- The Infrastructure Bill was passed into law last night
- A last-minute attempt to ease crypto reporting requirements was met with short shrift
- The U.S. Treasury department will now work out how miners and node operators can report their transactions
The Infrastructure Bill was passed into law last night without any further amendment of the cryptocurrency element, despite 11th hour attempts from senators Ron Wyden and Cynthia Lummis to amend some of the harshest elements of the bill. Bitcoin, which did not react to all the tribulations of the Infrastructure Bill when they were being discussed in August, fell $3,000 around the time of the signing, although there’s no way of knowing if the price action was related to the signing of the Infrastructure Bill. Crypto campaigners will now have to turn their attention to the Treasury department which will take over the finer points of enacting the crypto elements involved in the new bill.
Infrastructure Bill Amendment Effort Dies
Democrats had been keen to get the Infrastructure Bill passed into law on the back of recent gubernatorial defeats, and it seems they weren’t about to let a last minute amendment proposal by Wyden and Lummis derail them. The pair had planned to introduce a new version of the bill that would reverse some of the provisions in the crypto element, claiming that the amended version sought to “revise the rules of construction applicable to information reporting requirements imposed on brokers with respect to digital assets, and for other purposes.”
The key issue the revision would have tackled was the necessity for cryptocurrency miners and other node operators to be classed as brokers, which would entail collecting information on their transactions, something that is impossible for them to do. The revised bill was always doomed to failure however given the lateness of the hour and the lack of appetite from democrats to cut the crypto community some slack if it meant delaying things further.
U.S. Treasury Now Holds the Key
The end result was that the Infrastructure Bill was signed in its original form, with crypto supporters now needing to turn their attention to the U.S. Treasury Department which will spend the next two years turning the reporting requirements from theory into practice. With the necessity to report personal details of buyers and sellers now enshrined in law, crypto enthusiasts can now only hope that the Treasury department will listen to reason over the practical elements of the scheme.
