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A comment on Crypto community slams ‘disastrous’ new amendment to big infrastructure bill. Parent comment

Re:Crypto community slams ‘disastrous’ new amendment to big ... by Taek on Saturday August 07, 2021 @09:09AM (#28098333)
Agreed, but the current clause in the infrastructure bill is not about regulating unlicensed money transmitters, the wording of the bill is extremely broad and covers everyone who writes any type of software that handles digital assets, whether or not the author of that code is operating anything.

It's basically saying "if you've made a pull request to the bitcoin-core codebase, even just as a bugfix, you may be responsible for providing KYC'd information on all users of Bitcoin and on all Bitcoin transactions, regardless of where they happen or what your relationship to those people is".

Which is why the entire crypto ecosystem is up in arms. This bill is an extreme over-reach and would threaten the viability of essentially all crypto startups in the entire US.

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Re:Crypto community slams ‘disastrous’ new amendment to big ... by speeder on Saturday August 07, 2021 @09:45AM (#28098535)
The bill is also about "digital assets" and previously even in-game currency has been ruled as such (for example World of Warcraft gold, Second Life currency to buy land, etc...).

It also may apply to other non-crypto digital money, although that might be the point of the bill, since it would allow the US more easily to chase anyone evading its sanctions (for example: China is creating digital currency, Iran has some ideas too, they could use this to ignore SWIFT and thus ignore sanctions, this bill would allow US to sanction that thing too)

[ Parent | on HN ]