Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/senators-move-to-exempt-bitcoin-crypto-miners-from-proposed-u-s-tax-rules-11628102530

by _-david-_ • 5 years ago

229 227 5 years ago

dougSF705• 5 years ago

Obviously HN community is down on crypto. This exemption is a sign that Bitcoin is getting closer to the mainstream of finance. Like most flanker-moves, Governments should be incorporating it in to their tax policies rather than shunning it. Cannabis is a good proxy, states can keep it illegal and not make tax revenue or they can legalize it, control it and tax it. The feds should do the same. Same for crypto, keeping it on the fringes will only help illegal enterprises and rogue nations use it to bypass sanctions. As to whether it has a use or is a store of value, these are largely irrelevant questions. It is pure speculation, allowing one person to bet against another, much like playing poker in a casino.

nickthemagicman• 5 years ago

Isn't crypto a direct threat to their power?

If finance can't be tracked it can't be taxed.

If it's mainstream more and more people could potentially switch to crypto, which would reduce their tax collections.

Just theorizing. I have no idea if this would happen.

whateveracct• 5 years ago

BTC can be tracked better than cash

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

If they wanted to squash it they should have done it much earlier (if it was possible at all and wouldn't have just caused Streisand Effect).

Now you have congressmen with laser eyes on 100k bitcoin twitter profile pics, the head of SEC taught classes about blockchain at MIT; it is way too late.

The smart thing is to embrace it, the complete opposite of the Chinese government course of action. You set back the entire nation by not embracing innovation.

fabianhjr3• 5 years ago

Isn't crypto a direct threat to their power?

It isn't since it doesn't change property relations. It is more of a "different asset" they could own and speculate with.

If finance can't be tracked it can't be taxed.

Crypto-tokens are very traceable and most can be deanonymized by forensic accountants.

If it's mainstream more and more people could potentially switch to crypto, which would reduce their tax collections.

It wouldn't and most people aren't savy enough in cybersecurity to avoid having their tokens stolen. (And most protocols don't have a chargeback or recovery mechanism)

spicymaki• 5 years ago

Isn't crypto a direct threat to their power?

It is not a threat to their power, imagine the corrupting power of being able to produce wealth anonymously without being traced or taxed and having that sanctioned by the government.

jandrese• 5 years ago

No more than Pork Futures are a threat to their power. This is plain old fashioned finance guys paying off senators to make tax loopholes for them.

JumpCrisscross3• 5 years ago

Isn't crypto a direct threat to their power?

I don't know where this meme came from. If the U.S. government declared Bitcoin legal tender tomorrow, it would be monumental. But practically speaking, not that much would change. The Fed would buy Bitcoin the way e.g. the Swiss National Bank buys dollars and euros. And the Treasury would issue Bitcoin bonds or something, I don't know.

Cryptocurrencies currently make it easier to evade taxes, which benefits the rich, and easier to make money in a host of new financial activities, which benefits those near those activities, i.e. people with money and banks and first movers in the technology.

tmn• 5 years ago

Most people thought the internet was a threat to the establishment. In all likelihood bitcoin was developed by the NSA.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

This exemption is a sign that Bitcoin is getting closer to the mainstream of finance.

I think it’s more a sign that crypto is mainstream finance now. Specifically, the type that has enough money sloshing around at the top to warrant lobbying efforts and mingling with the finances of regulators.

Same for crypto, keeping it on the fringes will only help illegal enterprises and rogue nations use it to bypass sanctions.

None of this has any impact at all on whether or not crypto is used for illicit purposes in other locations. Crypto is also already taxed and legal, so the comparison to cannabis doesn’t make sense either.

dougSF705• 5 years ago

Sure, there are substantive differences between Crypto and Cannabis, the point I was trying to make is that Bitcoin is beyond the tipping point. The point that makes sense to bring it into the fold. Secondly, if the USA is seen to be focussed on legitimizing crypto then this would be a signal to NK / RU hacking groups that US Government Agencies are taking an active interest and including it in their daily operational scope. Given the tentacles of US enforcement, this could help limit use of BTC (not all crypto) for illicit purposes.

verdverm• 5 years ago

Obviously HN community is down on crypto.

This will earn you downvotes because it is a childish sentiment of HN.

