German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 21/99, pp. 12447-12448.
Right honorable Frau President. Right honorable colleagues. Dear
Bitcoiner.
Two minutes and six seconds, so long is required, as per the Finance
Ministry, for each German crypto investor to confirm his vendor
name, address, tax number, and birth date. Seven million citizens
who hold the cryptos times 2.1 minutes makes some 235,000 hours.
That is almost 27 years of a lifetime at a go. The state thus knows
the expense to the precise minute. Yet unfortunately as to income
is nothing, no number, null. No number – ja, that distinctly fits
Finance Minister Klingbeil. For expense, the state figures minutely;
for income, it believes. For belief, one actually goes to the church.
We deliberate today in an evening hour the treaty law for a reporting
framework for crypto assets. The Federal government signed in
November 2024 in Uruguay. Today, 23 months later, the Bundestag
is allowed to confirm it was signed. We are here not the
legislator, we are the notary, and the notary today has the night shift.
Already since January, every German crypto vendor needs to report
each transaction of his customers to the Federal central office for
taxation. Today now comes the second part. From September 2027,
this data goes to 55 additional states.
Jens Behrens (SPD): And that is good so!
Name, address, tax number, birth date, place of birth, each purchase,
each sale, each exchange. Even the carry over to one’s own wallet
is to be reported.
Jens Behrens (SPD): Very good! So needs it be!
Who puts his own money in his pocket is in the data bank ten long
years.
Christian Görke (Linke): Gott sei Dank!
It gets better. Article 2 of the law empowers the Finance Ministry
in the future to expand by legal decree the catalogue of exchanging
data – without Bundestag, without Bundesrat. The parliament will
tonight be asked once and then never again.
And with whom then do we exchange lively data? With the
Cayman Islands, Panama, the Bahamas, Gibraltar and the
United Arab Emirates.
Jens Behrens (SPD): There where criminals already sit!
The Federal government needs to prescribe in writing to these
partners that German tax data is not allowed to be used in
proceedings in which the death penalty can be imposed. Do
you know what? That will function fatally.
Which states are actually missing from the list? There are for
example the U.S.A., the world’s largest crypto market, in
addition to completely “unimportant” nations like China, India,
Russia and Turkey. You here throw a dragnet over 56 states;
yet the net has giant holes of many hundred thousands of
kilometers’ extent – so as to speak with Annalena Baerbock.
Jens Behrens (SPD): You heard my speech, that we
are working on additional states.
The big fish know all that. Only the German small saver in
Michaelhausen knows it not. The whole can thus be designated
as a kind of fiscal racism. In each case is yielded for our German
Turks a lucrative business model, if they themselves and also we
Germans are to be protected from demand for data access.
How goes it better?
First: Article 2 eliminate. Over the data of the citizens decides
the parliament and not some unit in the Finance Ministry.
Second: Transfers to one’s own wallet, out of the reporting
obligation, and finally a limit on bagatelles, like those demanded
by the expert Steger in the hearing.
Third: Data exchange only with states which also have an
EU level of data protection.
Fourth: Legal security instead of a dragnet search. The one-year
retention term remains, and crypto will not be treated worse than
other investments. That, we demand since 2019.
State borders you do not control.
Heiko Hain (CDU/CSU): So!
The purses of our citizens you control with 55 additional states.
The AfD alone rejects this law. For freedom is the only thing
that counts.
Johannes Fechner (SPD): And money laundering.
[trans: tem]