Blocktime
Your go-to Bitcoin podcast hosted by Pierre Rochard, VP of Research at Riot. Tune in weekly for thought-provoking discussions, exclusive interviews, and a deep dive into the disruptive power of Bitcoin.
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Blocktime
Episode 42: Bitcoin Act of 2024 with Pierre Rochard
We're back with Episode 42! Can Bitcoin transform national reserves and redefine America's financial future? On this episode of Block Time, we explore Senator Cynthia Lummis' groundbreaking Bitcoin Act of 2024 and its proposal to create a national Bitcoin reserve. Delving into the strategic implications of this legislation, we examine how Bitcoin's resilience and decentralized architecture could play a pivotal role in maintaining U.S. economic competitiveness. From understanding the peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin to the crucial function of Bitcoin mining, we aim to provide you with a comprehensive look at why this act could be a game-changer. Join us as we confront counter-arguments and highlight the compelling reasons for integrating Bitcoin into national reserves, shaping the future of the U.S. economy.
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Welcome back to Block Time, where we take a deep dive into topics relating to Bitcoin, bitcoin mining and the energy grid. So today we're really going to take a deep dive on Bitcoin legislation. On Bitcoin legislation, this particular piece of legislation was recently introduced by the senator from Wyoming, senator Cynthia Lummis, and it is called the Bitcoin Act of 2024. It's a follow-up to a speech that Senator Lummis gave in the Bitcoin 2024 Nashville conference, where she announced the introduction of this bill to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Her announcement followed the announcement from former President Donald J Trump, where he announced a similar type of idea of a national stockpile of Bitcoin. So similar concept. I'll highlight the only difference that we know of, because he has not introduced a bill, but perhaps this will be the bill that will win his endorsement. So I wanted to will be the bill that will win his endorsement, so I wanted to go through the bill line by line, read through it. I'll provide some comments of my own as we go through it and then I'll also provide some of the arguments I've heard against it and why I think those arguments don't hold a lot of water and why I think ultimately, this bill makes a lot of sense for the United States the bill starts with to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and other programs to ensure the transparent management of Bitcoin holdings of the federal government, to offset costs utilizing certain resources of the Federal Reserve System and for other purposes, be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled.
Speaker 1:Section 1. This act may be cited as the quote boosting innovation, technology and competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024, or the Bitcoin Act of 2024. So there's a rich tradition in the United States to create acronyms, so you have the acronym result that you want and then you fill in the words to get to it so famously. There's the PATRIOT Act, which was a particularly effective one, even though its track record is certainly controversial. An example of a really ineffective acronym is the DAMLA Act, which was introduced by Elizabeth Warren. I think that she took the opposite approach of starting with the words of Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act and then accepted the resulting acronym, which I don't think that's the way to go. So Bitcoin Act, I think. Really well named. It is exactly what the title suggests.
Speaker 1:Section two findings Congress finds the following One the global financial landscape is rapidly evolving, with digital assets playing an increasingly significant role in the world economy. So here I mean I think this is pretty uncontroversial that over the past 15 years of Bitcoin's existence, it's gone from having a total market cap of $0 to north of $1 trillion. So in just a decade and a half, bitcoin has become a macro asset, and an increasingly significant one. Two Bitcoin has demonstrated resilience, widespread adoption and served as a medium of exchange and a store of value for more than a decade. So I think the resilience piece is really important, because what that encompasses is the resilience of the software itself, by virtue of being free and open source, so that any kind of bugs or malfunctions of the software can be addressed by anybody. There's no Bitcoin corporation that you have to work for in order to fix the software. Lots of different people have contributed not only fixes to bugs, but also rewriting it from scratch in their preferred programming language. So there's several different implementations of the Bitcoin protocol in software Bitcoin node software, as we call it and the further level of resilience is around the nodes.
Speaker 1:So after you compile the code into a executable binary, then you run that, and with Bitcoin Node software, what happens at that point is that it downloads the entire ledger history from other peers on the network. They are peers because they are not authorities, in the sense that you are cross-checking all of their work cryptographically to make sure that nobody's feeding you bad information, and by creating a peer-to-peer network of nodes. This is really how you achieve maximum resilience for a network. That is, that you're not relying on any given server, there's no centralized authorities, and so you have the whole monetary ledger, the whole balance sheet and all the history of transactions for Bitcoin replicated globally. So if you're running a Bitcoin node here in Texas, or one in Canada or in Europe or in Africa, or wiped out all of our electronics, the other side of the world would still be able to continue to use Bitcoin and, furthermore, when we come back onto the network, we would be able to come back onto the Bitcoin network without having to trust the other side of the world, because we'd be able to cryptographically verify all of the data. So the resilience of the network has led to an uptime of greater than 99%. So Bitcoin operates 24-7. The last hiccup was more than a decade ago, in 2013, when there was a bug that had to be rolled back. So knock on wood, that doesn't happen again, but even if it does, the system was able to pretty quickly recover from that setback.
Speaker 1:And then the other layer to the resilience is the ownership of private keys, so anybody can hold their own private keys. They don't have to rely on a custodian although there are custodians that have emerged, nobody's forcing you to to rely on. They're purely there as a convenient service provider. And last but not least, the Bitcoin mining the Bitcoin mining that is providing for the ordering of transactions being added to the ledger. That is also very resilient where, on a regular basis, for example here in Texas, we'll have Bitcoin mining curtailments where whole facilities are turned off of Bitcoin miners. And if you're using the Bitcoin network, you don't really notice it at all because Bitcoin mining is globally distributed and wherever you are in the world, you're not far from a Bitcoin miner as well, and wherever you are in the world, you're not far from a Bitcoin miner as well. So this is really important to note that Bitcoin has demonstrated this level of resilience, because this decentralization is really what sets it apart from any other asset in the world. And then, furthermore, the widespread adoption, where we're 15 years in and Bitcoin continues to be number one in terms of cryptocurrencies, so Ethereum number two is a distant second, and the adoption of Bitcoin far surpasses other cryptocurrencies that try to be decentralized.