Many on HN dislike crypto in its current form of lawlessness. Regulation like this is a positive step for the ecosystem. Cryptos will still have to prove their value outside of finance to become more accepted by HN.

dougSF705• 5 years ago

Point taken, this characterization is too broad.

vmception8• 5 years ago

What is most significant about this is that all crypto bills have died in committee before now. And suddenly, all at once, crypto is being debated on the floor of the whole senate in a bill that the President wanted. They are recognizing it as a distinct asset class that is able to have attributes of other asset classes. This means old money has to wake up now.

fabianhjr3• 5 years ago

In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Recuperation_(politics)

overtonwhy2• 5 years ago

Bitcoin is built on a house of Tether. https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-re...

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Cannabis isn't a distributed ponzi scheme.

kelnos2• 5 years ago

I'm confused about your position on this, though: the amendment in question ensures certain cryptocurrency-related activities won't be taxed.

I agree that we shouldn't be banning this sort of thing, but if people want to throw electricity at it in ways that I consider a huge waste of resources, I'd really like to see that taxed better. And not in a regressive way that makes every electricity user pay more.

Obviously HN community is down on crypto.

I don't really think that's true, and please remember that the HN community is not homogeneous, and various people have very different (and strong) opinions on many things. I'm personally not a fan of cryptocurrency (I think it's a waste of time and effort, and to top it off it's currently an environmental disaster), but the top comments on this article are relatively positive right now.

I believe @dang has mentioned often that early comments on most articles end up being pretty negative, because the early posts will be more knee-jerk (which tends to bring out the worst reactions in people). Only after people have time to read and cool down will posts be more measured. This article was only posted an hour ago (at the time I'm writing this), so no surprise there's a lot of negativity here.

saalweachter• 5 years ago

... please remember that the HN community is not homogeneous, and various people have very different (and strong) opinions on many things.

Honestly I'm not sure I consider HN a "community" in the same way I consider other online ... communities, communities.

With notably rare exceptions you don't have a lot of sharing of personal milestones, and while you might occasionally "recognize" a poster (and we have a few "famous" ones) it's much easier to deal with each comment as a stand-alone statement without any provenance.

Even meta-discussion about the nature of HN like this seems a bit gauche and is discouraged.

blurbleblurble• 5 years ago

No no no, the amendment doesn't say that those activities can't be taxed, it clarifies that there won't be KYC requirements on people who literally can't comply with them.

The issue here isn't about what activities should be taxed, it's about overly broad KYC reporting requirements.

Pretend the original provision was about ATMs... the language could be used to argue that armored truck drivers should be required to collect personal information and transaction data for every user of every ATM they deliver cash to. Obviously that's not really possible and would be a huge privacy issue. The risk people are seeing here is that the current language could be abused to make ATMs illegal altogether, since nobody would want to risk getting in trouble during the process of stocking them.

hncurious• 5 years ago

"Cannabis is a good proxy, states can keep it illegal and not make tax revenue or they can legalize it, control it and tax it."

That should be a great proxy, but regulators have so overburdened legal dispensaries that they need to be bailed out. Illegal sources could have been easily been made extinct or at least sidelined, but are still able to thrive because the overhead to get a license and stay licensed is so immense.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-14/californ...

dmix• 5 years ago

Here in Canada there's a ton of shops that look like normal dispensaries but are just unlicensed ones. Their product selection is usually way better and includes co2 extracted vape products (which last I checked weren't legally available yet and IMO the future of weed consumption) and candy/drinks/etc. They also have better websites which cheap same-day delivery, usually within a few hours.

The municipal governments try to shut them down with daily fines but they either eat the cost because it's so lucrative or shut down temporarily and pop up somewhere else.

At least one shop had large bricks put in front of them at multiple locations and they just put someone outside with a square tablet and sold it there.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5369230/cement-blocks-illegal-mar...

I highly doubt the underground/grey markets will go away.

Guest422• 5 years ago

Sidetopic, but I am rather disappointed that Venmo has been pressuring me via email to embrace crypto and imagine behind the scenes they own however much, trades only get executed internally, and they do their best to extract transaction fees. To me this is the antithesis of what the crypto community was looking to stand for in terms of privacy and independence from traditional banking systems.

toomuchtodo5• 5 years ago

Venmo is pushing crypto hard because Instant Payments are coming down the pipeline from the Fed in the next 18 months (already in beta testing with a handful of smaller banks, they're ahead of schedule based on my reading of the roadmap), and that kills Venmo (and Paypal to a lesser extend) if they don't have something to pivot to.

