- The much maligned Infrastructure Bill is being reworked to be less harsh to the cryptocurrency community
- Two senators are now on board to help reword the bill which would decimate the U.S. crypto industry
- The crypto element of the Infrastructure Bill in its current state would class miners as brokers
The much-criticized cryptocurrency element of the Infrastructure Bill has received a facelift in the past 48 hours as crypto advocates push for a more reasonable version of the bill. Two senators, Ron Wyden and Pat Toomey, have come on board the fight to change the wording of the bill which currently classes cryptocurrency miners as brokers and requires them to collect impossible data among other enforcements. The welcome addition of the two senators adds weight to the movement to reword the bill which has already succeeded in narrowing down the broad focus of much of the content, but advocates claim there is still much work to do.
Infrastructure Bill Critics Now Include Two Senators
The cryptocurrency element of the Infrastructure Bill was announced last week and caused consternation within the cryptocurrency economy due to its treatment of cryptocurrency handling individuals and organisations, from home miners to wallet makers, as brokers. This meant they would have to collect a raft of personal information of those they transacted with, an impossible task for most, mainly due to the design of the blockchain ecosystem.
Individuals such as DeFi Alliance head Jake Chervinsky and Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito are leading the charge to protect the U.S. cryptocurrency industry which would be ravaged if the bill passes in its current form. The pair enjoyed some success in changing the wording of the bill to reduce the scope but were both at pains to state that there was still much to dislike about it, which was summed up yesterday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Here are 6 reasons we hate the new cryptocurrency surveillance provision buried in Biden’s infrastructure bill:
— EFF (@EFF) August 2, 2021
Chervinsky tweeted yesterday that conversations were “moving in a good direction” while Brito simultaneously said that he saw “a little ray of sunshine on the horizon.” This was followed by senators Toomey and Wyden and publicly stating that the bill was unworkable in its current state:
The bipartisan infrastructure package includes a hastily-designed tax reporting regime for cryptocurrency. Simply put, the text is unworkable. I plan to offer an amendment to fix it. https://t.co/LD1Bfwh4yh
— Senator Pat Toomey (@SenToomey) August 2, 2021
The Republican provision in the bipartisan infrastructure framework isn’t close to being that solution. It’s an attempt to apply brick and mortar rules to the internet and fails to understand how the technology works.
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) August 1, 2021
Despite these advances there is clearly much work to be done to ensure that the cryptocurrency sector is unfairly targeted by uneducated individuals in powerful positions, but at least things are moving in the right direction.