Speaker 1:And, furthermore, bitcoin can serve as a medium of exchange. So people will criticize that, oh, I can't go to my local laundromat or my local coffee shop and spend Bitcoin, and the way I characterize it is that quite often, it really ends up being a payment network of last resort, that is, that when all of the other payment networks have failed, here's one that will work, and so, in situations where you have hyperinflation or corruption or whatever it is that centralized options are not working, decentralized alternative is crucial. And, furthermore, when we look at the data from the Bitcoin blockchain right, because we're able to download the whole ledger and see all the transactions we do know that there are trillions of dollars worth of Bitcoin being transacted on the Bitcoin network. So, even if it's not your day-to-day experience with coffee payments, there are still lots of people around the world using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, and that is demonstrated in the data. Last but not least, is a store of value. So the majority of the Bitcoin that are on the ledger have not moved in more than a year, and so this really shows how much people are using Bitcoin as long-term savings, and when we look at the data, that is a trend where more and more people are holding Bitcoin long term. Eventually, what I think we'll have is where 99% of the Bitcoin are being held long term haven't moved in more than a year and then, a small sliver, that 1% of the Bitcoin will be circulating in the economy at a high velocity through a layer two network like Lightning, and so all the payments will be handled by a small fraction of the Bitcoin being circulated, changing hands. So further, just adding some commentary there let's go to point number three here. Just adding some commentary there. Let's go to point number three here. Just as gold reserves have historically served as a cornerstone of national financial security, bitcoin represents a digital age asset capable of enhancing the financial leadership and security of the United States in the 21st century global economy, in the 21st century global economy. So this is, I think, a key part of understanding the motivation for why the government should hold a Bitcoin reserve.
Speaker 1:If we look back at the history of the US dollar, the US dollar started out as describing a coin, a Spanish dollar, which was a certain amount of silver. So eventually this became the unit of account and it became detached from the actual physical silver coin to just a reference to the silver coin. And as the United States developed and found gold, then eventually they shifted it from saying okay, well, the dollar is referring to this amount of silver to saying the dollar is referring to this amount of gold. Now there was bimetallism where they were trying to say, oh, it's this amount of silver and this amount of gold. It didn't work out very well. Silver eventually essentially became demonetized, where people were not really using silver as money anymore, and it really became gold.
Speaker 1:The gold reserves, whether it was held by banks or by the government, was a key part of making sure that the dollar maintained its value by making sure that, if you have one dollar then stopped being redeemable for the public in the United States. Then, finally, in 1971, the gold stopped being redeemable even for foreign governments that wanted to trade in dollars for gold. You might wonder well, today we just have these gold reserves and they're kind of useless. So why would we have a Bitcoin reserve? I actually I don't think the gold reserves are useless. In fact, I don't think any of the.
Speaker 1:There's other reserves held by the government. For example, you could look at how much land the government owns out west and what they enabled the government to have is the option to sell that asset. And this is really it's kind of a nuanced point, because there's a difference between selling an asset and if the government sells gold. What happens is that essentially they're destroying dollars because they're taking dollars out of the economy and then they're putting gold into the economy, and so when they're taking dollars out of the economy, that helps reduce inflation or even create deflation, and vice versa, right. So if they're acquiring gold, then they are creating dollars. So even having this option available to them is a way of signaling to markets that if inflation really got out of hand, we could sell our gold. And that actually does help tame inflation expectations, because quite often financial markets are based on what they expect to happen in the future rather than anything really happening today. So the gold reserves do provide value, like that of and you could liken it to nuclear weapons right when the mutually assured destruction, the expectation of it, makes it so that you don't have to use the nuclear weapons, you just have it hanging over people's heads, and so gold reserves play a similar role. So gold reserves play a similar role, and what Senator Lummis here is suggesting in her act is that a Bitcoin reserve would also be a powerful tool in the toolkit of making sure that there is an asset that is fit for purpose in this digital age that can fill that similar role to the gold reserves.
Speaker 1:Number four the acquisition and long-term storage of substantial quantities of Bitcoin by the United States can strengthen the financial condition of the United States, providing a hedge against economic uncertainty and monetary instability. So this really applies whether you're talking about an individual holding Bitcoin for the long term as long-term savings, or if you're talking about a company or a non-profit or a local government, a state government or the federal government. This argument applies at any level that by holding Bitcoin on your balance sheet, you are strengthening your balance sheet because you're holding a high quality asset and also you're positioning yourself to be ready for future uncertainty. Now, when we talk about hedging against economic uncertainty, I think people usually assume the negative of okay, something bad is going to happen, so I better have a resource on hand ready to deploy and to mitigate a negative risk. But it might also be something positive. It might be a positive opportunity to invest or acquire another asset. So, for example, if we look at US history, we've acquired assets like the Louisiana Purchase or even acquiring Alaska. So it might be the case that we want to hold a reserve of Bitcoin because there will be an interesting investment opportunity for the government at some point in the future. But it might also be the case that they need this in order to offset a natural disaster or some kind of economic or monetary setback. You know if, for example, the Federal Reserve, if the US dollar were to get hacked, and what if something were to happen in a cybersecurity attack on the US financial system? Perhaps the outcome would be that Bitcoin would be the only functioning monetary backbone in the country, and it would really behoove us to have some on the federal government's balance sheet to be able to recover from a disaster like that.
Speaker 1:Number five a Bitcoin, as a decentralized and finitely scarce digital asset, offers unique properties that complement existing national reserves, strengthening the position of the United States dollar in the global financial system. So I think that highlighting the unique aspect of Bitcoin is crucial, because it's not unusual for people to conflate Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies, or even to conflate Bitcoin with Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs past financial or hobbyist, baseball card type collectibles. So how do we differentiate? Well, along two axes One is the decentralization that we covered earlier, and two, the finite scarcity. So the finite scarcity is really unprecedented in human history, because that cap on Bitcoin supply of 21 million, where there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin, that's never existed before, which means that if you acquire one Bitcoin, that means that you hold a fixed percentage of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist and you can't get diluted out of that one Bitcoin. So that finite scarcity is very appealing in a world where, for example, beanie Babies, they're going to continue to manufacture Beanie Babies. There's never going to be a finite scarcity of Beanie Babies. Even if we look at art, for example, they might say well, look, this artist passed away, and so there's finite scarcity of their art. That is true, but it's offset by the fact that there's no fungibility, that is, that the art is not divisible and it's not tradable in fungible units like Bitcoin is.
