[Drako]

Earlier today, the United States Senate passed the controversial Infrastructure Bill. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a $1.2T bipartisan economic bill, meant to jumpstart the U.S. economy. But it has brought major concerns for crypto along with it.

The US Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Tuesday with a glaring problem for the cryptocurrency industry. The bill includes vague new tax reporting requirements that digital rights activists say threaten individual privacy and crypto advocates say could hamstring industry innovation in the US.

The bill’s authors focused on closing the crypto “tax gap” to pay for some of the massive spending plan, but critics say it falls short of appropriately regulating the budding industry. The bill requires any crypto “broker,” defined as anyone “responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person,” to report users’ names and addresses. That leaves all sorts of players in the crypto space including miners and software developers on the hook—even though many of them do not currently gather or access personal information about users, many of whom are anonymous.

The bill will also hurt privacy in the blockchain as well.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, called the bill a disaster for digital privacy. “The mandate to collect names, addresses, and transactions of customers means almost every company even tangentially related to cryptocurrency may suddenly be forced to surveil their users,” wrote Rainey Reitman, EFF’s chief program officer.

I'm in no way a fan of this bill. It goes against crypto privacy, and furthers regulations on crypto that shouldn't be in place. And taxing cryptocurrency is something that shouldn't be there. Crypto is not owned by the government, it's owned by the people. No government or entity should have the right to tax cryptocurrencies.

Source - https://qz.com/2045654/the-infrastructur...d-privacy/