Hidden Danger in the Infrastructure Bill with Abraham Sutherland & Greg Xethalis - WBD408

Mr Obnoxious

Peter McCormack

Technology, News, Politics, Money, Investing, Finance, Bitcoin

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Location: Austin, TX
Date: Friday 8th October
Company: Independent, Multicoin Capital
Role: Independent, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer

In August, a bipartisan group of 69 senators passed a $1 trillion infrastructure package, including around $550 billion projected federal spending on roads, bridges, expanded broadband access and more.

While this may seem irrelevant to Bitcoin, this 2000+ page document outlined how the government plans to fund the bill. Under the 'Other Provisions' section, the bill focused on the reporting requirement for "brokers" of digital assets and their definition. These reporting requirements are designed to extract a tax from users who misreport or underreport their taxes.

This bill section caused a considerable backlash from bitcoiners as the proposed language is extensive and seems almost impossible to comply with.

While bitcoiners were up in arms about the broker definition, lawyer Abe Sutherland says that the bill contains an overlooked "digital assets" provision that could become a far bigger issue, affecting almost every bitcoin user if it becomes law.

In this interview, I talk to independent lawyer Abe Sutherland and Greg Xethalis, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Multicoin Capital, to discuss the onerous new reporting requirements hidden within the Infrastructure Bill.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an amendment to the tax code, but it's really a new criminal prohibition on peer-to-peer transfers.
0:10.0	And it's been overlooked.
0:12.0	Hello there, from Las Vegas, how are you doing?
0:14.0	You're well.
0:16.0	Welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I'm using to buy
0:20.0	Bitcoin.
0:21.0	I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I've got an interview with Abe Sutherland and
0:24.2	Greg Zales to discuss a provision within the infrastructure bill which has been overlooked.
0:29.8	Now this is a short interview as recorded last minute and I want people to focus on the content
0:34.2	so I'm going to be skipping sponsor as today.
0:36.8	I will though give a quick shout out to Gemini, blockfight ledger compass sportsbet
0:40.8	I.O exodus and casa for their continued support of the show.
0:44.6	Just as a quick intro. I met Abe and Greg last week in Austin at Unchained Capital.
0:49.5	They were hosting an event and they are two lawyers who have been spending a lot of time looking at the trillion dollar infrastructure bill
0:55.2	and trying to figure out all the ramifications that it may have for Bitcoin and you're not also for crypto.
1:00.3	They are. Now this was all huge news back in August when it was going
1:04.1	through the Senate, Twitter was going absolutely crazy at the time and no one
1:08.0	really knew what the implications would be because of the broad language
1:11.7	used in the bill and at the time the vast majority
1:14.4	of the tension it was getting was around the definition of a broker.
1:18.4	So when I bumped into Abe he was telling me that while this section is certainly important, there was another section of the bill that could have a far more profound effect.
1:26.0	This was something I not really heard anyone talk about, so last minute I got them together, got my camera guy in, and we recorded a show where they explained what the issues
	...

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