With the passing of the infrastructure bill in the Senate, men like Mark Cuban are getting worried about what could potentially happen to the crypto space in America in the coming future.
Mark Cuban Doesn’t Want Holds Put on the Crypto Space
One of the most controversial things about the infrastructure bill in the United States – aside from the fact that it was passed without being fully written – was that it contained a section detailing cryptocurrency taxation. This taxation would allegedly pull in as much as $28 billion from crypto investors that Congress would then put towards America’s ailing power and transportation systems.
This may seem like a big number on paper, but when one considers that the total value of the infrastructure bill was roughly $1 trillion, the former figure is quite small. Nevertheless, the section regarding crypto taxation contained very broad verbiage that failed to specifically describe what companies qualified as crypto brokers. The wording, as it was, made it sound like crypto software developers and even miners fell into this category, which of course, they don’t.
While some were proposing amendments to the bill to try and clarify this section, the changes were rejected and the bill was passed through in the Senate, where it must now undergo evaluation by the House of Representatives. Men like Mark Cuban feel that this was a big mistake, and Cuban made sure to voice his opinion about where Congress is heading in terms of crypto regulation.
In a recent interview, he stated:
Shutting off this growth engine would be the equivalent of stopping e-commerce in 1995 because people were afraid of credit card fraud or regulating the creation of websites because some people initially thought they were complicated and didn’t understand what they would ever amount to.
Other figures, like Jack Dorsey – a longtime bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate – were also quick to voice their anti-regulatory attitudes and express distaste for the bill as it was written. He suggested that the verbiage in the bill needed to be clarified before it could be pushed forward. He stated:
Forcing reporting rules on Americans who develop software and hardware, who mine and secure the network, or who run nodes to build resilience and efficiencies is an impossible task that will only drive development and operation of this critical technology outside the U.S.
Too Much Taxation?
Others, while taking jabs at the writing, also expressed unhappiness with the heavier taxation that the country is trying to force upon its people. Paolo Ardoino – chief executive at Bitfinex – said that the U.S. was heading towards a dangerous position of over regulation and taxation, and that the space would likely suffer in the end. Adroino states:
The bill has the potential to swamp cryptocurrency transactions in the country with an invasive dragnet.
