Mining of virtual currency

Virtual currency becomes taxable as you receive it from mining.  To calculate tax liability, you need to know how much you have mined at different times during the year. 

To calculate the value, you must:

1. Find the market value of the virtual currency that you’ve mined at the time of mining. Major providers, such as Coinmarketcap, offer historical exchange rates for most virtual currencies online for free.
2. Use the currency exchange rates provided by Norges Bankto convert the values into Norwegian kroner.

This value will also be your opening value if you at a later date sell the virtual currency you’ve mined. 

When calculating taxable income, you can claim deductions for the mining you’ve done during the year. Deductible expenses include expenses for purchasing machinery, software, and electricity.

• If you’ve purchased machinery and equipment costing more than NOK 30,000 that are mainly used for mining, and that at the time of purchase are expected to have a useful life of at least three years, you cannot deduct the expense directly in the year you bought the machinery. Several components bought separately and assembled can be seen as one piece of machinery. However, you can depreciate the expenses over several years. This means that you can claim a deduction for a part of the cost price every year. For machinery and equipment used outside business, a 30 percent annual depreciation can be used. 
• The deduction you can claim for electricity could be the increased electricity expenses compared to what you pay without generating cryptocurrency.

If you’ve mined cryptocurrency as part of a cooperative or similar, your share of the expenses must be divided according to the number of cryptocurrency you’ve received.

Example

• You've mined a type of virtual currency twice in 2024. The market value at the first time of mining was NOK 99,676, and it was NOK 96,041 at the second time of mining.
• In 2024, you bought equipment only used for generating virtual currency for a total of NOK 50,000. You can depreciate the equipment by NOK 15,000 (30 percent of 50,000) in your tax return for 2024. The residual value of the equipment will be NOK 35,000, and next year the depreciation will be 30 percent of this amount, amounting to NOK 10,500. 
• The mining increased your electricity expenses by NOK 50,000 in 2024.

Calculation of income and expenses:

Income at the first time of mining in 2024:	NOK   99.676
Income at the second time of mining in 2024:	NOK   96.041
Mining income in 2024:	= NOK 195.717
Depreciation of equipment for 2024:	NOK     15.000
Electricity expenses for mining in  2024:	NOK   50.000
Mining expenses for 2024:	= NOK   65.000

 

Income from and expenses linked to mining must be entered in your tax return using the fields Mining income and Mining expenses in the card Virtual assets/cryptocurrency. 

How to enter this in your tax return

There are two ways of doing this in the card Virtual assets / cryptocurrency:

• Enter information for each virtual asset/currency in its own card. 
• Enter the summarised information for all virtual assets in one card, with an attachment showing the information for each virtual currency and other virtual assets.

Log in to the tax return and select the topic Finance and then the card Virtual assets / cryptocurrency. You’ll find information and guidance on what to do and how to proceed once you’re logged in. There are help texts for every field.

You do not need to send us proof, but you must be able to provide supporting documents if we ask you to.