Speaker 1:And so Bitcoin really has a unique set of properties that no other asset has. That makes it an asset that makes sense for the government to hold in reserve in the national reserves as complementary to other national reserves. So I mentioned the gold, the land. There's also a strategic petroleum reserve. There's also reserves of things like medicine and food. You can imagine why that's a good idea when we think about having several legs on the chair, so that we have national resilience. It makes sense to diversify and to hold assets, that each asset has unique properties to it that make it complementary to the other assets being held on the national balance sheet. And that's the point of number six here. Diversification of the national assets of the United States, including Bitcoin, can enhance financial resilience and position the United States at the forefront of global financial innovation. That last piece is really important, and this is something that I've heard politicians bring up and policymakers that this is really a Bitcoin. Being a global phenomenon means that the United States it's not just about ourselves, it's about what are others doing, right? So what are other countries doing with regards to Bitcoin and how can we make sure that we're staying competitive and that we're keeping up with what other countries are doing? And this bill, if passed, would really set the United States up to be ahead of the competition and to accumulate more Bitcoin than any other country.
Speaker 1:Ok, so let's go into Section 3. Section 3 gets into definitions. So the first term defined is airdrop. So the term airdrop means a gratuitous distribution of digital assets to holders of Bitcoin in a broad, equitable and non-discretionary manner. So we've seen people do airdrops where they'll create a new token, and the way that they distribute it is by just giving it to anybody who's currently holding Bitcoin, for example, which might present some unique problems if it's the government holding Bitcoin. So we'll see how they handle airdrops later in the act. Number two, the Bitcoin purchase program, means the program established under Section 5A, which we'll get to.
Speaker 1:Cold storage means a method of storing private keys required to transact in Bitcoin with a nexus to a secure physical location protected from unauthorized access and isolated from any network connections. So cold storage is a really important concept in Bitcoin. The private keys are required to transact in Bitcoin in two ways. One is that in order to receive Bitcoin, you're going to have to create an address, and that address is the result of a public key, which is the result of elliptic curve multiplication from a private key. And so what the government? And really a best practice for anyone, and that's what I like about this act. It's like a lot of this is. It's good for the government to do this, but it's really good for everyone to do it. It really establishes some great guidelines.
Speaker 1:So when you're storing your private keys, you can actually, before you put your private keys away, derive the public key and keep the public key around to generate an infinite number of addresses without having to access the cold storage. So contrast this with gold, for example. With gold, if you want to add gold to Fort Knox, for example, you have to open the door. Right, you got to enter Fort Knox and you know that might open up some shenanigans, like if you've ever seen the Bond movie Goldfinger. So with Bitcoin, you don't have to open the door to deposit more Bitcoin. It's a really fascinating, unique property of the cryptographic and digital nature of Bitcoin. So then you share that address with whoever is going to send Bitcoin to the address and then, when they send Bitcoin to the address, the contract says whoever can provide a digital signature using the same private key that generated this address can unlock this Bitcoin in the future.
Speaker 1:So that's the second part of private keys is then when you want to go spend the Bitcoin, you're going to have to access the private keys. So that's when you are going to have to open the safe to get the private keys. You are going to have to open the safe to get the private keys. Now how you go about doing that is really going to determine whether the private keys are secure or not, in this case, with a secure location, a secure physical location protected from unauthorized access. So presumably you've got some kind of Mission Impossible or Ocean's Eleven type access controls to make sure that nobody gets to the private keys and isolated from any network connections. So this is really what makes it cold storage is that it's not connected to the Internet. You can imagine probably the least secure way of holding your Bitcoin would be to have your private keys on a computer that's connected to the Internet and then you just let anybody on the Internet access your computer. The password is password, the username is admin and you just let anyone go in and it's just plain text sitting on your desktop. So here, by having it cut off from the internet, you're really avoiding a lot of different attacks that could happen over a network and you're making it so that the attacker has to engage in the physical world, which the US government is really good at securing the physical world, in fact, the definition of a state is having a territorial, geographic, physical monopoly on the use of force, and so you know, really, governments should try to avoid having to engage in cybersecurity, because that's not their forte. Their forte, the real strength of the government is in the physical world, where they have access to guns, tanks, missiles, nukes. So I think this cold storage here is a really good idea.
Speaker 1:Number four fork, means a change to the consensus mechanism of a distributed ledger that creates a new, separate ledger, resulting in a new digital asset that shares a common transaction history with Bitcoin up to the point of the change. So we've seen forks happen in the past, for Bitcoin, probably most famously, is to fork Bitcoin Cash or, as I call it, bcash, to avoid any confusion and basically whenever, when we're looking at the Bitcoin protocol rules, it's a common language where, if one person decides to change the language and others don't go along with them, then they have created a new language. Right, because now there's their new language and there's the old language and they continue to exist side by side, and that's basically what a fork is, which, with Bitcoin, is interesting because, at the point at which the fork happens, you are copy-pasting the balance sheet of who holds what Bitcoin and you're copy-pasting it onto a new alternative cryptocurrency, which means that if you were holding Bitcoin when the fork happens, now you hold Bitcoin and Bcash If you want to recognize its existence at all. Right, which that's a different question. So it'll be interesting to see how this bill handles that situation.
Speaker 1:Number five the term secretary means the secretary of the treasury. Number six the term strategic Bitcoin reserve means the decentralized network of secure Bitcoin storage facilities established pursuant to Section 4A. All right, so let's get into Section 4A, establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The Secretary of the Treasury shall establish a decentralized network of secure Bitcoin storage facilities, because if you look at an asset like gold, gold always has to be in one place at one time. So if the gold is at Fort Knox, it is not at Fort Hood here in Texas. The gold is always in one place at one time.
Speaker 1:With Bitcoin, you can have what's called multi-signature, where you could have, let's say, 10 different private keys and you need to get eight signatures from any of those 10 private keys in order to move the Bitcoin. Well, now you can put the private keys at 10 different, co-equal locations. So, in a sense, the Bitcoin exists at eight of those 10 different locations at any given time. But you're decentralized and that is hugely beneficial from the point of view of removing a single point of failure. If Fort Knox is just one of 10 different Bitcoin storage facilities versus one of one gold storage facilities, right. So removing a single point of failure is really critical. The culture around the asset right. Where before, in a centralized culture, centralized command control, you have a very different approach to how you're going to go about securing the asset. With a decentralized approach, you could have one of the private keys be on a nuclear submarine in the middle of the Pacific. It's okay that, even if that submarine were going to get compromised and one of the submariners decides to steal the private keys, you can't do anything with it because he only has one of 10. And so you can actually trust individual people more, because they would have to cooperate with lots of other people in order to have a quorum to sign Bitcoin transactions and to actually steal the Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Section 4 purpose the strategic Bitcoin Reserve shall be used for the generation and safekeeping and management of Bitcoin private keys associated with government Bitcoin holdings. C oversight the Secretary shall be responsible for the ongoing monitoring and auditing of the holdings of the strategic Bitcoin reserve All very reasonable D decentralization are geographically dispersed throughout the United States to minimize the risk of simultaneous compromise and to enhance the resilience of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Something that would be interesting would be to have it. You could even have it be 50 private keys, right, so one in each state, and then you can say, okay, well, we need like 33 of 50 private keys to move the Bitcoin. There's a lot of creative ways you could do this.
