The Infrastructure Bill in the House: Big Benefits Will Come From a Big Push

We know we have to fight the infrastructure bill’s broken cryptocurrency language in the US House of Representatives. The current language forces broad financial reporting that will sabotage developers and operators and undermine privacy. The fight, though, can do more than just stop a terrible law. It can also propel crypto forward by educating the American electorate.

Most Americans do not understand crypto. In the recent fight over the language in the US Senate, only a handful of senators seemed informed. And in online discussions about the bill many Americans saw crypto mainly as a vehicle for crime. American crypto ignorance runs deep and hurts.

Educating Americans will make a difference. Broader understanding—of how crypto works, how it varies from coin to coin, and the how it will improve human endeavors—will be transformational. It is easy to imagine, for example, a knowledgeable government and electorate pushing for a crypto equivalent of the 1998 Internet Tax Freedom Act. That act accelerated the Internet and positioned the US to lead.

In the recent Senate fight, crypto advocates began a mobilization. Many called and wrote their senators. The media reported on it. This bit of publicity more than countered the awful outcome in the Senate where the Treasury Department and a few senators had drafted terrible crypto language behind closed doors, then the Senate dodged a vote on an amendment to improve it. Still, the net result was that crypto prices rose.

The expected fight in the House is our biggest opportunity yet to educate. The community is energized from the Senate fight and there are two big reasons for a push: 1) fixing the bill: saving the US from broken law, 2) increasing collective knowledge, knowledge that will allow America to take a leap forward.

We should give it our all. As the fight unfolds, with righteous energy we need to call, write, and visit our members of Congress to educate them on crypto. And we need to inform our family, friends, and neighbors. If we do this right and we do it in a big way, we will achieve both great objectives. It will be a watershed event, and we will come to look back on it as glorious.