Bitcoin strategic sovereign reserves
2024-08-01 15:35:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
There’s been a big shift in the sentiment towards Bitcoin and crypto in recent weeks. The US presidential candidates have realised that there are now quite a lot of people into crypto. So many in fact that they represent an amount of people large enough to have an impact in elections. That has led to several candidates announcing that they are now pro-crypto. Trump in particular has been particularly vocal, having spoken at a big Bitcoin conference a few days ago, where he promised to turn the US into the Crypto capital of the planet. Here’s the full keynote speech in video.
The video from the conference is pretty interesting. I’ve seen a bunch of soundbite clips which are short and informative but in the full video you can tell he is of course reading off of the tele-prompter, and though he obviously knows a bunch about Bitcoin and crypto, he’s clearly still got some learning to do. There are several bits where you can tell he doesn’t fully understand what he’s reading and saying, and there are some other bits where he’s genuinely suprised by the crowds huge reaction. But anyway the point is he’s talking about it, and he’s learning as he goes along. He’s a busy guy.
The US already has quite a big stockpile of Bitcoin, mostly from seizures from criminal activities, but there is much talk of the US creating a strategic reserve consisting entirely of Bitcoin. Though Trump didn’t go into specifics, others have done. Robert Kennedy for instance says he would setup a program of steady daily Bitcoin purchases, 550 Bitcoins per day until the US had around 4 million coins. That’s around 1/5 of all Bitcoin in existence.
What I found interesting was this idea of a country steadily buying up Bitcoin. Countries are such big entities that they could have a big impact on the Bitcoin markets. But what would happen if all countries banded together and bought Bitcoin at a sustained pace together?
I don’t know the answer to this, but I would have thought they could theoretically usher in a very smooth transition from fiat currencies to Bitcoin if they worked together. This is happening already, and everything in the world is being repriced accordingly, but it’s been somewhat chaotic. Though it’s chaotic, there are re-occuring patterns, with high valatility, but it has been happening in a 4 year cycle, that seems to follow the fiat money system’s liquidity refinancing cycle.
I’d like to know what would happen if countries band together and start buying Bitcoin in lockstep, slowly but synchronised? Would that be a good thing in general, what about for current Bitcoin holders?