Speaker 1:Now what the act calls for is that the secretary shall select the locations for the facilities described in paragraph one, based on a comprehensive risk assessment prioritizing geographic diversity, security and accessibility, because ultimately, if you can't access the private keys, then you're not going to be able to spend it. So putting it on the dark side of the moon probably is not very accessible, even if it's very secure. So it's always a set of trade-offs, and this is true whether it's the government or individuals or corporations. Sometimes you have to trade off between how secure is it versus how accessible is it. So it'll be interesting to see how they develop their site selection for the different locations.
Speaker 1:Security measures. The secretary shall implement state-of-the-art physical and you'd have to jump over spikes, so I think that should be a part of it too. But, you know, I trust that the government will find a way to have state-of-the-art physical security here in Texas. The Texas state government created its own Fort Knox, its own bullion depository for the Texas gold reserves, and so maybe that will be able to perform double duty as part of the strategic Bitcoin reserve as well. There's also a facility out in New Mexico, I believe, that they built to store nuclear waste, and unfortunately, due to lots of controversy around it, they didn't ever end up using it to store nuclear waste, so that would also be a great location to put one of the private keys. And then, of course, norad, which is where the nuclear command and control bunker is in the mountains, would also be a great location. No-transcript. So that's very good. Now I hope that you know one of the interesting outcomes of passing this bill would be that a lot of different people are going to learn about Bitcoin who were not expecting to learn about Bitcoin, so it's a great way to spread Bitcoin knowledge throughout all sorts of different sections of government by asking the government to hold Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Ok, so retention of forks and airdrops. The secretary shall ensure that, with respect to Bitcoins controlled by the strategic Bitcoin reserve, all digital assets resulting from forks of the Bitcoin distributed ledger and digital assets distributed via airdrops to Bitcoin addresses are accounted for and reasonably stored in the strategic Bitcoin reserve. So this generally will not be a problem. The only challenge is that when you get an airdrop to an address now, when you want to rotate the private keys for any number of different reasons, you might want to rotate the private keys you would have to not only send the Bitcoin to the new address, but you would also have to send the airdrop to a new address, or you have to also keep the old private keys around in case you want to use the airdrop in the future. So it does present some logistical issues. That's why I generally don't like airdrops. I think that they're an unfortunate side effect of how Bitcoin is architected, but also unavoidable.
Speaker 1:Number two here prohibition on immediate sale. No digital asset stored in the strategic Bitcoin reserve that is the result of a fork or airdrop may be sold or otherwise disposed of during the five-year period beginning on the date of the fork or airdrop, unless explicitly authorized by law. So this might seem counterintuitive because, on one hand, these airdrops and forks Because, on one hand, these airdrops and forks, they're something you want to get rid of because they're basically junk, so you want to. You know, one man's junk is another man's treasure, so, you know, sell it to somebody else who values it more. The reason you want to hold on to it in this particular context is, first of all, you don't want to have to access the private keys just in order to sell an Airtrop, because every time you're accessing the private keys, you're taking a risk. Right, you are opening up the box, and so you want to minimize how often you do that, and doing it essentially in five-year increments makes a lot of sense. Secondly, you could imagine a world where so somebody creates a fork of Bitcoin and they try to make it so that their fork of Bitcoin is deemed the official Bitcoin and the real Bitcoin is deemed to be the fork. And we've seen this happen in the past with Bitcoin Cash, so it could happen again in the future with Bitcoin Cash. So it could happen again in the future. And in that kind of, let's say, contentious, adversarial scenario, it's just better for the government to hold both sides and to not wade into the controversy. Just let the market. The reasonable people figure out what's what, and so it is kind of a way of preventing any kind of quirky gamesmanship with trying to label what is Bitcoin versus what it's not.
Speaker 1:Okay, section five the Bitcoin purchase program. This is my favorite section. Okay, so the secretary shall establish a Bitcoin purchase program, which shall A purchase not more than 200,000 Bitcoins per year over a five-year period, for a total acquisition of 1 million Bitcoins, of one million Bitcoins, so this is what we typically call. It's like dollar cost averaging, so having a regular purchase of Bitcoin over a period of time rather than trying to go all in on day zero and sometimes it works out well in your favor because the price goes down and so you're able to average down. More often, especially over a five year period, the price goes up, and so you know you end up having to pay more for your Bitcoin. But I think this is pretty reasonable, especially as we'll see there is some flexibility around the timing of this and that one interesting outcome of this purchase program could be that, over a five-year period, we've seen Bitcoin have significant volatility.
Speaker 1:If this purchase program is implemented such that the government is buying Bitcoin when the price is going down, then it could dampen the volatility of Bitcoin, which would be good for everyone in the market. In the market so part B here conduct purchases in a transparent and strategic manner to minimize market disruption. So in past Bitcoin cycles, sometimes at the top of the cycle, things get a little messy. So we see giant gaps where Bitcoin gaps up, gaps down, significant turbulence at the top of the Bitcoin market. So maybe not a strategic time to be buying Bitcoin and conversely I'm recording this on August 7th, earlier this week, we saw downside volatility to Bitcoin where Bitcoin gapped down. So that would be a good strategic time to acquire Bitcoin. When all the leveraged traders are essentially getting liquidated and the price is crashing, that's when you want to be buying. So this would provide some flexibility to when the government is going about acquiring these Bitcoin. And the transparency is important as well. Right, we do want to make sure that, as the government of the people you know, by the people, for the people we want to make sure that everything's on the up and up and that we're getting our money's worth of Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:C Hold Bitcoin acquired under this section in trust for the United States, as provided in this section. So these Bitcoin, you know they would be held for the nation, not for, you know, for the Secretary of the Treasury or any individual. It's really for the common good, all right. Part two here flexibility relating to purchases. The Secretary shall, by rule, establish a procedure to adjust the purchase schedule set forth under paragraph one, if necessary, based on prevailing market conditions. So you know, if Bitcoin's really at the bottom of the bear market, it might be time to bring forward some purchases, and we saw this in the previous bear market when Bitcoin was at $17,000. You know, that would have been a great time to accumulate. So hopefully we have a Secretary of Treasury that is a keen market maker, a keen observer of the price, who will be able to time purchases for positive effect.
