The US Senate’s infrastructure bill passed with a privacy problem for crypto
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.