Back in August, there were some dire warnings about what the Biden Administration’s proposed infrastructure bill might do to the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector by driving crypto miners out of the United States, crippling America’s leadership role, etc. The crypto sector reacted by mobilizing. Legislators are subject to full court-lobbying. It was however too late for the digital-asset language to be corrected, so the infrastructure bill was passed into law in November.

The good news is that the infrastructure law won’t take effect until January 2024, which allows lots of time to patch up its shortcomings. The downside is that its worrisome aspects — particularly an expanded definition of who or what is a “broker” and some new digital-asset reporting requirements — haven’t gone away. Charles Hoskinson was the founder and CEO of Noted in mid November shortly after the bill’s signing, the “bad [crypto] language” is now enshrined in law.