Nobody agrees how our crypto income should be taxed.

The confusion is structural, not personal. Countries have classified digital assets differently: as property subject to capital gains, as a foreign currency, as a financial instrument, as inventory where trading is frequent enough to be a business, or as their own statutory category. The classification determines the rate, the moment of taxation, whether losses are usable, and whether a crypto-to-crypto trade is even a taxable event. Two countries applying entirely reasonable rules to the same wallet produce different numbers.

Residency compounds it. A trader who moves mid-year may face taxation of the same disposals in both countries, and some jurisdictions tax unrealised gains on departure. Staking, lending, airdrops, and mining are often taxed as income at receipt and again as a gain on disposal, on a cost basis nobody recorded at the time. For founders, tokens held by a company raise a separate question of where the asset is actually managed from.

Reporting has caught up. Exchanges now report under CRS and the OECD's crypto-asset reporting framework, and a home tax authority frequently holds exchange records before any return is filed, which is why the first sign of a problem is often an audit notice rather than a query.