That's what you're seeing Visa, Paypal, and others attempt to go upmarket (business payments) or branch out (crypto, Plaid acq attempt).

Guest422• 5 years ago

Interesting, I’ll have to research that. It seems like something that would take a long time to deploy.

thehappypm3• 5 years ago

Venmo's core value right now is that it's ubiquitous. Everyone has a Venmo account and everyone trusts it. I paid an electrician through it yesterday -- no new Fed tech is going to replace it overnight, just like Zelle didn't kill it either.

r00fus2• 5 years ago

Sucks for Venmo, cash, etc. But clearly those apps can simply uptake instant payments (affiliate with bank or gain bank status) and stay relevant?

warkdarrior• 5 years ago

Venmo is clearly offering a service with the conveniences and ease of use that come with it. If you do not see the value and fees of that service, you can skip it and set up your own wallet, BTC node, etc.

drcode8• 5 years ago

It seems rather unprecedented that there are currently US citizens who are billionaires because of their crypto holdings, without the government having any insight into precisely who these people are. It seems like eventually the government is going to push for more onerous reporting laws to return to the usual equilibrium, where the government has at least some basic idea regarding who owns what (which I think they currently have, even for offshore bank accounts)

(not that I in any way support more aggressive reporting laws)

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

It seems rather unprecedented that there are currently US citizens who are billionaires because of their crypto holdings,

Perhaps, but it’s not as common as it sounds. Maybe there are people out there who invested $33,000 into Bitcoin when it was $1 and then didn’t sell a single penny as it rose and crashed multiple times, but the number of people achieving billionaire status without starting out with tens of millions invested is going to be quite small.

Also, once you pass a specific threshold of wealth it doesn’t pay to flout the rules and risk increasing consequences. Famous and wealthy people have gone to prison for tax evasion in the range of millions of dollars. Trying to dodge taxes to remain a billionaire instead of paying the relatively small capital gains taxes wouldn’t be a rational move.

Anyone sitting on huge amounts of crypto worth has likely hired teams of lawyers to cross every t and dot every i to stay in full compliance rather than put their windfall at risk for some irrelevant level of taxation.

drcode8• 5 years ago

Agree with all of this, except that I don't think these folks are currently reporting their holdings, as there is currently no requirement to do this.

TigeriusKirk2• 5 years ago

There aren't a huge number of crypto billionaires (though your calculations miss those who rode other crypto waves with their bitcoin profits), but there are a decent number of people in the upper 10-figure lower 11 figure range.

Outside of Satoshi, the number of those people who are anonymous at a governmental level has got to be quite small.

KingMachiavelli• 5 years ago

It's not a big deal. It isn't that different than finding a significant amount of oil/precious metals on your land. As soon as you try to extract the value of the resource/crypto, the government will know. If you just sell it, the crypto exchange will report it to the IRS. If you try to trade/buy goods with it directly, any assets you get will create a paper trail that the IRS will eventually discover.

Consider the fact that illegal enterprises like drug dealers will pay a premium to launder the money (probably >=10%) and then pay taxes on the remainder. If you have the gains legally (crypto), it makes little sense to not just pay the normal taxes.

Also, if you made a significant amount of money on any crypto, you probably held it for more then a year at which point to capital gains tax is probably at most only 15% (<$441,000 ordinary income). And if you quit your job prior to selling (i.e had ordinary income <$40,000) then the capital gains would go to 0% (seems wrong (?) and maybe you would have to pay the alternative minimum tax... not quite sure).

Anyway the taxes are basically nothing compared to the benefits of having 100% clean money that can be reinvested and make 10-15% in the stock market.

drcode8• 5 years ago

all good points

yellow_lead2• 5 years ago

Also, if you made a significant amount of money on any crypto, you probably held it for more then a year at which point to capital gains tax is probably at most only 15% (<$441,000 ordinary income).

Ownership of other assets tends to have legal documents of when it was purchased though. How does anyone know how long you've held it? You could prove it if it's been in the same wallet the whole time, with the transaction ID, and proof of ownership of the wallet. But what if you transferred it between wallets, and lost the first?

