Mined It? Don't Pay Tax Yet — Congress Takes Up Two Crypto Tax Bills Today
For a decade the crypto industry has begged for "regulatory clarity." The first thing to actually land isn't licensing — it's the tax form. Because the IRS is more anxious than anyone: if it can't figure out how to tax you, it can't collect a dime.
Three key facts
On September 16, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee holds a markup vote on digital asset tax legislation, pushing a crypto tax framework toward a full House vote. The session focuses on two long-running headaches: whether miners and stakers owe tax the moment they receive new tokens, and whether the stock market's wash sale rules should extend to digital assets.
The first blade, H.R. 9175, the Mining and Staking Tax Clarity Act: no tax due on receipt of new tokens — taxation is deferred until the tokens are actually sold, then taxed as ordinary income. Under current rules, a miner owes income tax at market price the day a coin is mined — even if the price halves afterward, the bill still comes due. That is effectively a tax on unrealized gains, and it snaps the cash flow of small mining operations.
The second blade, H.R. 9172: extending wash sale and constructive sale anti-abuse rules to actively traded digital assets. What's a wash sale? Equity traders sell losing positions at year-end to book the tax loss, then buy back within 30 days — the loss is on paper, the position unchanged, the tax bill smaller. Crypto plays this game even wilder: with no wash sale constraint, the same loss can be "harvested" year after year while the IRS watches its tax base get legally hollowed out.
WangDou's Take
Read the two bills together and you get the classic carrot-and-stick combo: 9175 cuts producers loose, 9172 handcuffs traders. But the real signal hides in the ordering — Congress moved on tax law first, not securities law. Why? Because market-structure legislation like the Clarity Act turns into a turf war between the SEC and the CFTC. Tax law has no turf war: the IRS has exactly one demand — collect the money. The simpler the interest, the faster the legislation.
For the industry, 9175 is a lifeline. The biggest cost of mining and staking on U.S. soil isn't electricity — it's the cash-flow mismatch of "tax arrives before the coin is sold." Pass deferred taxation and the math for U.S. mines instantly improves, giving industrial reshoring a hard-money reason to exist. But don't celebrate 9172 too early — once wash sale rules land, DeFi's "sell the loss in December, buy it back in January" tax-harvesting loop is dead. A loss becomes a loss, no longer an ATM. In one sentence: candy for those who mine in earnest, doors closing on those who engineer their taxes. That is what mature regulation looks like — not absence of rules, but precision in applying them.
Source: KuCoin News (via ODAILY) · Onebullex