Bitcoin
Donald Trump supports ‘strategic stockpiling of Bitcoin’ in speech to cryptocurrency believers
Former President Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge the growth of cryptocurrencies and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his speech at the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.
Trump has announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It shall be the policy of my administration to hold 100 percent of all bitcoin that the United States government currently holds or acquires in the future… as a core strategic national stockpile of bitcoin,” he said.
At this time, the US government has more than 210,000 bitcoins that were seized through illegal operations such as the online black market Silk Road and the BitConnect ponzi scheme. At the time of this writing, he is worth approximately $14 billion.
This movement rumors confirmed spread by bitcoin enthusiasts who are hopeful that Trump’s endorsement of a reserve could boost the cryptocurrency’s price.
Trump also announced plans to appoint a bitcoin and crypto advisory board, tasked with “designing transparent regulatory guidance for the benefit of your industry” in the first 100 days of his next presidency. He said he wanted the US to become the “crypto capital of the world.”
Trump also promised to create a framework to ensure the safe expansion of stablecoins, “allowing us to extend the dominance of USD to other places in the world” and doubled his promise to dismiss any effort to create a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or a digital dollar, saying “there will never be a CBDC as long as I am President of the United States.”
“I will always defend the right to self-custody,” he told the cheering crowd. What received perhaps the biggest cheer was a first-day pledge to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler.
“The moment I take office, the harassment will cease and the weaponization of your industry will end,” he said, naming Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as a sworn enemy of the industry.
He promised to make regulations favorable to cryptocurrency mining operations in the U.S. so that workers would not have to “move to China.” Trump has again promised to free Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for his involvement in Silk Road online underground marketplacewhere people could buy items such as illegal drugs before it was closed in 2013.
The crowd was waiting for the announcement of the bitcoin strategic reserve. On July 22, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming posted “Big things… in store this week” on X, two days before Fox Business reported she would “announce legislation for a strategic bitcoin reserve” at the conference.
Lummis appeared before the crowd shortly after Trump left to announce a “gift to President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve bill she was drafting.
“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” she said, elaborating that the bill would take “the bitcoin that President Trump just mentioned and put it in the reserve —[and] this is just the beginning.”
“Over five years, the United States will pool 1 million bitcoins,” she added, “five percent of the world’s bitcoins, and they will be held for a minimum of 20 years and can be used for one purpose: to reduce our debt.”