Speaker 1:Number three here transfer offset. Any Bitcoin transferred to the strategic Bitcoin Reserve under section 7 may offset the purchase requirements under paragraph 1. And we'll see what section 7 is in a minute. All bitcoins purchased under the Bitcoin purchase program shall be placed in the strategic Bitcoin Reserve. So this is really important, not just for the government, again, but also for individuals. After you buy your Bitcoin, withdraw them from the exchange to your private keys right To your multi-sig, your strategic Bitcoin reserve. Don't leave them on the exchange, where your exchange account could get hacked or the exchange could get hacked. All sorts of problems come from that. That's why Bitcoiners always say not your keys, not your Bitcoin. That's true for you. It's also true for the federal government.
Speaker 1:All right, c minimum holding period. So, in general, to ensure the long-term stability and security of the strategic Bitcoin reserve, the secretary shall hold all Bitcoin acquired through the strategic purchase program for not less than 20 years. 20 years is a long time, right? Bitcoin's only been around for 15 years, coming up on 16 on October 31st. So 20 years is longer than Bitcoin's even been around. So the idea here is that Bitcoin is a long-term savings asset. There's no reason to be trying to time the market short-term savings asset. There's no reason to be trying to time the market short-term when really, the value increase in Bitcoin happens over the long-term Retention of Bitcoin. During the minimum holding period.
Speaker 1:Under paragraph one, no Bitcoin held in the strategic Bitcoin reserve may be sold, swapped, auctioned, encumbered or otherwise disposed of for any purpose other than retiring outstanding federal debt instruments. So this is really important. It's basically saying no funny business with these Bitcoin that are being held. No funny business with these Bitcoin that are being held and that the only reason to be touching them is if you're going to pay off the national debt. And I think that that is a really important caveat to this is that if Bitcoin increases in value tremendously and it enables the country to pay off the national debt, well that's what we should do, and essentially what would happen would be that you are trading Bitcoin for debt, and so the people who were holding the debt before now they would hold Bitcoin and you get rid of the national debt, so we don't have to burden future generations with past mistakes of running massive deficits. And this is, I think, the most important part of this bill, because it touches on the most important problem it is solving, on the most important problem it is solving, which is that we've accumulated $35 trillion of debt and we have no plan of how to pay it off. So this introduces a plan on how we're going to pay off that debt $35 trillion today. Over the next 20 years, it's only going to increase, and so the only asset in the world that is going to increase in value and that has increased in value faster than the national debt, is Bitcoin, and so that's why I think that this act really solves the national debt problem.
Speaker 1:All right Recommendations after the holding period. On the date, that is, one year before the end of the minimum holding period of 20 years, the Secretary of Treasury shall submit to Congress recommendations on whether to continue to voluntarily hold or to allow for the gradual and controlled release of a portion of the holdings of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. So you know, this is just good financial planning, right? You got to have a plan for how you're going to accumulate Bitcoin, how long you're going to hold it and then how you're going to sell it or spend it or, you know, trade it or however you want to word that, upon the expiration of the minimum holding period, the secretary shall not recommend selling more than 10% of the assets of the strategic Bitcoin reserve during any two-year period. So this is really important for avoiding causing the market to crash because they sell all the Bitcoin at the end of 20 years and also avoiding a situation where you know they sell all the Bitcoin after 20 years and then Bitcoin does another 10x or another 100x. So this is really about selling in a reasonable way, and so, even if we're paying off the national debt, let's do it gradually rather than suddenly, so that we can make sure that everybody's adjusting to this new reality in a reasonable way. In a reasonable way, not later than one year after the date of enactment of this act and annually thereafter for a period of 20 years, the secretary shall publish an annual public report on the status of the Bitcoin purchase program. So you know, this is just good statesmanship of being transparent about what the government is doing with these public reports. Hopefully, these reports will be very thorough and not just cover what the government is doing with the Bitcoin purchase program, but also covering how the Bitcoin network is developing. And maybe they'll run their own Bitcoin node to get their own statistics on that. And, you know, making sure that the public understands what's going on with the Bitcoin purchase program.
Speaker 1:Section six this one is really cool the proof of reserve system. To ensure transparency and accountability in the management of the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the Secretary shall establish a quarterly proof-of-reserve system of public cryptographic attestation, under which the Secretary shall publish quarterly reports on the strategic Bitcoin Reserve that include detailed information on the total holdings, transactions and demonstrated control of private keys relating to the strategic Bitcoin reserve, including a public cryptographic attestation. So this proof of reserve is really something that it's impossible to do with gold or even financial assets at the Federal Reserve, which is to look at. One is you've got all these transactions that are public, right, so the government can tell the public hey, run your own Bitcoin node, you'll be able to see these specific transactions. These are the ones that relate to the strategic Bitcoin reserve, and here are the addresses that we're sending Bitcoin to, and here's the cryptographic proof that they are the government's addresses. This removes the risk of funny business going on, where a government agent might try to steal the Bitcoin or a corrupt secretary of treasury would send it to their Swiss bank account.
