This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 8th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Tax Day will be complicated for people who are crypto enthusiasts.

So what's the hold up in letting more people buy into the broad

crypto market through mutual funds or perhaps E. T. F.'s

exchange-traded funds? Cato's Jennifer Schulp discusses the role of

regulators and standing in the way of normalizing and making regular the buying and selling of cryptocurrency assets.

For anyone who has purchased and then sold, perhaps in rapid succession, asking for a friend here,

you would be amazed at exactly how complicated it is to do one's taxes.

And even the even Bitcoin or cryptocurrency exchanges will say this is extremely complicated and we don't really know how to do this and so it seems clear that people who want to make a purchase on the upside of the

crypto craze or fad depending on how you look at it might want to purchase

something where they're not themselves holding an asset buying and selling

they're instead buying something that is on an exchange to simplify that entire process.

At least that's a big part of the pitch

to people like me who don't want to do a complicated tax bill

at the end of the year.

So what do you view as like the strongest case for or possibly

against making crypto into an E.T. I think there's a lot of different cases that you can make. One of them is the

simplification case that you said, but I don't want to downplay the fact that sometimes it's

complicated to do your taxes if you're just selling and buying stocks

or exchange traded funds as well. It might be easier than doing it straight up with crypto,

but it could be complicated on that front as well. But being able to hold

...