ATO thinks Mining is different to Staking

I am trying to contact the ATO through their early engagement process. They recently updated their tax treatment for crypto currency taxation, however they are using incorrect definitions of mining.

https://community.ato.gov.au/t5/Cryptocurrency/staking-is-mining/td-p/71201
Really, Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are just different models in how to allocated the 'right' to mine a block.

A miners is someone who downloads the blockchain and adds block to it and are rewarded for this work. Its a general concept.

A Proof of Stake miner is given the right to mine 10% of the blocks if they are staking 10% of the coins. A Proof of Work miners is given the right to mine 10% of the blocks if they control 10% of the networks computational power.

However ATO treats POW Mining and POS Mining ( Staking ) differently. There is no hobby exemption for staking and it looks like you need to declare rewards as ordinary income - similar to if your are in the business of mining. Its not clear if you can deduct cost to run the full node and other expenses.

This guide, by koinly treats them properly.

"taxation will be different depending on whether you're mining as a hobby or are operating a crypto mining business. In order to determine whether you are mining crypto as a business, check out this section of ATO's website."

https://koinly.io/guides/crypto-tax-australia/

The ATO's as basically defining a car as a mode of transport powered by an internal combustion engine.

I hope, people can convince them to use the correct definitions - because treating staking like a business will basically mean its advantages to run the staking software on the cloud instead of your home computer so its easier to deduct costs from the staking 'income'. Calculating the market value for all rewards as they come would need to be automated by software and its not something you can do by hand... Its far easier to allocated all the rewards with a zero cost base and forget deducting costs ( which is allowed for hobby mining )

Its stupid to avoid doing something you want to do just because of the tax burden..