Speaker 1:Even if we look at gold the gold at Fort Knox nobody has melted it all down to verify that there's no tungsten inside of the gold bars, right? This allows you to have an automated process of cryptographic auditing and is really something that is not feasible with any other asset in the world, and I think that, from the perspective of the public, I would so much rather the government hold Bitcoin and be transparent about that than hold dollars, for example, where they'll say oh, the Pentagon has a trillion dollars missing. We tried to audit it and we couldn't find a trillion dollars. So you know, the transparency and the immutability of the Bitcoin ledger, I think, introduces a level of accountability to government that has really been absent over the past decades and centuries. And so we're embarking on a new era of statesmanship, of public service, where this technology is enabling direct communication with the public about what the government is doing with the public's money, and that's just not something that can be done with gold, with beanie babies, with petroleum right, so it's really unique. Moving on, make the quarterly reports available to the public on an official website of Department of Treasury and select an independent third-party auditor with expertise in cryptographic attestations to verify the accuracy and integrity of the quarterly reports. So this proof of reserve, I saw it firsthand at Kraken, where I previously worked as the Bitcoin product manager. One of my fellow product managers was a close friend of mine and was working on this proof of reserves for Kraken's clients, and it was very well received by clients that Kraken was willing to provide this level of transparency to them, and I think that you know this is the future.
Speaker 1:The Comptroller General of the United States shall, to ensure compliance with this act, conduct regular oversight of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. The quarterly reports under paragraph 1A and see the audits under paragraph 1C. Consolidation of government Bitcoin holdings section 7. Beginning on the date of enactment of this act, any Bitcoin under the control of any federal agency, including the United States Marshal Service, shall not be sold, swapped, auctioned or otherwise encumbered upon the acquisition of legal title to such Bitcoin, including after a final, unappealable judgment is entered in a criminal or civil forfeiture action in favor of the federal agency be transferred by the head of such federal agency to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. So this is a provision where you know, know any bitcoin that have been seized by the government and there's no way that they will be unseized and given back to you know, whatever criminal the government sees them from. Those bitcoin become part of the strategic reserve instead of being auctioned off or sold as they currently are. So when we look at the history of the government's interactions with Bitcoin, the government has sold a lot of seized Bitcoin at very low prices over the past decade, and so the public has really missed out on tremendous value appreciation due to that really bad policy.
Speaker 1:And in 2020, I actually had a friend of mine draft this piece of legislation to, and it was much more limited than the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. All it said was that the US Marshall Service should stop selling Bitcoin, so it was basically just Section 7 here, and then we would figure out what to do with it later. Now, I didn't get any traction on that bill, but I think that by including it in this bill now, we're creating a real strong framework around what is going to be done with the seized Bitcoin. Now some people have concerns about oh well, this. Will this encourage the government to seize more Bitcoin? Look the agents who seize Bitcoin. They're going to do it regardless of whether the government's going to auction it off or whether it's going to get transferred to the strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Speaker 1:And it also raises the question from people of hey, you claim that private keys are secure, but how come the government is able to seize these Bitcoin? Well, it's quite simple Criminals don't want to hold Bitcoin, they want to sell their Bitcoin, and so what criminals do is that they transfer their Bitcoin to an exchange in order to convert it for dollars. When the exchange sees that a criminal is doing this, they freeze that account, and then the government is able to seize those Bitcoin. So by cooperating with the exchange, because the exchange is the one holding the private keys in this scenario, and so you see here that it really has nothing to do with the private keys being compromised in any way. Rather, it has to do with the fact that the criminals are wanting to convert from Bitcoin into dollars, because they are criminals, they don't have a long-term view on anything right, they're trying to cash out. So that's how Bitcoin typically gets seized.
Speaker 1:There's other scenarios. One of them is, for example, in the case of the Silk Road, a laptop with the Bitcoin was left open and the government agents were able to access the private keys that were on the laptop. So, you know, in that scenario, a hardware wallet was not being used. This was before hardware wallets existed. Uh, multisig was not being used. This was before multisig was, you know, um, commonly used, and so just highlights the fact that, uh, you know, if you don't want your Bitcoin to get seized, whether it's by a criminal or by the government or by anyone else, uh, use a hardware wallet, use multi-sig. Uh.
Speaker 1:And then there was another case where, uh, the bitcoin are seized because the criminal put the private keys on their in a google doc I think it was a google spreadsheet and the government was able to access the Google spreadsheet by doing a subpoena on Google. So don't store your private keys in the cloud unencrypted like that. It's really you're going to make them vulnerable, okay, section eight voluntary state participation and segregated accounts. Oh'm sorry, unless you're a criminal, in which case, yeah, leave your private keys in the cloud, please, because I don't want you to have those bitcoin, okay, uh, so here the secretary shall establish a program that allows a state to voluntarily participate in storing the bitcoin holdings of the state in the strategic Bitcoin reserve in a segregated account. I think this makes a lot of sense and I think that if I would make a change to this act, it would be to expand this section to where not only can you have voluntary state participation, but also local governments and really anyone. I think anybody should be able to use the strategic Bitcoin reserve, as long as they're paying for their use of it in parallel to the federal government's use of it, because you're going to have some of the greatest minds in security come together to build you know, fort Nakamoto a really you know this decentralized storage solution, and it would be a storage solution that would be useful for a lot of different long-term holders of Bitcoin, so hopefully access to this will be expanded.
Speaker 1:A state choosing to participate in the program established under subsection A shall sign a contractual agreement outlining the terms and conditions of participation. And conditions of participation which shall include the responsibilities of both the state and the strategic reserve in managing securing the Bitcoin holdings of the state in the segregated account of the state. Two, a requirement that the state, in coordination with the secretary, develop and implement appropriate security protocols and access controls to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the segregated accounts of the state. And three, retention of title and all attendant legal interests by the state in the Bitcoin held in the segregated account, including title to any digital asset that is a result of a fork or airdrop relating to such Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:Section C withdraw or transfer. So each state participating in the program established under subsection A shall have the right to withdraw or transfer the contents of the aggregated account of the state within the strategic Bitcoin reserve, subject to the terms and conditions in the signed contractual agreement under subsection B and any applicable federal regulations. So here again, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. So in this case, the Bitcoin really are controlled by the federal government, but assuming that they've got a really solid contract put in place. I think that it makes a lot of sense for states to participate in the Bitcoin Reserve and, you know, they could even set it up where they could have some of their private keys with the federal government and then some of them within the state, and so it would be kind of a hybrid solution for maximum security, all right, so how does this get paid for?
