There’s going to be a lot of young Democratic party and Brandon voters who do a lot with crypto and will be very surprised
Biden’s infrastructure bill hands crypto industry to US Treasury
US President Joe Biden has signed a landmark $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law which includes tax reporting provisions that apply to cryptocurrency (snip)
The legislation will be significant for the crypto industry. As part of its revenue-raising provisions, the infrastructure included new definitions for ‘broker’ among cryptocurrency network participants.
The bill is mainly meant for the IRS to have ‘well defined’ definitions but, ultimately, it risks asking network actors to behave as node operators in order to report identifying information for crypto transactions that they have no way of gathering.
Justin Banon, co-founder of Boson Protocol – a decentralised commerce protocol – stressed the need for “sensible regulation for technology in order to protect consumers and users”.
Banon claims the bill needs to be smart and informed by people who understand the threats, opportunities, and economic implications presented by the technologies themselves.
Well, good luck with that! This is the IRS we’re talking about, and the ones writing the rules will have little understanding of crypto and a whole lot of understanding of how to take people’s money. You can bet they’ll start yammering about equity and racial stuff and social justice.
Dr Amber Ghaddar, co-founder of AllianceBlock, commented that crypto was a new industry with an infrastructure quite different from traditional finance and, therefore, applying the ‘letter of antiquated laws’ and provisions to a new industry showed a lack of understanding from the government.
Still, she stressed this was partly “our fault for not ironically ‘centralising’ our efforts to not only lobby but also explain to key stakeholders how our protocols work”.
On one hand, she’s right. On the other, why is it necessary to lobby the federal government to stop involving itself in everything?
The passage of the infrastructure bill itself could potentially be messy for small investors.
If a DeFi or self custody user transfers a certain amount from their wallet to the exchange, the exchange will consider the dollar amount sent as a sale but it doesn’t know how much the client initially paid for the tokens.
The user can then end up with an overstated 1099-B, forcing them to actually hire an accountant or manually reconcile.
In other words, it will cost them even more money. Breitbart has a long piece on the lack of infrastructure in the infrastructure bill, like
The bipartisan infrastructure proposal floating around the Senate is essentially a Green New Deal Lite.
Check out the latest #RSC memo from Chairman @RepJimBanks explaining the top 10 reasons to vote no: pic.twitter.com/BgdtCI2Pp0
— RSC (@RepublicanStudy) August 2, 2021
and spends some time on crypto, including
The bipartisan infrastructure bill contains two regulations of cryptocurrencies that many conservatives and industry officials have criticized as threatening American liberties and could result in the offshoring of American jobs.
One regulation, proposed by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and the Biden White House as a $30 billion “pay for,” would require that any broker that transfers any digital currencies would need to file a tax return under a “modified information reporting regime.” (snip)
Abraham Sutherland wrote a report for the Proof of Stake Alliance that noted the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill contains a provision to amend tax code 6050I that would make it a felony if one did not report receiving digital assets, whether it be cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or any other digital assets.
Sutherland noted, “Miners, stakers, lenders, decentralized application and marketplace users, traders, businesses and individuals are all at risk of being subject to this reporting requirement, even though in most situations the person or entity in receipt is not in the position to report the required information.”
“Congressional Democrats have a completely antiquated view of cryptocurrency and that has led them to add yet another burdensome hurdle to everyday crypto investors. The United States needs to be leading the world in the digital asset space instead of overregulating it and pushing it overseas,” Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) told Breitbart News during an exclusive interview in September.
This should turn out well, eh?
That might be the cause of this effect: