Another try for the BITCOIN Act
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis re-introduced the bitcoin reserve proposal that stalled last year
Senator Cynthia Lummis | Gage Skidmore/"Cynthia Lummis" (CC license)
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After Trump’s executive order to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve fell flat for some, we have a new development.
Criticisms of the EO? The vague language around possibly buying more BTC. Plus, Trump doesn’t have Congressional support. Not yet, at least.
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis seeks to rectify that by re-introducing a bill that stalled last year.
“This asset is a game-changer for the whole world,” Lummis said Tuesday at a Bitcoin Policy Institute event. “So for America — the leader in financial innovation — to have sat on the sidelines for as long as we have is unusual for us.”
Trump’s executive order — committing to not selling the country’s stash of roughly 200,000 seized bitcoin — gets the US off the sidelines and “in the arena of global policymaking,” she added.
But it was still just a first step.
While Trump’s EO authorized the Treasury and Commerce secretaries to develop “budget-neutral” strategies to buy more bitcoin, Lummis’ bill draft offers more specifics.
In case you forgot, the senator’s so-called BITCOIN Act — first unveiled last July — includes buying up to 200,000 bitcoin per year over a five-year period. So a million BTC, or roughly 5% of the asset’s total supply.
The Treasury department would issue new gold certificates to the Federal Reserve that reflect current prices, and the Fed would use the difference (between the old and new certificates) to fund the buying.
The Secretary of the Treasury would hold all BTC bought for and deposited in this reserve for at least 20 years to ensure its “long-term stability and security,” the bill notes.
Michael Saylor spoke shortly after Lummis, doing some math for us.
Moving 20 years into the future, the Strategy executive chair’s base case for bitcoin price is more than $13 million per coin. Yes, you read that right.
Under that scenario, the ~200,000 BTC the US government already has from forfeiture proceedings would be worth about $3 trillion in 2045.
That alone is valuable, as Saylor said frankly: “Sometimes the absence of doing awful and stupid things is making money.” He was, of course, referring to selling bitcoin. Remember this tweet from crypto/AI czar David Sacks?
But the bigger opportunity is buying another million BTC to make the pile worth roughly $16 trillion, Saylor noted.
Lummis was at home sick with pneumonia during Friday’s White House crypto summit. At times that meant watching news anchors mistake bitcoin with ETH and other digital assets, she said.
Lummis said last month there’re Congress members still not understanding BTC’s role as a sort of “digital gold.” She noted that US states could thus approve a bitcoin reserve before the federal government.
The senator’s home state is among those where bitcoin reserve proposals have recently died.
Lummis’ PR team didn’t immediately comment on whether Lummis expects to see more support for the proposal this time around. I feel like we’ve preached about the value of patience before, so I’ll spare you.
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