Former President Donald Trump has outlined a plan to boost cryptocurrency growth and turn the United States into a cryptocurrency mining powerhouse in his keynote speech at the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.
Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the United States. “It will be the policy of my administration to hold 100 percent of all bitcoins that the U.S. government currently owns or acquires in the future… as the core of the national strategic bitcoin reserve,” he said.
At this time, the United States government owns more than 210,000 bitcoins what were they attorney through illegal operations such as the online black market Silk Road to the BitConnect ponzi schemeAt the time of writing, it is worth approximately $14 billion.
This movement Rumors confirmed spread by Bitcoin enthusiasts who hoped that Trump’s approval of a reserve could boost the price of the cryptocurrency.
Trump also announced plans to appoint a bitcoin and cryptocurrency advisory board, tasked with “designing transparent regulatory guidance for the benefit of our industry,” within the first 100 days of his upcoming presidency. He said he wanted the United States to become the “cryptocurrency capital of the world.”
Trump also pledged to create a framework to ensure the safe expansion of stablecoins, “allowing us to extend the dominance of the dollar to other places around the world,” and He doubled his promise dismiss any efforts to create a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or a digital dollar, saying that “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 jubilant crowd. What received perhaps the loudest cheer was his pledge on the first day to fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
“The moment I take the oath of office, the persecution will stop and the use of weapons against your industry will end,” he said, mentioning Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as the industry’s sworn enemy.
Trump promised to make regulations favorable to cryptocurrency mining operations in the United States, so that workers would not have to “move to China.” Trump once again promised to free Ross Ulbricht, who was jailed for life for his involvement in the Silk Road online underground marketplace, where people could buy items like illegal drugs before it was shut down in 2013.
The crowd was awaiting 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 that would “announce legislation for a strategic bitcoin reserve” at the conference.
Lummis appeared before the crowd just after Trump left to announce a “gift to President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve bill she had been drafting.
“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” he said, explaining that the bill would take “the bitcoin that President Trump just mentioned and put it into the reserve, (and) that’s just the beginning. In five years, the United States will collect 1 million bitcoins, 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 only: to reduce our debt.”