Looking for a generous soul to help me with a problem I'm having. I use KMyMoney to document and track my bank checking account, my credit cards and my investment brokerage account, and have had almost no issues doing this for the past three years.

Now, just to deep my toes on crypto currencies (better late than never, right?), I have just opened a Coinbase account, transferred a small amount of money to it from my checking account, and purchase a tiny amount of Bitcoin. I know I can add BTC to KMyMoney as a second currency, as I already have US dollars as my base KMyMoney currency, but… What type of account do I create in KMyMoney to document and track my Coinbase activity? If I create an investment/brokerage account, and its associated cash account, by doing this I could document the bank checking account cash transfer to Coinbase, but then, this newly created Coinbase investment/brokerage account only lets me invest my transferred USD in either Stocks, Mutual Funds or Bonds, so, it appears the investment/brokerage account route is not the correct way to do this. What then? An asset account, a savings account, a cash account? If any of these, can I mix two different types of currencies in the same account (USD and BTC)?

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

P.S. The official KMyMoney user's manual contains zero mention of BTC or of any crypto currencies or associated issues, which I find puzzling.

Can someone at the very least tell me why my question is being 100% ignored?

Thanks

You are not being ignored. (The forum page shows 44 views as of now.) I think this issue is so far nobody has any useful advice. In terms of why the manual doesn't mention BTC, it's because I barely have time to get the manual up to date on changes in the basic program, and as BTC is just another potential currency, I don't see any point. (If you want to suggest changes to any particular chapter, feel free to make suggestions. In fact, if you do find a good way to do what you want, that may well be worth documenting.)

Now, to your question of how to handle a Coinbase account - I don't think there is any definitive good solution right now. The reason is the dual nature of BTC as just another currency, and also as an investment. (That is my personal opinion, and I do not own any cryptocurrencies, so take it as you will.)

My current thought would be to create an investment account for your Coinbase account, with an associated brokerage (checking) account. In order to treat your BTC purchase as an investment, just invent a stock called BTC, priced one share to one BTC the currency. That way, when you buy or sell, you are trading dollars (or whatever your base currency is) in the brokerage account to/from a stock whose share value is 1 BTC. The only thing I'm not sure about yet (without more thinking) is how to be sure you have a reasonably current value of your BTC investment. I think, since the value of 1 share of your BTC "stock" is always one BTC, then you just need to update the BTC/dollar value.

Any other thoughts?

Thank you so much for your reply. Yes, I agree 100% with your suggestion on setting up an investment account and creating an "equity" named BTC, or whatever the cryptocurrency in question would be. In fact, I conducted a search to see how Quicken users are handling this issue, and thus far, that appears to be the agreed upon approach. The thing that threw me off to some extent was the fact that KMyMoney allows me to select BTC as a currency, but, I will stick to good ol' USD as I have always done, and just create my BTC "stock". Thanks!!!

If you just create a stock BTC, how will you update it's value? I have not looked, but I don't think there is any stock price reporting site which would include BTC. However, updating the conversion rate between the currency BTC and dollars is easy. That's why I think you need to price your BTC stock as one BTC (currency) and then use the currency conversion rate to calculate value. Otherwise, you would need to get the currency conversion rate, and use that to manually update the stock price. If you have another way to handle it, let us know, so others can do the same.

I hadn't though of that, as I just own a little bit of BTC and was planning to do manual price updates.

I understand what you are saying, however, the fact is, cryptocurrency is here to stay, and has for several years now. Moreover, while I myself only currently own a minuscule amount of it, for some investors cryptocurrency makes a sizable portion of their investments, so I believe that sooner or later, and I hope it is sooner, programs such as KMyMoney will have to start paying attention to this new investment vehicles.

So, I created an investment account called CoinBase. USD is the monetary unit. I added a transaction to buy $50 worth of Bitcoin. For the symbol, I used BTC-USD. Yahoo was the source of quotes. And it seems to work. Please let me know if this is not working properly.
A

P.S. I had to edit the investment detail to (a) make it a "stock", (b) set the fraction to 1 00 00 00 00 , (c) set the Price precision to 9.

the relationship between a bitcoin and the US$ (or any other valid currency) wouldn't that a kind of an exchange rate between the two?

Just a thought I had when I read this tread.