Trump's first Treasury wanted names and home addresses behind crypto wallet transfers. His second buried the plan, with the president's family now billions richer from crypto.

On Dec. 18, 2020, with Christmas a week away and Donald Trump preparing to leave the White House, Steven Mnuchin's Treasury Department announced a plan that would require crypto exchanges and other financial institutions to collect more information about transactions involving wallets people controlled themselves.

The public was given just 15 days to comment, with most of that period falling over Christmas and New Year's, and the government said the urgency was justified by ‘national security concerns' and the growing use of cryptocurrencies in financial crime.

Six years later, President Donald Trump's second administration formally withdrew the proposal, ending a regulatory proceeding that had generated thousands of objections, survived the transition to Joe Biden's presidency, and appeared as withdrawn in a federal regulatory agenda more than two years before its final notice was published.

The reversal is unusual to say the least, because both decisions came from administrations led by the same president.

However, the more interesting part is what happened between them, as Washington spent years trying to decide how much information financial institutions should collect about people who use cryptocurrency without relying on a bank or exchange to hold their money.

What started as an effort to extend banking rules into crypto eventually became a much larger argument about financial privacy, forcing regulators to confront a basic difference between the two systems: banks generally know who owns an account, while public blockchains can record transactions without identifying the people controlling the wallets involved.

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