Speaking to a crowd of 22,000 at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, Trump promised to “fire” SEC chair Gary Gensler, set up a crypto advisory council, and make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.”
by Jessica Klein, Wired.com, July 27, 2024
Former president Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge crypto growth and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his keynote address to the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.
Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It will be the policy of my administration to keep 100 percent of all bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires in the future … as a core of the strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” he said.
Right now, the US government owns more than 210,000 bitcoins that were seized via illegal operations like the online dark market Silk Road and the ponzi scheme BitConnect. It’s worth approximately $14 billion at time of writing.
This move confirmed rumors spread by bitcoin enthusiasts who are hopeful that endorsement of a reserve from Trump could bolster the price of the cryptocurrency.
Trump also announced plans to appoint a bitcoin and crypto advisory council, whose task would be to “design transparent regulatory guidance to 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 pledged to create a framework for ensuring the safe expansion of stablecoins, “allowing us to extend the dominance of the USD to other places around the world,” and doubled down on his vow to scrap any effort to create a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or digital dollar, saying “there will never be a CBDC while I’m president of the United States.”
“I will always defend the right to self-custody,” he told the exultant crowd. What got perhaps the biggest cheer was a day one promise to fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler.
“The moment I am sworn in, the persecution stops and the weaponization against your industry ends,” he said, name-checking Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as the industry’s sworn enemy.
He promised to make regulations friendly to crypto mining operations in the US, so workers wouldn’t have to “move to China.” Trump promised, again, to free Ross Ulbricht, imprisoned for life for his involvement with online underground market Silk Road, where people could buy items like illegal drugs before it was shut down in 2013.
The crowd expected the bitcoin strategic reserve announcement. 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 just after Trump walked off to announce a “present to President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve bill she’d been drafting.
“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” she said, elaborating that the bill would take “the bitcoin President Trump just mentioned and pull it into the reserve—[and] that’s only the beginning.”
“Over five years, the United States will assemble 1 million bitcoin,” she added, “Five percent of the world’s bitcoin, and it will be held for a minimum of 20 years and can be used for one purpose—reduce our debt.”
The bill further provides that the US will “convert excess reserves at our 12 federal reserve banks into bitcoin over five years,” so that instead of holding a depreciating asset (the US dollar, which she said has been “designed to debase at least 2 percent per year”), it’ll be holding an asset with potential for growth.
There’s no arguing that the value of bitcoin has increased over time, though it’s no higher now than it was before Trump’s keynote. It peaked around $69,000 this morning and, as of just after Trump’s talk, sits around $68,400.
Trump’s desire to add bitcoin to the country’s strategic reserve doesn’t mean it will happen, even if he is elected. Ari Paul, founder of BlockTower Capital, an institutional investment firm specializing in crypto, took to X about a week before the conference to put the odds of a bitcoin strategic reserve happening in the next four years at “10 to 1.”
The US Federal Reserve currently includes assets like gold and foreign (fiat) currencies. They’re used as credit lines to keep the US economy stable, particularly in times of crisis. Many in the crypto community have criticized it for encouraging the US Treasury to “print money” during Covid-19, which has led to lasting inflation. Adding bitcoin to the reserve could, per Lummis, “cut our debt in half.”
Trump has drastically changed his tone about bitcoin from his time as president, when he said it “seems like scam.” He’s since described himself as “good” with crypto.
On Saturday he praised the crowd as “high-IQ individuals” as opposed to the “low-IQ individual” he’s running against (referring to presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris). He credited the room with predicting inflation: “You understand inflation more than anyone else,” he said. “They didn’t listen to you.”
Trump’s running mate, Republican senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, is also a fan of crypto. He reported owning between $100,000 and $250,000 in cryptocurrencies in 2022. As of the start of the Bitcoin Conference on July 25, Trump had reportedly received around $4 million worth of cryptocurrencies in campaign donations, in bitcoin, Ether, Ripple, and the US-dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC.
Because of that, we might be at the mercy of Trump. “Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar. The behavior of the current US Government is threatening the dollar,” he said. “The danger to our financial future does not come from crypto, it comes from Washington, DC.”
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