DeFi and the “digital asset” felony hidden in the infrastructure bill

Why would this require a court test? It's clearly constitutional (commerce clause) and there are a ton of past legal cases where reporting requirements have been enforced. Any "DeFi" user/creator who tries to keep using those products after this law passes would be well advised to take a plea deal because they would really have no defense.

josho5• 5 years ago

I don’t understand the issue.

Today if I have a cash transaction greater than $10k I have to report it. This bill just clarified that cash includes digital assets.

Is your issue with the existing law or you feel crypto shouldn’t be treated like cash?

nybble415• 5 years ago

Is your issue with the existing law or you feel crypto shouldn’t be treated like cash?

Both. This law is wrong (even without the crypto / DeFi elements) and crypto shouldn't be treated like cash. It's not property, or even a legally enforceable contract like the one that governs your relationship with your bank. From any reasonable perspective it should be classified as something akin to "goodwill" and not something the law should concern itself with.

bradwood3• 5 years ago

You need to report the details of the party on the other side of the transaction. Who exactly is that when the other side is a smart contract? This part is unenforceable

malermeister14• 5 years ago

Why would this law be unworkable? You are under the assumption that you have a god-given right to DeFi. You do not.

If this law is incompatible with DeFi, it is DeFi that is unworkable, not the law.

gfodor2• 5 years ago

Perhaps the best way to deal with these laws is to let the ones that turn a few million innocent people into felons overnight pass, vs whittle them down so it’s just a few thousand (eg based on net worth or transaction size.) The former would never hold given the consequences, the latter would and eventually be ratcheted.

nickff4• 5 years ago

"Perhaps the best way to deal with these laws is to let the ones that turn a few million innocent people into felons overnight pass"

There are already hundreds if not thousands of these; the average person commits a felony something like once a day. Nobody seems to want to tackle over-criminalization. Many books and articles have been written on the subject, and I invite you to read them.

eindiran4• 5 years ago

A felony per day? That cannot possibly be true; maybe the average person commits 1+ "crimes" per day, but not felonies. The only felonies I can think of that an "average person" can plausibly have committed in their entire life: mail fraud, damaging mailboxes, election fraud, tax evasion (willful and intentional evasion of a federal tax), accidental violation of the NFA (on something like what counts as an SBR), obscenity (because who even knows what counts as obscenity anymore), selling/buying _large_ quantities of drugs, grand larceny, cyber crime, vandalism of federal property, and copyright infringement (for _significant_ profit). Most of those are seriously straining plausibility on the "average person" front.

Am I missing something? I just can't see how a felony a day is even close to the correct order of magnitude.

Taek• 5 years ago

If you do that it just means the government can throw you in jail at its discretion

alyandon• 5 years ago

Laws like that would only be a tool of selective enforcement wielded by the politically connected and elite against what they deem to be undesirables.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

This is why I find these threads so frustrating.

Laws like these aren’t really to protect people. It’s to protect the current financial system where elites are given special privileges and non-elites are selectively fucked over at the whim of people in power.

This is supposedly because elites are more trustworthy and responsible but that’s been shown to be a lie.

gfodor2• 5 years ago

Well, that is one outcome. Another outcome is that they actually try to enforce it and the response undermines the law. Hard to say how to best predict what would happen in this specific case.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

I think it would be nice if we passed laws that made sense.

If a law is going to turn millions of people into criminals overnight - then you probably need some kind of grandfather clause, or else it's just a bad law.

malermeister14• 5 years ago

Or maybe millions of people are just doing bad things?

zxcvbn4038• 5 years ago

That works - NYC tried to crack down on “unlicensed taxis” when Uber first arrived, so the Port Authority started seizing and towing the cars of people making drop offs at Airports. It was completely arbitrary - if the PA officer didn’t think the people looked enough alike, then the assumption was that it was an illegal taxi. So interracial families, helpful neighbors, etc could all end up being ticketed and their vehicles seized and towed. The sheer idiocy of the whole situation started making the front page of the NY post and a couple weeks later the practice was dropped.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

This is the worst aspect of laws that are overly broad and turn everyone into criminals: it’s then up to the police to choose when and where to enforce the law. Do we need to wonder why interracial families were targeted?

jimbob452• 5 years ago

Is DeFi what we're officially calling cryptocurrencies now? A quick Google search looks like that's the case but I don't know if DeFi covers anything else that I haven't thought of.

