For two years, the cryptocurrency world has been waiting to see how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would implement the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Put simply, this law established new reporting requirements that risked setting a de facto ban on cryptocurrency mining and exposing millions of Americans to new felony crimes. The good news is that the IRS’s nearly 300-page proposal is not quite as bad as it could have been under the law. However, that is far from saying it is good policy.
As citizens, companies, and consultants finish crafting their comment letters ahead of the October 30 response deadline, it’s important to take a step back and recognize why businesses should not be required to report customers to the government by default.
Recalling back to 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was about building roads, bridges, and the like — it was not about cryptocurrency or financial reporting. It wasn’t until funding was desperately needed to offset spending that members of Congress slipped in two provisions to increase financial surveillance over cryptocurrency users. Their argument was that increasing surveillance would increase tax revenue, effectively accusing cryptocurrency users of tax evasion.
The $28 billion figure was questionable at the time. And less than a year later, the Biden administration released its budget, which contained a vastly different estimate. In contrast to the $28 billion estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Biden administration estimated that only $2 billion would be received over the next 10 years. And now, even that number might be an overestimation as Treasury officials acknowledged that the estimates were based on a very different market.
The IRS summary of its proposal for imposing new data-collection requirements on cryptocurrency service providers. Source: U.S. Federal Register
With cost-offsetting out the window, what is left appears to be little more than another brick in the wall of U.S. financial surveillance.
The IRS’s proposal, again, doesn’t seem as bad as it could have been since the proposal does exclude miners and some software developers for now. Still, the proposal chooses a concerning path for deciding who should be required to report customers.
The premise seems to be partly based on “whether a person is in a position to know information about the identity of a customer, rather than whether a person ordinarily would know such information.” The proposal states that this distinction is made because some platforms “have a policy of not requesting customer information or requesting only limited information [but] have the ability to obtain information about their customers by updating their protocols.” For this reason, the proposal states that the IRS expects some decentralized exchanges and selfhosted wallets may be forced to report their customers’ private information.
The IRS reports 1,726 comments received so far.
Those are rookie numbers.
Unless you want:
– Every crypto site and wallet to have your SSN, and
– Nodes, devs, governance, & LPs to be brokers in technical noncompliance,
In other words, even though businesses may have no reason to collect sensitive, personal information from customers, the baseline that the IRS is working with is whether they have the ability to do so. That may be somewhat limited given the focus is on businesses providing a service, but “the ability to collect information” seems to be little more than “collection by default.”
While concerning, this approach should not come as a surprise. The U.S. government has slowly been establishing broader financial reporting requirements with the Bank Secrecy Act, the Patriot Act, and many other laws and regulations. The provisions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the resulting proposal from the IRS are just the latest iteration of this expansive framework.
Yet rather than continue to expand the range and depth of financial surveillance, now should be the time to question the premise as a whole. In a country where Americans are supposed to be protected by the Fourth Amendment, businesses should not be forced to report their customers to the government by default. Activities like using cryptocurrency for payments, receiving over $600 on PayPal after a garage sale, or getting a paycheck from a job should not put you on a government database.
Steering away from this surveillance status quo might require fundamental changes to U.S. law, but that’s not to say doing so is a radical idea. When surveyed by the Cato Institute, 79 percent of Americans said that it is unreasonable for banks to share financial information with the government and 83 percent said that the government should need a warrant to obtain financial information.
It is those principles that should guide the discussion forward. So, while the October 30 response deadline is just around the corner, commenters should weigh both what the proposal does and doesn’t say.
Furthermore, although the present focus is very much on the IRS, let’s not forget that the responsibility to fix both the current situation and the larger financial surveillance status quo lies in the halls of Congress. At the end of the day, the IRS is doing what Congress told it to do. So, it’s Congress that needs to step in to reform the system as a whole.
Nicholas Anthony is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. He is the author of The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Attack on Crypto: Questioning the Rationale for the Cryptocurrency Provisions and The Right to Financial Privacy: Crafting a Better Framework for Financial Privacy in the Digital Age.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Sir Keir Starmer needs to choose between parents who want stronger action to tackle harmful content on children’s phones, or the “tech bros” who are resisting changes to their platforms, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Speaking to Beth Rigby on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, the Labour peer noted that the prime minister met with the creators of hit Netflix drama Adolescence to discuss safety on social media, but she questioned if he is going to take action to “stop the tech companies allowing this sort of stuff” on their platforms where children can access it.