RIMR• 5 years ago

The problem is, you can't transfer the oil to others with the click of a button for other things.

Tax evasion is very easy when you have crypto. You couldn't just sell it all at an exchange tax-free, but you can convert it into foreign currencies, goods, and services all without any oversight.

davidlee1435• 5 years ago

And if you quit your job prior to selling (i.e had ordinary income <$40,000) then the capital gains would go to 0% (seems wrong (?) and maybe you would have to pay the alternative minimum tax... not quite sure).

Not a tax advisor, but I thought capital gains counts as taxable income? So someone who sells $50k worth of BTC will pay 15% on $10k.

thesausageking3• 5 years ago

It's very unlikely there are US citizens in the US who are Bitcoin billionaires and have not reported it and paid taxes to the government. Unless you're planning to flee the country, at some point the IRS will catch up with you. Remember that Bitcoin is an open, public ledger of every transaction. If someone is a billionaire, paying capital gains taxes is worth their freedom without a doubt.

drcode8• 5 years ago

There is currently absolutely no requirement in the US to report crypto holdings, only crypto sales.

So it is very likely there are such people, especially since it is common to divide large holdings between many separate addresses, making it impossible to infer holdings from sales income.

irishloop• 5 years ago

But the IRS needs a mechanism to understand and interpret these ledgers, right? And the IRS enforcement is only as good as the people who are doing the enforcing.

I'm an engineer and I barely understand crypto, what hope does an IRS auditor have?

girishso• 5 years ago

Crypto experts are predicting insane valuations for BTC, at the same time USD value will drop (rather people will lose confidence in USD).

What I fear is, will Uncle Sam just let the USD go down the drain and watch doing nothing?

ilaksh• 5 years ago

I have heard that they are aiming to make an exception for Bitcoin only but try to stop everything else.

That would be a really horrible outcome because Bitcoin is by far the most outdated and least useful cryptocurrency.

vmception8• 5 years ago

nobody is trying to make an exception for just bitcoin, they are trying to fix it for the whole class of crypto and broader digital payments

nootropicat• 5 years ago

The new amendment does exactly that. He had good info.

https://www.coindesk.com/senator-who-wrote-controversial-cry...

Really evil to explicitly promote proof of work.

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

The finance industry will never say no to yet another financial instrument. These people will trade anything if you leave it up to them.

danielvf• 5 years ago

Finally found the text of the amendment:

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wyden%20Lummis%...

The amendment is short and explicitly notes that that the following categories do not count as brokers:

(A) validating distributed ledger transactions

(B) selling hardware or software for which the sole function is to permit a person to control private keys which are used for accessing digital assets on a distributed ledger, or

(C) developing digital assets or their cor- responding protocols for use by other persons, provided that such other persons are not cus- tomers of the person developing such assets or protocols.

Tepix• 5 years ago

I guess we need a proper CO2 tax to encourage better technology than proof of work

sputknick• 5 years ago

ETH PoS mainnet transition is underway and will be completed early 2022. With this holders of ETH will be able to earn fees from transactions, just by running an application on their standard normal computer. The only encouragement you need to move off of POW is profit motive.

ComodoHacker• 5 years ago

This would just increase the cost of electricity and thus the cost of living for everybody, and won't affect crypto miners much.

jonathanpeterwu• 5 years ago

We should probably also find a way to tax US dollar usage with CO2 tax as the net energy usage here is quite high as well

sunshinerag6• 5 years ago

There is nothing in POW that requires CO2 emissions.

godelski4• 5 years ago

There's plenty of PPOS systems that aren't as resource intensive. ETH2 doesn't require POW. Algorand is PPOS and built a contract into the leger to offset carbon emissions for the electric costs, making it carbon neutral or negative.

awrence3• 5 years ago

The math on the PoW energy FUD just doesn't check out.

- At current levels, bitcoin uses very roughly 0.1% of global electricity but electricity only represents 25% of fossil fuels emissions so current PoW contribution to global emissions = 0.025%, ie a rounding error. This issue is currently a total red herring. Now let's project into the future.

- bitcoin total addressable market cap if it took over the entire global monetary world (full global monetary premium): ~ 250tn or 300x from here implying a worst case outcome of 7.5% of global emissions, IF this happened TODAY and hashpower linearly tracked price. This is impossible off the bat because building out that infrastructure would take at least a decade. But more importantly it will take a decade or two for price to get there, by which time...