hammock2• 5 years ago

DeFi is not cryptocurrency, it's a specific use case of cryptocurrency.

jimbob452• 5 years ago

Feel free to expand on why that is. I'm genuinely asking - this is the first time I've heard that portmanteau.

idrios4• 5 years ago

I think there's a difference in that a cryptocurrency can still be centralized, such as a government that creates its own crypto and manages it through its own exchange.

jgoldshlag• 5 years ago

DeFi also includes the various crypto-adjacent scams, can't leave those out!

serverholic6• 5 years ago

Yes freedom means good people can do good things and bad people can do bad things. It's almost impossible to craft laws that only restrict the bad people without reducing the freedom of good people.

jcpham2• 5 years ago

I’d say cryptocurrecy has created DeCentralized Finance would be more accurate one enables and furthers the other. DEXs, DAOs, stuff like what AAVE and DAI stablecoin.

There are instruments on instruments cross referencing each other creating entirely new instruments.

Maybe a defi ecosystem empowered by cryptocurrency but one doesn’t necessarily equal the other. The picture is much much larger now with the meta verse angle.

danny_codes• 5 years ago

On first read I don't see anything wrong with this bill. It appears to extend a reporting requirement already applying to cash transfers to other forms of monetary exchange.

I don't see why transferring money via a cryptocurrency vs cash should be subject to different rules.

I_am_tiberius• 5 years ago

Did you read the "it imposes reporting requirements that, given the way DeFi works, would make it impossible to comply" part? If that's not wrong I'm not sure what you expect.

Arcuru• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, saying that something is "illegal by design" is not usually an effective defense.

This is just the kind of thing that cryptocurrencies need to contend with if they want to be used everywhere. Either they need to comply with the existing financial regulations or become powerful enough that they can change the financial regulations.

elil172• 5 years ago

Report requirements have been around for every other form of transaction. The fact that a bunch of companies went out and built products that would not be able to comply with a very foreseeable regulation is their own fault.

fasteddie• 5 years ago

That's the point, though. I could make a non-crypto based money transfer software that does not store sender or recipient information in the db. That too would make it impossible for that software comply with the law. Or the authors sculpture example.

Just because the nature of the software makes it impossible to comply with particular laws doesn't make it good or bad. You need to make a value judgement if the regulation itself is valuable.

fny2• 5 years ago

Honestly, I think this is outside the spirit of the law.

Say you take your money put it in a bank account, the bank lends that money out again. Are you responsible for knowing the recipient? No. I imagine the same will be extended to putting money into a swap pool or DEX.

Now say you actually send money to someone over $10k and don't report it. This is just like a 1099.

Honestly, all the fear over what this is going to do is total FUD. It's not that difficult of a rule to deal with for law abiding citizens, and anyone who wants to continue using crypto to launder money or evade taxes will keep using mixer wallets.

kiklion• 5 years ago

I did read but it assumes people know what a liquidity pool is.

So what is a liquidity pool? Example one indicated that a person could withdraw coins using tokens he got when he deposited coins.

So pools are something you deposit coins into for LP tokens and later can surrender the tokens for coins.

In example 2, they say that coins received from a liquidity pool swap cannot be traced. Why not? When the liquidity pool received the coins could it not associate the coins with where it came from?

Even if not, then the liquidity pool itself is the source of the coins. When it gets coins, it needs to know who sent it, and when it sends coins it needs to know who it’s sending it to.

All of this is possible. Just because they currently don’t track this information doesn’t mean it’s impossible to track. It would just require adjustments to their business to make it in compliance with regulations.

_jal3• 5 years ago

This is starting to get to the original intent of creating Bitcoin - attacking the nation state's taxation and enforcement capability.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

malermeister14• 5 years ago

If something can't possibly be implemented in a legal way, then maybe, just maybe, it's just a bad idea?

"It's impossible to comply with the ban on murder while we continue killing people" - Yes, that's the point. Stop doing what you're doing.

woah2• 5 years ago

Your comment is pretty unrelated to the article. It sounds like you're talking about a simple sending of cryptocurrency from one business or individual or another, but that's not what the article is talking about.

It is impossible to report "who" you received an asset from if you received it from a smart contract that is not under the control of any one business or individual. In the cases of most defi contracts, the assets involved are pooled from many thousands of individuals and act as a sort of autonomous market maker.