Sir Keir hosted a roundtable on Monday with Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne and producer Jo Johnson to discuss issues raised in the series, which centres on a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a young girl, and the rise of incel culture.
The aim was to discuss how to prevent young boys being dragged into a “whirlpool of hatred and misogyny”, and the prime minister said the four-part series raises questions about how to keep young people safe from technology.
Sir Keir has backed calls for the four-part drama to be shown in all schools across the country, but Baroness Harman questioned what is going to be achieved by having young people simply watch the show.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
3:15
Sir Keir Starmer held a roundtable with the creators of the Adolescence TV drama.
“Two questions were raised [for me],” she said. ” Firstly – after they’ve watched it, what is going to be the discussion afterwards?
More on Electoral Dysfunction
Related Topics:
“And secondly, is he going to act to stop the tech companies allowing this sort of stuff to go online into smartphones without protection of children?
“Because if the tech companies wanted to do this, they could actually protect children. They can do everything they want with their tech.”
She acknowledged there are “very big public policy challenges” in this area, but added of the prime minister: “Is he going to side with parents who are terrified and want this content off their children’s phones, or is he going to accept the tech bros’ resistance to having to make changes?”
The Labour peer backed the Conservative Party’s call for a ban on smartphones in schools to be mandated from Westminster, saying it would “enable all schools not to have a discussion with their parents or to battle it out, but just to say, this is the ruling” from central government, which Ofsted would then enforce.
“I’m sensitive to the idea that we shouldn’t constantly be telling schools what to do,” she continued. “And they’ve got a lot of common sense and a lot of professional experience, and they should have as much autonomy as possible.
“But perhaps it’s easier for them if it’s done top down.”
Baroness Harman also questioned the speed with which parliament is actually able to legislate to deal with the very rapid development of new technologies, and posits that it could “change its processes to be able to legislate in real time”.
She suggested that a “powerful select committee” of MPs could be established to do that, because “otherwise we talk about it, and then we’re not able to legislate for 10 years – by which time that problem has really set in, and we’ve got a whole load more problems”.
On the podcast, the trio also discussed the 10% tariffs imposed on the UK by Donald Trump and the government’s efforts to strike a trade deal with the US to mitigate the impact of the levy.
The government has refused to rule out scrapping the Digital Services Tax, a 2% levy on tech giants’ revenues in the UK, as part of the negotiations with the Trump administration – a move Baroness Harman said would be “very heartbreaking”.
A group of investors with cryptocurrency custody and trading firm Bakkt Holdings filed a class-action lawsuit alleging false or misleading statements and a failure to disclose certain information.
Lead plaintiff Guy Serge A. Franklin called for a jury trial as part of a complaint against Bakkt, senior adviser and former CEO Gavin Michael, CEO and president Andrew Main, and interim chief financial officer Karen Alexander, according to an April 2 filing in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The group of investors allege damages as the result of violations of US securites laws and a lack of transparency surrounding its agreement with clients: Webull and Bank of America (BoA).
April 2 complaint against Bakkt and its executives. Source: PACER
The loss of Bank of America and Webull will result “in a 73% loss in top line revenue” due to the two firms making up a significant percentage of its services revenue, the investor group alleges in the lawsuit. The filing stated Webull made up 74% of Bakkt’s crypto services revenue through most of 2023 and 2024, and Bank of America made up 17% of its loyalty services revenue from January to September 2024.
Bakkt disclosed on March 17 that Bank of America and Webull did not intend to renew their agreements with the firm ending in 2025. The announcement likely contributed to the company’s share price falling more than 27% in the following 24 hours. The investors allege Bakkt “misrepresented the stability and/or diversity of its crypto services revenue” and failed to disclose that this revenue was “substantially dependent” on Webull’s contract.
“As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” said the suit.
Other law offices said they were investigating Bakkt for securities law violations, suggesting additional class-action lawsuits may be in the works. Cointelegraph contacted Bakkt for a comment on the lawsuit but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.