You’re about to spend trillions on ‘infrastructure’ that is mostly transfer payments to people you like, to be paid for by people you don’t like, in the wake of a huge pandemic, and aside from potentially banning large areas of software development by requiring theoretically impossible tax reporting
The first part is just a jab at politics. IIRC the second part comments on some kinds of new proposed cryptocurrency regulations. When politicians regulate new technology, they compare it to old technology, and sometimes these comparisons make no sense and put an undue regulatory burden on the new technology. From what I understand, the proposed regulations could treat cryptocurrency miners as brokers, in which case miners would presumably fall under the purview of some kinds of financial regulation.
If this article is to be believed, the legislators tried to fix that problem. The article’s last section implies that this attempt failed, however:
Updated to add
The $1tr infrastructure bill has passed its Senate vote by 60-33, but the new terminology for cryptocurrency miners and researchers didn’t make it into the final legislation.
As so often happens in the Senate these days the bi-partisan amendment was blocked. Unanimous consent for the amendment was required and Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) objected, effectively killing the changes that had taken weeks of careful negotiating.
It’s now up to the House of Representatives to come up with its own version of the language in its bill, so it’s not over yet.
Citation?
The first part is just a jab at politics. IIRC the second part comments on some kinds of new proposed cryptocurrency regulations. When politicians regulate new technology, they compare it to old technology, and sometimes these comparisons make no sense and put an undue regulatory burden on the new technology. From what I understand, the proposed regulations could treat cryptocurrency miners as brokers, in which case miners would presumably fall under the purview of some kinds of financial regulation.
If this article is to be believed, the legislators tried to fix that problem. The article’s last section implies that this attempt failed, however: