Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, the default is. One of the first thing I did is like, I need a software. This is all on chain, so surely, there's a way for this to automate and track for me. I won't name the product because I can't endorse a product, but I found a particular software that I liked, that I used, and helped me track all that stuff. The motivation was a sincere one, which is, hey, we want to make sure that the people aren't evading taxes. Actually, that's what it was. It wasn't a tax on the broker. It was going to require anybody who was defined as a broker to provide tax information to the IRS. It would have required developers to all of a sudden provide tax information. Which makes sense if you're not familiar with crypto, because that is the way that our USD-based infrastructure works, where if you have a brokerage account somewhere, you can just count on the fact that it's calculating all your taxes for you, it'll tell the IRS, and it'll send you a copy so that you know what to pay or at least you know what to include in your tax return. Because that's not mandatory in crypto, none of the brokerages do it. It's actually a little bit difficult in many ways, especially in DeFi to figure out what your taxes are. But you face this other problem where it may not be what we think of as like a brokerage or an exchange that is generating these taxable events for you. You would need every application developer to be spitting these things out too, which is, as you mentioned, pretty untenable. Right. The senator who proposed that had to go down to the well of the Senate and basically say, I did not intend for it to sweep in all these developers, wrote letters, and those sorts of things. That's actually important to do, because that way, if anything ever goes to court, they could refer to that as, hey, this was actually congressional intent. It wasn't to sweep up all the developers, but was to actually go after legitimate brokers. That was an aha moment (I think) for all of us, but certainly for the crypto community was that infrastructure bill. That's unfortunately how things do get legislated around here a lot. I am hopeful that with respect to crypto though, that going forward, we'll be more thoughtful and do things like what I think is appropriate, which is to take sort of little bite sized chunks as we understand them, because the last thing you want to do is put something forward that you only sort of understand, and then ultimately, you cause a heck of a lot more problems than you intend to. That's the direction we seem to be going in crypto. That's actually really encouraging and not normally how we operate around here.…

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