The crowd was anticipating the announcement of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. On July 22, Sen. Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming posted “Big Things … in Store This Week” on X, two days before Fox Business reported that she would “announce Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Legislation” at the conference.
Lummis appeared before the crowd just after Trump left to announce a “gift for President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve bill she was drafting.
“This is our Louisiana buy moment,” she said, specifying that the note would take “the bitcoins that President Trump just mentioned and pull them into the reserve –[and] this is just the beginning.”
“In five years, the United States will collect 1 million bitcoins,” she added, “Five percent of the world’s bitcoins and will be held for a minimum of 20 years and can be used for one purpose – to reduce our debt.”
The bill also stipulates that the U.S. will “convert excess reserves at our 12 Federal Reserve Banks into bitcoin over five years,” so that instead of holding a depreciating asset (the U.S. dollar, which it says is “designed to depreciate at least 2 percent of year”), will own an asset with growth potential.
There’s no arguing that Bitcoin’s value has increased over time, although it’s no higher now than it was before Trump’s keynote. This morning it peaked around $69,000 and just after Trump’s speech it was 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, reached out to X about a week before the conference to rate the odds of a strategic bitcoin reserve over the next four years at “10 to 1.”
The US Federal Reserve currently includes assets such as gold and foreign (fiat) currencies. They are used as lines of credit to keep the US economy stable, especially during times of crisis. Many in the crypto community criticized him for encouraging the US Treasury to “print money” during Covid-19, leading to persistent inflation. Adding bitcoin to the reserve could, according to Lummis, “cut our debt in half.”
Trump dramatically changed his tone on bitcoin from his time as president when he said it “looks like a scam.” He has 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 forecasting inflation: “You understand inflation more than anyone,” he said. “They didn’t listen to you.”
Trump’s running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, is also a fan of crypto. He reported holding between $100,000 and $250,000 in cryptocurrencies in 2022. As of the start of the Bitcoin conference on July 25, Trump had received about $4 million worth of cryptocurrencies in campaign donations, in Bitcoin, Ether, Ripple and the US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC.
Because of this, we may be at Trump’s mercy. “Bitcoin does not threaten the dollar. The behavior of the current US government threatens the dollar,” he said. “The threat to our financial future doesn’t come from crypto, it comes from Washington, DC.”