- The block subsidy will have gotten cut by ~ 10 (three halving cycles). Transaction fees might grow of course so let's say 5x lower which gets us back to 1.5% of global emissions.

- Add to that the following:

- 30% of CURRENT electricity production is stranded / wasted. All terminal bitcoin energy usage needs to do is tap into 5% of that to be emissions neutral. And it's heavily skewed towards tapping into that exclusively as that's the cheapest source and PoW is location neutral.

- the proof of work energy mix skews towards not only wasted / stranded but renewable which is trending towards being the cheapest form of energy.

- green power production is on an exponential adoption curve and enough sunlight hits the earth to power humanity for a year. Clean energy is there in amounts dwarfing societal needs, it's just a matter of harnessing it. This doesn't even include geothermal or nuclear.

- At an even higher level, if you got to this point, you would have replaced all the fiat systems in the world thereby: - eliminating the energy spent on maintaining the fiat system which is easily more than 1.5% of global emissions - flipping the world into a hard money world that is no longer incentivized to consume at all costs (read misallocate capital) ergo hugely reducing conspicuous consumption / GDP growth at all costs which is arguably the biggest driver of unnecessary emissions

- This final line of thought would have you conclude flipping to PoW would be emissions negative in the long run, but you don't really need to go there though, the energy numbers alone make this at best a chronically misunderstood narrative.

Taek• 5 years ago

A proper CO2 tax wouldn't be disruptive to bitcoin, bitcoin only cares that everyone pays the same price for electricity. If the absolute cost of electricity goes up, nothing changes.

cwkoss8• 5 years ago

Also note that this crypto tax-reporting provision was slid into a huge bipartisan infrastructure deal. It really never should have been included in this legislation in the first place.

Exempting actors in the crypto space who facillitate crypto usage without ever having custodial control of the funds makes a lot of sense. (Just like envelope manufacturers shouldn't have to register as money transmitters because people sometimes mail cash.) The provision that was slid in was nonsensically bad.

JumpCrisscross3• 5 years ago

this crypto tax provision was slid into a huge bipartisan infrastructure deal. It really never should have been included in this legislation in the first place.

Why not? The infrastructure is being paid for in part by this tax. They're fundamentally linked.

3np2• 5 years ago

(C) developing digital assets or their corresponding protocols for use by other persons, provided that such other persons are not customers of the person developing such assets or protocols.

The last qualifier seems poorly worded and becomes too broad. So (extreme example) a consulting agency developing a value-exchange platform to be run on a private chain in a customer corporate network would not be exempt. Bringing the act of building and selling software (or a SaaS, as long as the service itself doesn't custody user funds) is nonsensical. (B) is also a bit too narrow to address this.

notJim• 5 years ago

Does this include or exclude DEXes? It sounds like C) could mean that DEXes are not included (which would be good), but I'm not entirely clear on the legal definitions of some of these things.

backprop1993• 5 years ago

They want to exempt miners who are making Bitcoin from paying taxes on it? Why? They are making revenue from this activity. Of course they should pay taxes on that revenue.

This makes no sense at all.

uncomputation• 5 years ago

Did you read the article? This is just about exempting non-exchanges from “broker” status i.e. keeping track of users’ personal information, transaction history, and data. The representatives said they agree people not paying taxes on crypto is a problem, but classifying them as brokers is not the solution.

skybrian• 5 years ago

Why isn’t it part of the solution? It seems like keeping track of who buys mining equipment (at least at large scale) would be a pretty important component in making sure that they pay taxes? Just like it’s important that brokerages report your stock transactions to the IRS.

flyingfences2• 5 years ago

The proposal does not exempt anybody from paying taxes; it exempts people and organizations who are not actually brokers from reporting on their customers' activity.

mola• 5 years ago

This means that people with deep pockets, with money which came from who knows where and was laundered through Bitcoin, just bought the US Senate.

flyingfences2• 5 years ago

No, it just means that there are three people in the Senate who recognize that labelling wallet devs -- or anyone other than actual exchanges -- as "brokers" is impractical and serves no purpose.

jnwatson2• 5 years ago

What counts here as a digital asset? World of Warcraft coins? Steam collectible cards?

robot_no_419• 5 years ago

Yes, those are all digital assets. It's a much broader class of assets than just virtual currencies (ie, cryptocurrencies) that includes photos, electronic records, and pretty much everything that's electronically stored and can be owned by a person.