Cases where criminals obfuscate simple transfers are already prosecuted under money laundering laws, and they are very easy to prosecute because blockchains are a completely open record for anyone to data-mine.

If research into and use of financial smart contracts should be shut down immediately in the US, let them debate and make a law about that. Don't sneak it into a monster bill and pretend that it's about something entirely different.

pjc504• 5 years ago

smart contract that is not under the control of any one business or individual

This doesn't mean it's not under control of someone or a group of people. Claiming it's not under control just means you're hiding the true controller, which might be an embargoed entity like Iran.

If you have to submit a 1,000 long list of people each of whom has a fragment of control, so be it. Or spend a few dollars getting a Delaware corp.

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

Tangential, but it's preposterously stupid that our legal system works by legislators voting on a giant collection of laws bundled together, rather than separating these things into entities with specific concerns and voting on those.

Shouldn't it be reasonable for someone to think the infrastructure bill is a good idea but this part is not?

UnpossibleJim• 5 years ago

I mean, if we lived in a reasonable society, riders would be abolished.

breadzeppelin__2• 5 years ago

I often try to think of a rule that would require simplified bills without just having arbitrary limits. Like, wouldn't it be nice if each thing voted on had to be less than 8 pages (for example) in length instead of 3000. I'm sure there is some downside though like how will we fit all the pork in to this vote??!?

KMag• 5 years ago

Not just pork, but also more productive forms of legislative compromise would be affected by such limitations.

louloulou2• 5 years ago

It should be +1 day per page before it can be voted on. It's completely absurd that the people voting on these bills don't have the chance to read and understand them before having to give an opinion and change the laws governing >300M people. The whole thing makes a mockery of representative democracy.

CabSauce• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, anything passed in the senate requires 60 votes or need to be passed during reconcilliation (one bill per year). This is due to the use of the fillibuster to stop anything else from being considered.

nickff4• 5 years ago

The reason for this is that most legislation wouldn't pass without the amendments; the amendments contain 'pork' and special interest legislation that encourages legislators who are on the fence or even mildly opposed, to vote for the bill. Some of the most well-documented examples of this are the amendments to the ACA (Obamacare), which include the infamous 'corn-husker kickback'.

hallway_monitor2• 5 years ago

Yes everyone knows about that carve out in the ACA. But does everyone know it was removed, allegedly at Nebraska senator Nelson's request, before the legislation went into effect?

Djrhfbfnsks• 5 years ago

I don't think it's a bad thing that most current legislation wouldn't pass as-is. If it's not popular enough to reach the required threshold on its own, then it shouldn't become law.

Blackthorn• 5 years ago

This is entirely due to the necessity of 60 votes to pass a normal bill vs 50 for a reconciliation bill.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

Who _actually_ decides if it gets in the bill, anyway?

And who actually writes it? Often industry. In this case maybe law enforcement?

idrios4• 5 years ago

My job complains when I make a pull request that includes more than a few hundred lines of code and tells me to break it up into smaller, more readable changes. But for the US govt a 2700 page bill that congressmen get only a couple of days or hours to review seems to be the norm.

notJim• 5 years ago

I think there's actually a helpful analogy to software development here.

If your company can only release once every 2–8 years, then naturally the releases would become huge. Unfortunately, our government is so bogged down by divisiveness and the filibuster, etc, that is the state we're in. Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. As a result, that bill becomes enormous, just like the software release.

As with software, the fix is likely to make it easier to pass more small bills, but the very systems that lead to the current status quo make reforming it nearly impossible.

helen___keller• 5 years ago

Truthfully, a critical eye at the structure of US government sees an enormously poorly designed system on almost every front except stability. Unfortunately, even if a system could be designed that improves on the failures while maintaining the stability, the US government is so stable that it's nearly impossible to improve (as this requires constitutional amendments, the highest possible hurdle to clear)

snarf21• 5 years ago

It is the nature of compromise for 50-60 people. The thing that is more stupid in my mind is that they all only care about getting their pork barrel. I don't understand why some don't revoke their support for things that are too blatant. Unfortunately, our political system is all about money in and kickbacks out. Classic system of misaligned incentives.

aspaceman• 5 years ago

It's been a slowly developing problem. There's always been riders to important bills, but so little legislation is made by Congress now. The only opportunity to get anything done is one of the few bills they manage to get their shit together and pass.

