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?

> 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.

It's not property, except I want to be able to own it, buy it, and sell it for $CURRENCY...

It's not legally property. Legally you don't own it. If the network suddenly changes its rules and says it's not yours then you have no legal recourse against the developers/miners/etc. If you buy, that's a service; you're paying someone to apply their signature to a note in the distributed ledger. You don't own the note and the currency itself is nothing more than an abstract concept which has meaning only to the extend that there is consensus among the users, none of whom have any particular obligations toward you.

> It's not legally property. Legally you don't own it. If the network suddenly changes its rules and says it's not yours then you have no legal recourse against the developers/miners/etc.

I wouldn't assume this unless you are aware of specific case law that says this. If you held some assets on a blockchain and the developers decided to block your address after you made fun of them on twitter or something, it certainly seems like you'd have standing to sue.

> If you held some assets on a blockchain and the developers decided to block your address after you made fun of them on twitter or something, it certainly seems like you'd have standing to sue.

What exactly would you sue them over? The design always depended on the voluntary consent of everyone involved. The developers never promised that the protocol would remain unchanged. This has happened before—for example, the Etherium hard-fork that reversed withdrawals from the DOA which were unexpected and unintended but authorized by the smart contract code—and no one on the losing side of that fork managed to successfully sue the developers for changing the protocol. They would have had standing if anyone did.

The developers don't even fully control it; as an open, distributed system, someone else can step in and supplant them with new client software if users (meaning mainly buyers and retailers accepting the currency) decide they prefer different rules. Whatever changes the developers might make is only an expression of their opinions about how the system should work. Other users of the network are not obligated to accept those changes if they happen to disagree.

What may be semantically true may also be quite different than peoples perceptions. And peoples perceptions and how they functionally treat crypto is like a currency, it's even in the name. So, I strongly suspect if you tried to argue that position in a court of law, or even in a debate amongst tech. peers you would come out on the loosing end. Regardless, I appreciate your perspective. Thank you for sharing.

"Cryptocurrency" is well understood to be a misnomer. The correct term is "Crypto Asset" as, at least according to most tax legislation, it is not a _currency_.

Currencies do not attract CGT on disposal. Assets (like crypto) do.

This is a big difference

> This law is wrong

Ignoring the changes to crypto, what makes the law wrong?

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

> without doing a modicum of research

I think they know exactly what they are doing.

Or rather, the lobbyists working with them know what they are doing

The lobbyists are just bagmen. A big part of what they are paid for is obfuscating who actually wrote the legislation and on whose behalf they did it.

They do, and they very much view it as a threat to the centralized power of the USG.

At the very least, it's a legislative shake down opportunity. Form a team 'for' and a team 'against,' and each gets paid to 'fight' by their respective consitutency.

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.

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.