Early-stage U.S. House bill would ban CoinJoined coins from CEXs (Unlikely to become law)

This information comes from Monero friendlies. BCH🤝XMR

On July 28, 2021 U.S. House Representative Donald Beyer Jr. (Virginia 8th district, Democrat) introduced H.R. 4741: Digital Asset Market Structure and Investor Protection Act. It appears that this bill is unlikely to become law. More on that later. First, the parts of the bill that may impact BCH's CashFusion CoinJoin privacy-enhancing protocol:

​

(b) Purpose

The purpose of the rule described in subsection (a) shall be to ensure that anonymizing services, money mule, and anonymity-enhanced convertible virtual currencies are not used to prevent association of an individual customer with the movement of a digital asset, digital asset security, or virtual currency of which the customer is the direct or beneficial owner.

(c) Requirements

The rule described in subsection (a) shall—

(1) require any financial institution to prohibit any person from engaging in any transactions that involves digital assets or digital asset securities and—

(A) anonymizing services;

(B) money mules; or

(C) anonymity-enhanced convertible virtual currencies;

[....]

In this section, the term ‘virtualcurrency’, ‘anonymizing service’, ‘money mule’, and ‘anonymity-enhanced convertible virtual currency’ have the meanings given such terms by the Secretary of the Treasury, acting through the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

We are still working on determining where the Secretary of Treasury defines these terms, if they have even been defined yet.

CashFusion may be affected by this since it could be considered an anonymizing service. Therefore, centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Gemini, etc. might refused coins that have gone through a CashFusion transaction.

The good news is that this bill will likely not become law. Members of Congress introduce bills that will never be enacted all the time. It is sort of a way to show to their voters and lobbyists that they are working on issues. They may also try to insert pieces of their bills into larger bills as amendments.

This bill has no co-sponsors, so no other member of Congress has gone on the record as supporting it. It has only been submitted to the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Agriculture, and the Committee on Ways and Means. This is the beginning of a long process of edits, hearings, and votes before it even gets to the floor for a final vote -- and then it would need to pass the Senate hurdle. In addition, it is very difficult to get any legislation through Congress right now since the Republicans and Democrats are so at odds with each other, and the Democrats have a weak governing coalition.

Finally, the GovTrack "prognosis" says "4% chance of being enacted according to Skopos Labs." I have never seen a prognosis percentage like this before, so it may be new -- and I don't know what it's based on. But I guess the algorithm, whatever it is, agrees that it is unlikely to pass. Pieces of the bill could still show up as attempted amendments to other bills, however.

So, don't worry too much (yet). I'm posting this now to get ahead of any rumors that may start about this bill. I used to work in policy so I'm in a pretty good position to interpret the chances of this bill and the process for it possibly becoming law.

EDIT: The GovTrack info and the bill text itself was inconsistent about whether it had been referred to a committee. I edited the post to say that it had been referred to committees, since the bill text said it had been.

EDIT2: If I had to write the post title again, I probably would have said "would likely ban..." since interpretation of law can be complicated.

submitted by /u/Rucknium
[link] [comments]

source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/p36lh3/earlystage_us_house_bill_would_ban_coinjoined/