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In Portugal, yes, you have to pay tax on your gains when you sell cryptocurrency. The Tax Authority considers crypto as an asset and the profits you make are income subject to IRS. Basically, if you bought Bitcoin at 30,000 euros and sold it at 50,000, that 20,000 gain is taxable. The rate depends on your income bracket - it can be from 14.5% to 48%, depending on how much you earn overall.
What confuses a lot of people is that it's not automatically deducted like with stocks. You have to declare it to the Tax Authority yourself through Annex J or iReport (depending on how you do your operations). If you used an exchange that's regulated in Portugal or Europe, some of them already provide a report of your movements, which makes it easier. But even so you have to put everything in your income tax return at the end of the year.
One important thing: cryptocurrency you hold only in your wallet without selling isn't taxed until the moment of sale. And be careful if you did a lot of operations - the Tax Authority is paying more and more attention to this, especially if there were strange money movements. The more documentation you have of your trades, the better. Some people use spreadsheets or apps that track everything automatically, if you do a lot of operations it gets way easier later when you're filling out the IRS.
The big danger is thinking that because nobody sees the transaction it goes untaxed - the Tax Authority has access to the records from the platforms. If you sell and make a profit, you have to declare it on your tax return, no matter the amount. What a lot of people don't know is that besides your tax return you also need to be careful about municipal taxes and, depending on how much you make and how often you trade, it can be seen as professional activity instead of passive income, which changes things quite a bit when calculating taxes.
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