Bitcoin Daily: Crypto Investor Sues IRS; Crypto Advocates Eye US Senate Bills That Target Encryption

A former Coinbase user, Jim Harper, is looking to protect his privacy from the IRS through a lawsuit, CoinDesk reported.

The user received a now-infamous crypto letter from the IRS last August, which informed him and others that the IRS had “information” on their crypto accounts and that the government agency believed taxes had not been paid on the crypto, according to CoinDesk.

Now, Harper is suing the IRS, its commissioner and up to 10 unnamed agents, saying that if the IRS illegally accessed his data, he wants it destroyed. He said per the report that a win in the case would let other recipients of the letter do the same thing.

In other news, cryptocurrencies have no way to abide by proposed new rules in numerous U.S. bills on the table, industry officials say, according to CoinDesk.

The bills in question include the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act and the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, the former of which is a new bill and the latter of which has been in the works for months and gone through several amendments.

The LAED Act would end encrypted communications, giving law enforcement a backdoor to access the data with a court order. And the EARN IT Act would try to fight child exploitation online by cutting back on privacy for social media or tech companies, although the exact ways this would happen have changed numerous times.

Critics of the bills say cryptocurrencies and blockchains, which often depend on privacy, would have no way to comply without giving up that same privacy.

Meanwhile, Grayscale reported its largest quarterly inflows with $905.8 million for the second quarter. The number is nearly twice that of the previous quarterly high of $503.7 million in the first quarter.

And inflows into Grayscale products hit over $1 billion over the past six months, which the company said demonstrates “sustained demand for digital asset exposure despite a backdrop characterized by economic uncertainty.”

Grayscale’s cumulative investments have reached $2.6 billion across all its products, and new investors in Q2 totaled $124.1 million.