For the better part of a decade, Washington has tried to force 21st-century financial technology into a tax code built for another era. The results are predictable: confusion, unnecessary compliance costs, arbitrary tax treatment, and a bureaucracy that makes ordinary people pay for Washington’s failure to keep pace.

Today, buying a cup of coffee with bitcoin can create a tax-reporting obligation, moving digital assets across a network can generate taxable events, and miners and stakers can face taxes before they have even sold the assets they earned. That is not sound tax policy — it is government getting in the way of innovation.