I'd be much more entusiastic about a series of bills. Or a Congress more willing and active about legislation from the liberal-wing. At least that'd fit their marketing better.

But the right-wing is incredibly obstructionist. Without serious action the two are just stuck in a staring contest as the judicial and executive suck up all the power and responsibility they leave on the table.

landemva• 5 years ago

If the 'someone' is the person who can veto it, then we should expect that 'someone' to sign it into law. I suppose we get what we allow and what we voted in to office.

SkeuomorphicBee• 5 years ago

The USA may take the concept of "collection of laws bundled together" a bit too far for comfort, but such concept implemented with more moderation is a good one, I may even say a necessary one. Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one. So it makes sense to bundle such concerns into a all or nothing deal. A simple example would be a bill to build a shipping port in a remote location being bundled with a bill to build a railway and a roadway to said remote location; if one is passed without the other you end up with a useless port or a useless road/railroad.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one.

Laws are software and should be written and managed like that.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

it's preposterously stupid that our legal system

So at this point, your Chesterton fence alarm should be blazing red, because it is unlikely that you, sitting in pure contemplation, can correctly decide that something so widespread and stable across centuries is "preposterously stupid".

So let's try to understand why this is necessary.

To start, we do not live in a democracy, we live in a system where large majorities are needed for something to pass. Democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on who to have for dinner. It scares the hell out of people, and rightly so.

To defend against this, we institute a number of undemocratic consensus requirements that effectively boil down to large supermajorities being needed in order to get a law passed. This, by the way, is why people are so confused that Biden can't get his infrastructure bill passed even though he has that oh-so-sexy 2 seat margin in the house and a 50-50 senate.

Now imagine you are a team leader with 10 reports, and you are evaluating some course of action, and 6 people feel strongly that option A is the way to go, but 4 people feel strongly that A is a menace and the opposite of A is the correct approach.

Do you go ahead and do A, because 6 is a bigger number than 4? If you do, you are a fool, because you tore your team apart, four people may leave, and you are screwed. You need to govern by consensus, and that means:

1. Abandon option A and find another option, A' that a large majority (8 out of 10) can support. This, of course is the ideal solution. A majority so large that the remaining holdouts feel like assholes for pressing the issue.

2. Come up with a mix, where you do A but also B, where the group that hates A loves B, and is willing to trade doing A for getting B. And the group that love A doesn't like B so much, but is willing to accept B in order to get A. So everyone is a little happy.

#1 we can call "find the one pure course of action we all agree on" approach

#2 we can call "generate a collective basket of actions that, together, we can all agree on".

And very little introspection should tell you that option 1 is almost never available, but option 2 is virtually always available.

So one senator gets more grain subsidies, and in exchange he's willing to tolerate removal of a tax deduction and the subsidy of some solar panels, and another senator hates the solar panel subsidy, but loves getting rid of the tax deduction more, and doesn't much care about the grain subsidy, and the third senator hates getting rid of the tax deduction but loves the grain and solar subsidies more.

Thus there is a policy mix where all of them can agree, even though on each specific policy there is no consensus. This magic by which the sum of policies is able to achieve consensus while each individual policy is not really confuses people who don't understand convex preferences. They think preferences should be linear, not convex. Some even have bizarre moral beliefs about this, which is truly a WTF situation, but that's where we are, people get outraged about literally everything, including convex preferences.

You may have noticed that this basket approach is very reminiscent of the gains from trade you learned in your econ 101 class, and you'd be correct -- this consensus formation is even called "horse trading".

Thus welfare maximization via convex preferences is the process by which a super-majority agreement is reached when there is no one pure action that we all agree on, allowing government to continue while protecting us from the tyranny of majority rules.

The only thing "preposterously stupid" is the shallow dismissal of this consensus formation, seeing as how it is the bedrock that allows consensus to be reached in any group situation, from being an engineering team lead to running a local Kiwanas club to running congress.

Next time you face a divided membership in whatever team you are leading, start some creative horse trading -- there is a good chance you will be able to reach consensus.

narrator• 5 years ago

The biggest problem is that you could comply in that an ssn could be attached to each transaction, but ssns are both usernames and passwords that are used to authorize transactions and identify a person, so they can't be stored where everyone can read them.

Perhaps if the government switched over to digital signatures instead of SSNs compliance would be possible.

