Donald Trump spoke to a crowd about his plan to establish a strategiccryptocurrencies stockpile

The Coincurrency Crisis: Bitcoin, the Currency, and the Dreams of Donald Trump in the Western Hemisphere – Cynthia Lummis, Chairman of the SEC, London, July 22

Trump also promised to create a framework that would allow us to extend the dominance of the US DOLLAR in other places around the world, and that he would scrap any effort to create a Central Bank Digital Currency or digital dollar.

The US government owns about 210,000 of the coins that were seized through illegal operations, such as Silk Road. It’s worth approximately $14 billion at time of writing.

This move confirmed rumors spread by bitcoin enthusiasts who are hopeful that endorsement of a reserve from Trump could bolster the price of the cryptocurrency.

“I will always defend the right to self-custody,” he told the exultant crowd. One day, Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was going to be fired.

“The moment I am sworn in, the persecution stops and the weaponization against your industry ends,” he said, name-checking Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as the industry’s sworn enemy.

The crowd expected the bitcoin strategic reserve announcement. On July 22, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming stated she would announce legislation for a strategicbitcoinreserve at the conference days before Fox Business reported she would do so.

Lummis appeared before the crowd just after Trump walked off to announce a “present to President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve bill she’d been drafting.

“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” she said, elaborating that the bill would take “the bitcoin President Trump just mentioned and pull it into the reserve—[and] that’s only the beginning.”

Five percent of the world’s bitcoin can be used for one purpose and the US will assemble 1 million of it over the next five years.

People are standing in line to take a picture next to a cutout of Donald Trump with blood on his face from an assassination attempt. A second copy of the cutout is on top of the tower. Superimposed over his clenched hand is a big bitcoin.

If you are not part of the community you will think that the conference is full of Trump supporters. The halls are popping red with bright baseball caps, but most of them say the same thing. A person who wears the MBGA hat tells me that it’s not a political statement.

The presidential candidate claims to be the first “major party nominee to accept donations in bitcoin and crypto.” As of July 25, he’s received more than $4 million worth. Nearly two million came from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, twin founders of crypto trading platform Gemini, who Trump calls out during his Bitcoin 2024 speech, saying they “look like male models…with a big, beautiful brain.” Another big chunk came from CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, Jesse Powell, who wrote that he donated $1 million to Trump—“mostly” in Ether. The industry is courting Trump again.

The organizers of the conference made it clear to me that this is not a Trump rally. I am confident that it is abitcoin one, if it is any kind of rally. After his speech, Trump held a $844,600 per seat donor dinner in Nashville, hosted by Bitcoin conference organizer David Bailey. But conference organizers say President Joe Biden was invited to speak at the conference, and then Vice President Kamala Harris when he dropped out of the race and endorsed her. “Would be very savvy of her to reset the democrat positioning on the fastest growing voter block in the country,” Bailey posted to X on July 23.

Harris did not attend. Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Trump are Independents. Two of the 10 politicians on the conference speaker list were Democrats.

Based on what attendees—most of whom are men—say their voting plans are for 2024, this lineup makes sense. One attendee describes the Democratic party to me as dangerously approaching “communism.” Others express distrust over the left-leaning media, asking whether I think Trump’s shooting was staged (a conspiracy theory that’s crossed party lines), and who directs what I write.