Gifting Bitcoin to Children: Allowance, Holding Period and the Tax Office Report

When you gift your child Bitcoin, you transfer two things at once: today's value and the tax history. The value decides whether any gift tax arises at all. For your own children, 400,000 euros per parent stay free of tax within a ten-year period, and very few transfers ever come close. The history decides what happens when your child sells the coins later: the acquisition date and the acquisition cost travel with them. Your child therefore takes over your holding period and your entry price. That is the short answer, and it sounds more relaxed than practice is. Between the allowance and the sale sit a three-month reporting deadline, the question of who may hold the keys, and a less noticed side effect: a gain in the child's hands can touch free family health insurance. This article works through the points in order, each of them under German law. Gifting Bitcoin to children: what actually transfers for tax purposes For tax purposes, crypto assets are economic assets. They count as neither currency nor securities. An economic asset is any advantage with a monetary value that can be valued on its own. The German Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed this classification in its circula...