I have been reading up on the upcoming infrastructure bill and have heard many different things.
According to this article, the US Congress is planning to introduce prison sentences for the use of mixers and privacy coins. Is this part of the same bill that will be going to the House of Representatives on September 27 of this month? If passed what do you guys think the implications will be for ZEC and crypto in general?
The key point is having freedom to utilize non-custodial solutions, as the laws so far have applied primarily to Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs).
Heres the bill itself and like Aiyadt says it applies to VASPs which specifically “(B) does not include any person who—
“(i) obtains a digital asset to purchase goods or services for themself;
“(ii) provides communication service or network access services used by a money transmitter; or
“(iii) develops, creates, or disseminates software designed to be used to issue a digital asset or facilitate financial activities associated with a digital asset.”.
Its a very invasive bill and after 2 months has 0 sponsors, I know Coincenter watching this too
Sorry if I’m not understanding. So is this a problem or not a problem for ZEC?
Hard to say really, it doesn’t seem like a very popular bill really but with viewing keys Zcash users can comply with the rule described in 402.b. This kind of goes way back to all that working with educating law enforcement about selective disclosure and stuff. It is under the “Bank Secrecy Act” amendment which requires institutions to collect and pass on certain customer information with the movement of monies between them and other institutions. It would be like going to a bank where you have or acquire an account and want to deposit a lot of cash, say $20k. Well, whether or not that happens is gonna depend on your ability to prove certain things. I don’t want to say it was forseen but kind of yeah, but idk we’ll see.
(b) Purpose.—The purpose of the rule described in subsection (a) shall be to ensure that anonymizing services, money mule, and anonymity-enhanced convertible virtual currencies are not used to prevent association of an individual customer with the movement of a digital asset, digital asset security, or virtual currency of which the customer is the direct or beneficial owner.
(The Bank Secrecy Act also requires said institutions to protect all of the collected and generated data from their customers so idk its weird)
In this video he states suspicious deposit limit of $10,000 will be lowered to $600. Anything over $600 will now be reported to the IRS.
Thats insane if true.
Thats how it is with normal income in the US; $600 at one time or $6000 across a year is the threshold for reporting and with crypto I would assume that will be a thing eventually even if all that other stuff doesn’t.
No, it is not. It is an entirely separate bill that has little chance of passing as-is. The bill is named “H.R. 4741: Digital Asset Market Structure and Investor Protection Act” and I wrote about it over a month ago in an effort to squelch rumors about it. Of course, rumors be rumoring and here we are.
I’ll just quote myself:
The good news is that this bill will likely not become law. Members of Congress introduce bills that will never be enacted all the time. It is sort of a way to show to their voters and lobbyists that they are working on issues. They may also try to insert pieces of their bills into larger bills as amendments.
This bill has no co-sponsors, so no other member of Congress has gone on the record as supporting it. It has only been submitted to the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Agriculture, and the Committee on Ways and Means. This is the beginning of a long process of edits, hearings, and votes before it even gets to the floor for a final vote – and then it would need to pass the Senate hurdle. In addition, it is very difficult to get any legislation through Congress right now since the Republicans and Democrats are so at odds with each other, and the Democrats have a weak governing coalition.
Finally, the GovTrack “prognosis” says “4% chance of being enacted according to Skopos Labs.” I have never seen a prognosis percentage like this before, so it may be new – and I don’t know what it’s based on. But I guess the algorithm, whatever it is, agrees that it is unlikely to pass. Pieces of the bill could still show up as attempted amendments to other bills, however.
So, don’t worry too much (yet). I’m posting this now to get ahead of any rumors that may start about this bill. I used to work in policy so I’m in a pretty good position to interpret the chances of this bill and the process for it possibly becoming law.
If anyone is interested in working on these issues, the Monero Project has a very active Policy Working Group that regularly submits official comments to regulatory bodies on these issues around the world, among other activities. Our next meeting is Tuesday Sept. 28 at 19:00 UTC. Feel free to join if you are interested.
Investors should not worry about whether investing in cryptos is legal or illegal. Also interesting to see how these apps like UnidoEP will fair against these regulations.