I have also read this section of code. Moreover, my view is that since I sincerely believe this to be correct, even in the event it were overruled, it could not be construed as criminal.
It is not just that IRS guidance may be unlawful, if you look at their verbiage, it is unintelligible gibberish. "Digital assets" and other nonsense buzzwords are not real things, and they would have you believe that my posting this message would be a "digital asset" transaction.
More broadly, the fact that Bitcoin has a UTXO rather than account model might make it untaxable in any context ever, since it is just speech and not money.