those that do seems profitable are. The highest paying Bitcoin mining pool and cloud mining provider on the market. Brocken Marathon which is a mosque bitcoin miner hardware buy in the eastern edge of South Africa since the 1971 flood, but by the impact of large scale shipping operations taking place on November join. Zcash to bitcoin calculator. Compare Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin Cloud Mining Contracts We try to make it as easy as possible for you to and using live data to give you all the metrics you need to make a decision. If we don't think the contract provider is legit - we say so - and if the stats say the contract makes no sense - we let you know that it isn't profitable. You can rank and filter by companies and return by day or reviews in our mining contract list. You can filter by what you want to mine or how long the contract will last. Profitability Some contracts aren't even profitable with present market rates. We calculate the profitability by seeing how many days the contract takes to pay back the money invested. We do this by working out the daily return given the present hashrate of your contract and the network and then subtracting the appropriate fee if necessary. The figures we use can be found at the bottom of the page as shown in the picture below. We also give a wealth of other information - such as the expected return per year - the 174% above means the contract will pay you back your initial investment of $899 dollars and give you a return of 74% on top. We also show you the cost per MH/s, the return per week, month and year - all depending on the network hash rate which is 628 GH/s and exchange rate of $2.12 - these can vary a lot so the returns that we show can vary a lot - these are just best guesstimates using our data - which we take a lot of pride in. Some contracts only exist for a certain amount of time. They might exist for three months yet have a payback period of over a year. This way you will never get your money back. If our payback period says never, it means that you will never get your money back as the fee exceeds the revenue the contract generates per day, or the payback period is longer than the duration of the contract. We also give another metric called the profit ratio per day. This shows you how much the revenue exceeds the fee per day. In the case of the genesis mining ethereum contract this is 100% as there are no fees. However on the 15 TH bitcoin mining contract shown below the profit ratio is 81% meaning the revenue exceeds the fee by 81%. Scam Contracts - Proof of Mining A lot of contracts appear and then seem to payout for a period giving an air of legitimacy. Then suddenly they stop paying and a suspiciously similar website with similar offerings reappears. We list some new providers but issue warnings at the top of the page if we believe the provider has not given sufficient evidence of their Bitcoin mining operations. Ideally we want them to give us a guided tour of their facilities on Skype, and we believe that if they don't do this then something is up! You can read more about how to detect a. Reviews We also provide reviews for all our cloud mining contracts so you can see what other people have experienced with the provider. Devil in the Details - Mining Contract Legal Jargon Some mining contracts terminate when they become unprofitable. You need to read the contract carefully to see if this is the case. Some providers own your contract until it pays back what it owes for being kept on when it is unprofitable - and only then do you start receiving payouts again. So a word to the wise - read the fine print! Also due to the razor thin margins of the industry, and the huge amounts of volatility involved, make sure you are aware that some Companies, even if they are legitimate (or trying to be), can go out of business in the blink of an eye. Caveat Emptor! If you have any views on how to make this clearer and make sure no-one else gets ripped off by unscrupulous providers - please let us know in the comments section below - and lets clean up this industry for the benefit of everyone! |
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