[ad_1]
The crypto community opposes changes to the crypto provisions of the White House infrastructure plan – which aims to raise $ 28 billion for infrastructure funding through expanded taxation of crypto transactions and impose new reporting requirements for crypto “brokers”.
On August 6, Senators Mark Warner and Rob Portman proposed a “last minute amendment” to the infrastructure deal to exclude proof of operations and vendors of hardware and software wallets from the bill. However, the wording of the amendment suggests that crypto developers and proof-of-stake validators would still be subject to broad reporting and taxation that some have described as “impractical.”
Hours later, Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein tweeted that the White House formally supports their amendment.
Last Minute – White House officially speaks out in favor of the Warner-Portman-Sinema crypto amendment, implicitly against the Toomey-Wyden-Lummis plan
– Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) August 6, 2021
If this is correct, it means the White House does not support a rival amendment proposed by Senators Cynthia Lummis, Pat Toomey and Ron Wyden which provided a much broader list of exemptions, including for any entity “validating transactions. of the distributed ledger “, the entities” developing the digital assets or their corresponding protocols “, as well as the minors.
“By clarifying the definition of broker, our amendment will ensure that non-financial intermediaries such as miners, network validators and other service providers are not subject to the reporting requirements specified in the bipartite infrastructure package”, Toomey tweeted.
Coin Center Executive Director Jerry Brito slammed Warner and Portman’s much more limited amendment as “disastrous”, accusing Congress of “picking winners and losers”.
If that passes, the US Congress chooses the winners and the losers.
– Jerry Brito (@jerrybrito) August 5, 2021
The Minimum Amendment was widely condemned by the crypto community, with many onlookers highlighting that proof of work networks and software developers will be affected by the new legislation.
A petition asking citizens to push back the amendment has already been posted on FightForTheFuture.org, with the page slamming the law to “dramatically expand[ing] financial supervision ”and undermine innovation.
On August 2, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published an article criticizing the amendment for including within its scope developers who do not control digital assets on behalf of users.
Specifically, the EFF aimed at wording in the amendment which defines a cryptocurrency “broker” as any person “responsible for and regularly providing any service performing the transfer of digital assets”, claiming that “almost any entity within the cryptocurrency ecosystem [could] be considered a “broker” under the new definition. EFF added:
“The mandate to collect the names, addresses and transactions of customers means that almost any business, even tangentially related to cryptocurrency, can suddenly be forced to monitor their users.”
Related: Mike Novogratz slams US officials for misunderstanding the crypto industry
[ad_2]
Source link