15 years after Bitcoin was created, there are still few legitimate use cases. Today, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are primarily used for financial speculation and to facilitate organized crime. The broader crypto industry, meanwhile, has been rocked by scandals, including the spectacular implosion of FTX and criminal charges against Binance.
But crypto lobbyists still have one ace up their sleeves: lots of money.
The industry’s primary Super PAC, Fairshake, has raised over $202 million in the 2024 election cycle. Most of this money was collected in the form of 8-figure contributions.
Coinbase alone has donated $70 million so far, and crypto investors like Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, and the Winklevoss twins have written multi-million dollar checks. The largest individual donors are also supporting Trump’s candidacy. This money dwarfs the spending by Sam Bankman-Fried in the 2022 election cycle. Of the approximately $45 million Fairshake and its subsidiaries have expended thus far, two-thirds was used to attack Democrats or support Republicans. The cash stockpile positions the industry to be one of the most powerful forces in politics over the next 100 days.
The strategy appears to be paying off.
Speaking to the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville on Friday, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said the federal government should create “a strategic Bitcoin reserve.” Lummis intends to introduce legislation that would require the federal government to purchase 1 million Bitcoin — about 5% of the total available — for $68 billion. Lummis said her proposal was “the solution” to America’s financial issues, describing the opportunity to purchase lots of Bitcoin as “our Louisiana purchase moment.”
According to Lummis, her plan to purchase Bitcoin would allow the United States to become “debt-free.” More specifically, Bitcoin would “cut our debt in half by 2045.” But even if the federal debt did not grow at all in the next 20 years, the price of Bitcoin would need to increase by 250 times to halve the current debt of $34 trillion. In other words, the price of one Bitcoin would have to increase from $68,000 to $17,000,000.
This is amazing! Bitcoin is a negative sums game, this Plan B hinges on the USA buying in with hundreds of billions, and OTHERS buying in with upward of twenty trillion dollars!
And hope that the current holders like Satoshi having premined one million bitcoin do not sell for trillions of dollars!
