If a crypto exchange becomes insolvent and you later get something back, what decides the crypto tax is not the size of the payment but its form. If the same coins return into your control, nothing has happened for tax purposes: acquisition date and acquisition cost run on unchanged, and a holding period that expired long ago stays expired. If money arrives instead on a filed insolvency claim, the event is an entirely different one, and the tax authorities have not expressly regulated it to this day.

That difference is the whole article. It concerns many German investors right now, because several large proceedings are stuck in the wind-up phase and a deadline at Mt. Gox expires on October 31, 2026. Both routes are set out below in…