What happened
On 15 November 2021 the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act became law as Public Law 117-58. Division H carries the act's revenue provisions, and one of them, section 80603, amends the Internal Revenue Code.
It adds a fourth category to the definition of a broker in section 6045(c)(1): "any person who (for consideration) is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person."
Three further changes travel with it. Digital assets become "specified securities", which pulls them into cost basis reporting. A "digital asset" is defined as "any digital representation of value which is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger or any similar technology as specified by the Secretary". And section 6050I, the rule requiring a trade or business that receives more than $10,000 in cash to file a report identifying who paid it, is amended to treat any digital asset as cash.
The amendments apply to returns required to be filed, and statements required to be furnished, after 31 December 2023.
What it changes
Being a broker under section 6045 is not a licence. It is a filing duty: you report your customers' proceeds on an information return, which means you must first know who your customers are and what they received.
That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the wording carries the weight it does. "Responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers" describes a custodial exchange exactly. On a plain reading it also describes a miner who includes a transaction in a block, a node operator who relays it, and a wallet developer whose software constructs it. None of those parties has a customer, and a reporting duty nobody can discharge is not a lighter obligation than one they can.
The 6050I amendment works from the other end. It lands on the recipient: a business paid in bitcoin above the threshold owes a report about the person who paid it.
What it does not change
It does not make anything unlawful, and it does not change how bitcoin is taxed. Bitcoin remains property, and gain is still measured on disposal.
It also does not settle who is covered. The definition of "digital asset" is expressly subject to what "the Secretary" specifies, so the boundary is delegated to Treasury rather than fixed by Congress. Section 80603 goes further and adds a rule of construction: nothing in it creates any inference, for periods before the effective date, about whether any person was a broker. Congress wrote the words and left the line to be drawn later.
Context
Section 6045 has required brokers to report customer sales for decades. This is an existing machine extended to a new asset class, not a new machine, which is why the drafting problem shows up as a definition rather than as a new regime.
The section also sits in the revenue title of a spending bill, which is where provisions go when they are counted as offsets against the bill's cost. A revenue estimate asks how much a rule collects. It does not ask who falls inside it.