I completely agree and the IRS leaves us all confused about this. I mean people in Second Life, how do they pay taxes for their trades of in game items? How about people in other online games? What if it is baseball cards and people trade them?

I realize we are supposed to pay taxes on all of these trades but it's unrealistic to expect any human to calculate every trade they ever made for their entire existence. I will make my best effort to pay what I understand I owe, and if they give more clarity then I can better direct my effort. As things are now, I have no idea if I paid the tax the right way, or if I got the right amounts, and using magic values on Steem websites which don't reflect what it is when it reaches my bank account is even more confusing.

By the time it's translated into fiat (real currency) it's usually not whatever is reflected on these sites. It might be more in some cases, but often it is less, and it would be easier on all of us and possibly better for the IRS (they can collect more tax) if we were allowed to simply capture everything going into our bank account, or at least onto the regulated exchanges like Poloniex and Coinbase. I can handle exporting my Coinbase transactions and paying tax on that, along with Poloniex, Bittrex, etc, if that is the case, but not the amount Steem is worth at any given day doesn't seem to reflect what a person will actually get for the Steem after multiple trades.

First you have to send the Steem to Poloniex or Bittrex as SBD. This SBD then gets traded into Bitcoin. Bitcoin can actually be sold for fiat so it's at least convertible. Steem isn't that popular and SBD isn't really used outside of Steem ecosystem.