The requirement for secrets only shared with the government in each transaction is what breaks crypto in this instance. Perhaps someone could figure out a way to easily attach secret information that only the government could read to each transaction?

One solution would be that each transaction would have an identity broker attached to it where you would store your verified identity that would send the tax records to the IRS for you on the person the transfer was going to on their behalf, so you wouldn't have to see the SSN of everyone you did business with and likewise.

The key here is to separate custody of funds from knowledge of identity.

Edit: downvotes? Why? Can someone tell me why I'm at least wrong?

dogman144• 5 years ago

Perhaps someone could figure out a way to easily attach secret information that only the government could read to each transaction?

attaching an SSN to every bitcoin transaction is nonsensical, in short.

josho5• 5 years ago

You are thinking of this like a technologist. Think about it on how we handle reporting requirements on a cash transaction. There is nothing inherent in a cash purchase that facilitates reporting of the transaction to the government. All of that _paperwork_ is handled outside of the transaction itself.

With crypto the same manual reporting would apply. If however we want to supplement crypto with new extensions to help facilitate the reporting that's certainly possible.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

I don't understand why people talk about crypto with such venom in their tone. Yes there are scams but there is legitimately interesting innovation happening too.

Interesting mathematic, economic, and computer science ideas are being explored and tested. In the future it may be possible to have a global financial system where the users are in control of their own funds. Isn't that something worth exploring?

malermeister14• 5 years ago

"The users are in control of their own funds" just means "Jeff Bezos owns everything with no viable way to get it back".

State control of funds is the only thing that can bring us back from the brink of neofeudalism. The venom is against the people trying to accelerate our decline by taking that away.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

The state is there to enforce corporate interests. Competition is what these companies are afraid of.

godelski2• 5 years ago

I think people have a hard time disconnecting the two. It's new technology and clearly a wild west. I mean it really hasn't been around for long. Yeah there's a lot to be critical of. But that doesn't mean there aren't interesting aspects.

X6S1x6Okd1st3• 5 years ago

Tbh the ETH community should probably work with regulators to get a standard for what logs to produce. As it currently stands anyone could generate the reports needed for DeFi on ETH, but it'd take understanding each contact to do it.

If there was a standard eth log to emit then contacts could choose to emit it and then as long as one actor in the environment coalesces all of those logs and reports it then they'd all be in compliance

coleca• 5 years ago

Except we aren't tracking names, addresses, and SSNs of the holder of each ETH wallet, which is required for the IRS reporting under this proposed amendment to the statute.

malermeister14• 5 years ago

Well maybe they should? The whole argument seems to be "we want to do questionable stuff, why doesn't the government let us?"

X6S1x6Okd1st3• 5 years ago

It'd still be much better for all of the addresses that have interacted with a KYCed interface (e.g. exchange)

I wouldn't be surprised if years down the line US govt starts requiring validators to not include certain txns like tornado cash.

Also that PII clearly shouldn't be in the public logs.

legutierr• 5 years ago

Hmm. The article talks about the question of DeFi, where the sender might be a smart contract, making it difficult or impossible to identify any human beings to include in a report.

The issue would seem to be much broader than that, however. What about miner or validator rewards? Is it an implication of the bill that the receipt of digital assets as part of a miner or validator reward would also trigger a reporting requirement, if the block reward exceeds $10,000 in value?

Who would one be able to identify as the person responsible for sending the portion of the reward that is generated by cryptocurrency inflation? And what about miner fees? Would every user that pays miner fees need to be identified?

Even a simple transfer would require a sender to identify themselves both to their recipient and to the miner who mines the block. But how would the miner and the sender even have the physical ability to connect with each other to share this information, even if they wanted to?

It's one thing to make DeFi illegal, or to make participating in DeFi in a compliant manner impractical, it's an entirely different thing to make operating a miner illegal or impractical.

Somehow I doubt this would have been Congress's intent, but might it be the effect of the bill?

smitty1e• 5 years ago

Why are we not demanding Congress put pending legislation in a suitably architected public git repo, and then hitting it with AI to find out how our "aristocracy" is burning us ahead of the flame application?

Soul3000• 5 years ago

Wow. Read half this thread and had to make an account to reply. Love the deep philosophy tied to economics and crypto.

Imo, I don't care about crypto being crypto, or about paying taxes. In fact, I prefer to pay taxes like income, and for the government to be able to track it, that way banks can more easily incorporate digital asset holdings which will increase the power of bitcoin and therefore the innovation bitcoin provides.