Speaker 1:Section 9, offsetting the cost of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. So here, basically, they're saying that we're going to strike. Let's see, I'm trying to get the numbers right $6.8 billion and insert $2.4 billion in the discretionary surplus funds of the Federal Reserve Banks. So, notwithstanding the second subsection B of Section 7 of the Federal Reserve Act for fiscal years 2025 through 2029, if the Federal Reserve Banks remit net earnings to the general fund of the Treasury during that period, the first $6 billion of these remittances in a fiscal year shall be utilized by the Secretary for the implementation of the Bitcoin purchase program, pursuant to the purposes set forth under Section 5. So the Federal Reserve has acquired a large balance sheet of assets, of mostly Treasury debt, that they earn interest off of, and then they take that interest and then they send it to the Treasury, and so what this act is saying is that now we're going to use some of that to acquire Bitcoin instead of just sending it straight into the Treasury account. Exception paragraph one shall not apply if the Federal Reserve banks do not remit net earnings in any given fiscal year during the period of fiscal years 25 through 29. So hopefully the Federal Reserve turns a profit. This whole program depends on that, hinges on that. So we'll see how that goes, but that's outside of our control. We'll see how that goes, but that's outside of our control.
Speaker 1:Now, another way that they could earn a profit other than just the interest income is with the gold certificates. So the Bitcoin Act says Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this act, the Federal Reserve Banks shall tender all outstanding gold certificates in their custody to the Secretary. Not later than 90 days after the tender of the last such certificate, the Secretary shall issue new gold certificates to the Federal Reserve Banks that reflect the fair market value price of the gold held against such certificates by the treasury as of the date specified by the secretary on each new gold certificate. Upon issue by the secretary, each federal reserve bank that receives a new gold certificate shall remit the difference in cash value between the old and new gold certificates to the secretary for deposit in the general fund within 90 days. So, basically, here, what we have is we've got some old gold certificates that are marked to what the gold price was back in the day, I you know, probably $35 an ounce or something like that and now they have to get marked up to the current trading price of gold. And that markup, that unrealized profit, would then be realized by kind of an accounting trick and would be able to contribute to acquiring these Bitcoin, which is really clever. Uh, conforming amendment. Um, so they're amending here to strike for the purpose of issuing those certificates of oh sorry, it was $42 and two 19th dollars. So, uh, I guess, uh, I don't know what two-nineteenths is in pennies, but they're talking about fine Troy ounces here.
Speaker 1:Last section, section 10, protection of private property rights. Nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize the federal government to seize, confiscate or otherwise impair any property right in the lawfully acquired Bitcoin holdings of any person or infringe upon the rights of individuals, businesses or organizations to purchase, hold, transfer or dispose of Bitcoin in accordance with the law. So this last part is really important, because some people might misconstrue this Bitcoin Act to say that they're nationalizing Bitcoin, right, or they're making it so that only the government can use Bitcoin. The opposite is true. In this act, they're making it clear that anybody and everybody can use Bitcoin and should use Bitcoin, because ultimately, the benefits that the federal government is getting from holding these Bitcoin are the same as the benefits that anybody else would get from holding Bitcoin. The self-custody aspect of it, where you're not having to rely on a trusted third party About you know being able to have cryptographic proof that you hold Bitcoin. Or you know holding Bitcoin so that you can pay off your mortgage later right, it's the same idea as holding Bitcoin so you can pay off the national debt later. So that wraps it up for reading through the act.
Speaker 1:Now I want to address some of the common objections to the strategic Bitcoin reserve. One objection that I heard recently on Laura Shin's podcast, because in addition to creating podcasts, I also listen to them. So on Laura Shin's Unchained podcast, she had a guest, george Selgin, and he argued that putting Bitcoin on the federal government's balance sheet is too speculative and that essentially, this is gambling with the public's money. Gambling with the public's money, whereas what the federal government should do is only hold dollar-denominated assets that are safe, so that we're not gambling with the public's money. So it's a totally reasonable point to make, but we have to look at the government's balance sheet as it is, not as we wish it to be, or as kind of in an academic laboratory. The reality is that the current balance sheet of the federal government is very speculative and that there is a massive gap between the assets held by the government and any future cash flows, any income with the liabilities of the federal government and any future increase in those liabilities, any future expenses, and there's a huge mismatch. So already the government is short dollars. So, in terms of speculation, right now the government is in a very precariously speculative financial position of having $35 trillion in debt and not much to show for it, so acquiring a high-quality asset that is going to significantly appreciate in between the obligations of the United States and the resources it has to meet those obligations.
Speaker 1:Now I think the counter-argument would be that well, pierre, you don't know that Bitcoin is going to increase in value, so you don't know that it's going to fill that gap, and you know my argument that Bitcoin is going to increase in value is really just based on the fundamentals of Bitcoin from an engineering and economic perspective and the fact that it has increased in value over the past 15 years. It's really on the opposite side to prove that something has fundamentally changed about Bitcoin such that the past 15 years are not reflective of the next 20 years. Tremendous burden of proof because when I look at the source code of Bitcoin and how it operates, not only has nothing changed in the negative right, nothing has gotten worse about Bitcoin. Bitcoin has only improved. So, if anything, I'm more bullish on the next 20 years of Bitcoin, based on rational arguments about reality, than I am bullish on the past 15 years of price appreciation. So I think that not acquiring Bitcoin is speculative and not acquiring Bitcoin is gambling compared to the opposite right, because ultimately there's no neutral position where you're delta neutral on Bitcoin. You're either long Bitcoin or you're short Bitcoin. There's no alternative.
Speaker 1:The other second counter argument that I heard in that same podcast was that stockpiles should be of useful goods like oil or medicine, and by all means we should have stockpiles of useful goods like oil or medicine for those purposes. It's interesting to bring up oil because when we look at the history of the oil stockpile. There was actually a big missed opportunity in 2020, when the price of oil went negative. It went to zero because of COVID and people were proposing, hey, let's fill up the oil stockpile, and then others argued against it and ended up not happening, which was a huge missed opportunity. But it just goes to show that when the opportunity presents itself, let's take action, let's not be naysayers.
Speaker 1:Now, what is the utility of holding a stockpile of Bitcoin, of Bitcoin? It's the same utility whether it's the federal government doing it or an individual doing it or a corporation doing it, and it is explained in the act. So I don't think that there should be any ambiguity as to what the utility is, which is that you want to have an asset that is uniquely differentiated from any other asset, so that you're able to, for example, be able to send those Bitcoin out or hold those Bitcoin through a unique set of circumstances that would not apply to any other asset. So, for example, your oil stockpile. Well, what if a foreign sabotage team blows it up? You know that would be horrible. Now, could they blow up every single location where the Bitcoin private keys are being held? That would be far harder than blowing up oil terminals where the strategic oil is being held, or even the pipelines that would allow you to access it. Same thing with the medicine. What if a sabotage team were to poison the medicine or to somehow otherwise impair it? Far easier to do that than to impair the Bitcoin being held.