It's also not really a legally defined term, so there are bound to be different definitions and interpretations. I got my definition from https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/b...

See also the wiki, which provides a similar definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_asset

RandomLensman2• 5 years ago

Sounds like it is a defined term: https://www.rpc.senate.gov/legislative-notices/hr-3684_infra...

jnwatson2• 5 years ago

Good source.

"Additionally, the provision clarifies that the definition of specified security includes a digital asset, which is defined as any digital representation of value that is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology."

That means that WoW coins don't count (but NFTs do).

animal_spirits2• 5 years ago

That means that the IRS will not be able to require that miners, stakers and companies that sell hardware or software for storing digital assets report the activities of their customers or crypto users whose transactions they verify.
In a statement, Wyden said that “investors failing to pay tax they owe through cryptocurrency is a real problem,” but that the law as previously written was too broad and would have applied to actors who would not have been able to fulfill its mandates.
The changes will lead to the bill raising $5.2 billion less than the $28 billion envisaged by the initial legislation, according to a Politico report citing the Joint Committee on Taxation.

To me, a layman, it seems that they are trying to allow more loopholes for tax evasion through buying and selling bitcoin in certain ways? Or am I completely off base?

EDIT: Here [0] is the actual ammendment, so it seems maybe it's just protecting people doing development work on cryptocurrency software/hardware from having to pay taxes.. I think

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28075226

meowkit• 5 years ago

You’re off base. The original definition was putting tax and KYC requirements on people who don’t have, and can’t get, that information. Network nodes facilitate transactions, they don’t broker them. Its like treating an exchanges electricity provider as part of the equity trade.

It’s not tax evasion. The law as originally stated would have crippled the industry in the US.

animal_spirits2• 5 years ago

Interesting, thank you

arcticfox• 5 years ago

I rarely notice politicians, but Wyden is frequently in the fray on the right side of a lot of issues I hear about. Seems like he got this one right, again.

deegles• 5 years ago

Devil's advocate for a moment... the definition of a broker is "a person who buys and sells goods or assets for others," or it can mean to "arrange or negotiate" a deal or plan.

How is a miner not a broker then? They accept transactions and then place them on a blockchain by performing some kind of work. Sure, at the moment few if any cryptos are definitely securities, but what is going to happen when a company creates (for example) a wrapped SP500 token? A "traditional" broker can't just trust anyone to record a transaction, there is a lot of regulation.

Will there be a class of tokens that can only be mined by people who can do KYC on them? Why is a miner exempt from caring about what transactions they accept?

qeternity2• 5 years ago

The original definition was putting tax and KYC requirements on people who don’t have, and can’t get, that information.

You fundamentally misunderstand regulation. If someone can’t/won’t do something, regulation is enacted to either compel them or to outlaw their behavior.

Your tacit suggestion that because miners can’t do something means the law is flawed, is akin to saying “oh well burglars won’t pay for the goods so oh well”. If we pass a law that miners can’t follow, then mining becomes illegal. We do this all time, especially in finance.

A more realistic example is “WhatsApp is E2E encrypted so traders can’t be monitored”. This means WhatsApp is a non-compliant (“illegal”) facility to transact in most regulated markets.

purple_ferret• 5 years ago

The changes will lead to the bill raising $5.2 billion less than the $28 billion envisaged by the initial legislation, according to a Politico report citing the Joint Committee on Taxation.

How do they come to this conclusion since taxes are still owed? Just that they expect about 5 billion in tax evasion from this?

tedunangst2• 5 years ago

They're all made up numbers that exist only to get the bill passed.

jb775• 5 years ago

In other words, crypto miners are investing in lobbyists.

memming• 5 years ago

Or lobbyists are investing in crypto.

nyghtly• 5 years ago

This headline might as well be click bait.

It's important to remember that this is a proposed amendment. It won't pass unless the infrastructure gang supports it. And it's very unlikely that they will support it, because that would mean that the bill isn't fully funded. Not being funded would kill the bill, because the Republicans who support it are demanding full funding.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/03/senate-bipartisan-i...

Senators move to exempt Bitcoin, crypto miners from proposed U.S. tax rules

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