That being said, I suppose it means I agree that you have to go "through the state first."

Abolishing the state? I don't have that visionary capacity, however, certainly taking a step towards a utopia where there are less middle men, lowers the wealth gap therefore. Furthermore, technology is ultimately what will one day lead us to renewable energy sources, genomics which can help us understand anxiety and depression better, and oh yeah. Space travel :) So using the state to prop up bitcoin sounds like the much more efficient idea. The term "crypto" in itself is a slap in the face, therefore, imo. We want to take a step towards limiting the states power, but not so much of a step to arise heavy social movements against bitcoin via state supported propaganda.

That being said, I loved the example of saying that I am not liable for knowing who held my cash before I did when going to a bank ATM. The bank, however, is required to verify incoming funds are not tied to illegal activities. That being said, the bank only has to verify the identify of the person sending funds to them directly, not investigate where the funds came prior. They then work with the IRS, simply to report any sums coming in over a certain dollar amount, and perhaps any funds that fail some sort of security verification tied to hacking.

I read that identify verification of bitcoin users can be time consuming, so I have tried to find out which software would allow banks to easily track an identity. It could, come to pass that exchanges that do not disclose identities of funds when transferring funds, will not be able to interact with banks in the future, and/or, they will not be allowed to operate in the US at all.

I would be more than fine with that. I am all for the protection of privacy in many areas, but I still believe in paying taxes, and so I don't expect privacy on the movements of my assets when they are tied to income. Now if I send 1M to someone. To me, it becomes the liability of the person receiving that amount and/or their exchange or bank to report it, not me, as I'm not the one making income. Now if I report it as a loss to avoid taxes, then yes, I would expect less privacy in that case.

Now, when I buy from an exchange and bits come from everywhere, that makes the exchange liable not me, and yes they should have an accessible list of identities for any subpoenas looking for crime, however, without a crime, they should only have to actually report large amounts transferring from person to person, or report income made from selling an asset. That list would make it easy, if the IRS was investigating someone, to compare that number to a person's reported income. It should not be that difficult really, but trying to avoid it? That seems like a good way for exchanges to get investigated or barred from activity.

Even still, some exchanges will comply, and investors can simply shift to them, or they can go to non US exchanges, but if they ever bring that money back into the US, then it would be reported over a certain dollar amount by that receiving exchange etc.. etc...

So I don't really see a complex issue really, unless no exchange is operating in a way that would comply with normal income reporting tax code. I'd like to know which exchange is or is not.

As far as feudalism and market makers who benefit more than "the common people." Ultimately that comes down to the ability to prosper, thrive, find freedom, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Having more control and more money, like jeff bezos, isn't going to yield enough happiness to say that is a worthy end goal, because it still falls short on several accounts: Spiral Dynamic Theory, Maslow's Heirarchy, and perhaps Map of Consciousness theory. A person benefiting more than the social environment around them, creates alienation and creates existential angst.

Therefore, what bitcoin is to me... is the promise of expanded innovation. If the whole world can communicate better through fair global trade through blockchain, and advanced circuitry leads us one day to clean, renewable energy, the entire base line of global culture will rise, and everyone ends up benefiting equally.

Having more money than someone else, ultimately is a minimal factor in comparison to the whole ecosystem improving, and that is what I believe bitcoin is bringing.

So yeah. Crypto due to untrust of state. I get it, and I agree, but sometimes innovation is more about learning how we can all work together, and that ultimately is what decentralization is supposed to do.

We just have to pay our taxes in the mean time, bc learning to decentralize, does not mean we will have the millions of advancements needed to tie in to that decentralization to effectively roll out a new culture. It may take 100 years...

Like when we went into Iraq. Great idea to take out a dictator, but how to do reconstruction and build a new culture? Woops. NO IDEA.

An initial great idea needs a long time to develop to truly understand its applications, and it seems much more beneficial to get the state behind bitcoin than to buck the system.

But if for example I have to pay a higher short term gains rate than I do other income? Then I would not be happy.

Oh, and the market makers, the nodes, have incentive to operate, so capitalism is built into the code. Decentralization combined with capitalism, seemed to be the right call for our current state in evolution per spiral dynamic theory.

DeFi and the “digital asset” felony hidden in the infrastructure bill

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