Speaker 1:And so the utility is that you're able to use this monetary asset under a completely different set of circumstances and trust assumptions than useful goods that are physical in nature and thus far more vulnerable to sabotage than Bitcoin is, and also that the value of oil and medicine being stockpiled will decrease. It will never increase. You might have short-term increases in the price of oil, for example, or a shortage in a given medicine or whatever it is, but over the long term you have the depreciation of the asset itself. So a lot of these useful goods have a shelf life. Second, you have the storage cost, so the storage cost of holding $100 billion worth of oil is far greater than the storage cost of holding $100 billion worth of Bitcoin. Furthermore, it scales linearly, so the more oil you are storing, the higher your storage cost is, the more Bitcoin you are storing. Actually, the storage cost stays the same because you've still got the same set of locations, it's still the same private keys, and so that's a nonlinear relationship, which is another differentiator that Bitcoin has.
Speaker 1:Furthermore, when we look at commodities like oil, over the long term, because of advances in technology, the unit economics are such that the price of oil has declined over the past hundred years, excuse me so over the long term, because we get better and better at extracting resources and a lot of these commodities are relatively abundant. They're not scarce. They don't have the finite scarcity that Bitcoin has. They also have more, better medicine that comes out tomorrow and now suddenly you know that stockpile of medicine loses its value. So all this to say that these commodities are going to decrease in value, whereas Bitcoin is going to increase in value because of the finite scarcity.
Speaker 1:The Bitcoin halvings right. The reward halvings every four years. No other commodity has that built into it. So another criticism you know the reserve should be safe assets like government bonds. This one is, I think, is particularly nonsensical, because when we look at the liabilities, the liabilities are government bonds. So if you have the same asset and the same liability, it just nets to a zero and you're not really accomplishing anything. So that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Number four government control over Bitcoin undermines its purpose. This one is really nuanced, because the government can control its own private keys and can control its own node, but the government cannot control other people's private keys or other people's nodes, and that's true of everyone on the Bitcoin network. So it doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you hold, you don't control Bitcoin. That's the whole purpose of it being decentralized. Don't control Bitcoin. That's the whole purpose of it being decentralized. So this argument, I think, is just a misunderstanding of how the Bitcoin network functions and that having a node or holding lots of Bitcoin does not give you more control over Bitcoin. It only gives you control over your own Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:I saw some cynical takes on X about this being a bailout of Bitcoin holders and miners, and you know this is just to pump their bags of. Hey, you're just trying to lobby the government to buy this asset to. You know, enrich yourself and look. The reality is that it would pump our bags for sure. But let's look at as a practical matter.
Speaker 1:Every policy question is going to benefit some people and disadvantage others. We always have to bring it back to is this for the common good? You know, taking out any kind of special interest, any type of private interest that would benefit from any kind of policy decision. So, for example, you know the government bailing out banks yeah, of course that benefited bank shareholders, bank depositors, right, and you know the rest. The policy question is always OK, yeah, but what about national security? What about financial stability? What about all of these common good questions? Right of, okay, well, is it in the national interest?
Speaker 1:And so I think that this argument is kind of just the person arguing that they don't understand why this would be in the national interest, and so they're just revealing their own ignorance of kind of what we went through over the past hour. And, furthermore, this is a far greater bailout of the government than it is a bailout of Bitcoin holders, because, as the value of Bitcoin increases, this is going to allow the government to meet its financial obligations. And so, really, who are we bailing out here? We're bailing out all the people who lent $35 trillion to the government, who would otherwise get paid back in debased, devalued, worthless dollars or get defaulted on. We're bailing out all of the social security pensioners, right, all the beneficiaries of social security who they thought they were paying into the system, but really they were paying into a Ponzi scheme that was simultaneously paying out. So they were actually hoodwinked and scammed by politicians in the past to create this Social Security Ponzi scheme. A strategic Bitcoin reserve is the only way to bail out Social Security. So that's who's really getting bailed out here is all of the victims of past fiscal irresponsibility.
Speaker 1:Another argument that I've heard is that it's going to weaken the dollar because you know they're going to essentially create more dollars to acquire these Bitcoin. I think it's a drop in the bucket, right. I mean, if they're creating $70 billion, like nobody's even going to notice that, because the deficit is $1 trillion. So you know we're talking about a fraction of a percentage of the deficit here. It's really irrelevant. And then it's funny because I've also heard the opposite argument of it's going to strengthen the dollar, because now the dollar is going to be partially backed by Bitcoin, and isn't this going to undermine Bitcoin adoption? I think this is going to accelerate Bitcoin adoption. And I think this is going to accelerate Bitcoin adoption because now legislators, politicians, are going to have to decide on whether they want a strategic Bitcoin reserve or not, and so they're going to have to study Bitcoin and some percentage of them are going to get it and it's going to click, and then they're going to be orange pilled, as we say, and they're going to go out and they're going to start explaining to their constituents why this is a good idea. So I think this is going to accelerate Bitcoin adoption at scale with tremendous leverage.
Speaker 1:Number eight on the common objections is that there are other pro-Bitcoin policies that we should prioritize. So I agree that there are other pro-Bitcoin policies, like getting rid of capital gains tax. Getting rid of a lot of the over-regulation of how we use Bitcoin will cause those other policies to increase in their odds of success of being prioritized, because it will realign incentives and it will, as I just mentioned, it will get lots of politicians who might be on the fence about Bitcoin excited about Bitcoin because now they understand the use case of. Ok, this is going to help us fix the fiscal and monetary problem here in the United States. Now let's find other beneficial policies related to Bitcoin to augment the effectiveness of their strategic Bitcoin reserve. So I think, overall, this act will be a catalyst for other policy changes that we want to see.
Speaker 1:So that wraps it up. I hope that I addressed a lot of the questions and some of the details here of this act. If you have other questions or if you have other objections to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, I'd be very interested in hearing them, and I'm sure that we will be able to address them on a future episode of Block Time. So thanks for joining us today. I hope you found this interesting, and don't forget to subscribe, leave a positive review and share it with your friends and family so that they, too can learn about Bitcoin, and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you and bye.
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