Former President Donald Trump outlined a plan to accelerate cryptocurrency development and make the United States a cryptocurrency mining powerhouse in his opening speech at the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.
Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the U.S. “It will be the policy of my administration to retain 100 percent of all bitcoin that the U.S. government currently owns or acquires in the future… as the core of a strategic national bitcoin reserve,” he said.
At the moment the US government has over 210,000 bitcoins it was occupied through illegal operations such as the online murky market Silk Road and bitconnect ponzi schemeAt the time of this writing, it is worth approximately $14 billion.
This move confirmed rumors spread by bitcoin enthusiasts who hope Trump’s support for the reserve could boost the cryptocurrency’s price.
Trump also announced plans to establish a bitcoin and cryptocurrency advisory board tasked with “developing clear regulatory guidelines to benefit the industry” within the first 100 days of his next presidency. He said he wants the United States to become the “cryptocurrency capital of the world.”
Trump also promised to create a framework to ensure the sheltered expansion of stablecoins, “which will allow us to extend the dominance of the USD to other places around the world” and he doubled his oath abandon any attempt to create a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or 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-care,” he told the jubilant crowd. Perhaps the biggest applause came when he promised to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler on the first day of his term.
“The moment I am sworn in, the persecution will end and the use of your industry as a weapon against you will end,” he said, singling out Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as a sworn enemy of industry.
He promised to make regulations amiable to U.S. cryptocurrency mining operations so workers don’t have to “move to China.” Trump also vowed to free Ross Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the underground online marketplace Silk Road, where people could buy things like illegal drugs before it was shut down in 2013.
The crowd was expecting an announcement about the bitcoin strategic reserve. On July 22, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis posted on X, “Big things… this week,” two days before Fox Business reported at the conference, she was to “announce legislation regarding a strategic bitcoin reserve.”
Lummis appeared before the crowd just after Trump left to announce her “gift to President Donald Trump”: a bitcoin reserves bill she was drafting.
“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” she said, explaining 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 the course of five years, the United States will have accumulated 1 million bitcoins,” she added, “five percent of the world’s bitcoins, which will be held for at least 20 years and can be used for one purpose: reducing our debt.”