Bitcoin Is Manifest Destiny For The United States Of America

Senator Lumis and Michael Sailor, thank you for joining us today.

I don't think anyone has done more than Bitcoin adoption than you two in your respective worlds.

Senator Lumis, you've influenced the majority of the GOP, I believe, to be pro Bitcoin.

We call it orange-pilling and to anyone who doesn't have the term yet.

Through your leadership in Congress, Michael, you have led the charge for Bitcoin in corporate America.

We just saw results of this yesterday with GameStop.

You've led the charge for Bitcoin in corporate America and on Wall Street.

So, I'm really excited to dive into a very important topic that's gotten a lot of attention recently.

The strategic Bitcoin reserve.

I think that's something that we all on this stage agree is a fantastic proposal.

I think the audience, the industry more broadly supports as well.

So, Senator Lumis, earlier this month, you introduced, reintroduced legislation,

the Bitcoin Act that would direct the Treasury Department to purchase one million Bitcoin.

And since there's ever only going to be 21 million Bitcoin, this is 5% of the global supply.

And Michael, building on this effort, you recently laid out a path for the United States to become

a Bitcoin superpower.

So, let's just start with the most straightforward question.

Senator Lumis, why does the United States need a strategic Bitcoin reserve?

We have a strategic oil reserve.

We have a strategic gold reserve.

We have a strategic cheese reserve.

Bitcoin is digital gold.

Bitcoin is easy to store.

It is immutable.

It is scarce.

We can protect it in individual vaults that can be secure and hold it for 20 years.

If it is held for 20 years, pursuant to the best modeling available,

we can reduce our national debt by half.

Now, for me, I started, believe it or not, as an elected official in the Wyoming legislature,

when I was 24 years old, in 1979.

And I've always been looking for ways that government can balance their budgets.

Wyoming's always been able to because we have mineral wealth.

And when we harvest that mineral wealth, we were able to convert it into cash and put it in a

fully diversified asset allocation that continues to produce revenue for the Wyoming legislature.

So, it was converted from something in the ground to something that has enduring value

long term. So, when I was state treasurer, I was always looking for ways to have some assets

that produced income and some that were there as a store of value, much as it was when those

minerals were still in the ground. And at that time, it was pre-bitcoin. But now Bitcoin definitely

serves that role. Now, I'm in a branching government, the federal government, that is $36 trillion

in debt. I am embarrassed. I don't want to pass that debt on to your generation. My daughters

generation, my grandsons. And I've kind of been looking for the Bitcoin strategic reserve,

my whole life, to find a way to give a more financially sound government to my daughter and my

grandsons. And thanks to people like Michael Sailor, who have just been trailblazers in

recognizing and helping people understand the uniqueness of this asset. We're in a position to do

it. So, I really want to thank Michael. If you haven't seen his presentation that is about 30 minutes,

it's easy to find these days on the internet. It'll just blow you away. Because he talks about

the expanding role. And certain aspects of Bitcoin, as they deal with defense, with national security

strategy, with energy. It really is, Michael, one of the most ten best presentations I've ever seen

in my life. And he is so significant to this effort that it's just an honor to be on stage with

you here today, Michael. Yeah. It is a fantastic presentation. And anyone watching should definitely

find that on YouTube after this. Michael Sailor, what are your thoughts? Why do we need a strategic

Bitcoin reserve? Bitcoin is an asset, but it's not just an asset. It's the most valuable asset in the

world. Its property, it's not just some property, it's the most valuable property in the world.

It's a network, it's not just some network. It's the most valuable network in the world.

It's a defense system. It's not just some defense system. It's the most valuable defense system

them in the world. We bought 80% of the United States for $40 million. It was a good deal.

Superpowers are defined by literally power. Naval power, land power, air power, nuclear

power. The British proved that the Romans had to beat the Carthaginians and prove that

John D. Rockefeller gave the United States the majority of all the chemical power in the

world. That's why we won those wars. The 21st century is digital. Bitcoin is digital.

It's a digital asset, digital property, a digital network. It's a digital shield. It's

a digital defense system. There's only one of them. Only one country can control it.

There's only one room for one superpower. You either control the Atlantic and the Pacific

or somebody else did. The reason the Romans had to kill the Carthaginians is because only

one nation could control the Mediterranean. Bitcoin represents this most powerful, emerging

digital phenomenon. The country has an economic challenge. We have to pay off our debt, but

there's smart ways and stupid ways. We can either pay off the debt through austerity

and nobody wants that or we can be visionary. I think that we'd rather pay off the debt

by being visionary. I've met a lot of the big tech moguls in Silicon Valley. They're

not smarter than you. They don't work harder than you. They're just richer than you. The

reason they're richer than you is because of insane leverage. It's because they have a

lever that's a billion X. Whenever they do an hour of work, they get a billion hours

of output. The dude with the machine gun, he's not tougher than you. He's just got a machine

gun. When you own the Air Force or whatever, the nuclear bomb, you're not smarter. You're

not better. You're just more powerful. Micro strategy was worth $600 million four years

ago. The enterprise value was $100 billion today. I'm not working harder. I'm not better.

We just found leverage. You want to make $100 extra money. There's a famous line from

Robert Heinlein. He says, you don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars

by making the other person die for their country. In this particular case, Bitcoin is here.

It's a viral, exploding, digital energy not worth covering the world. It's spreading

like wildfire. It's unstoppable. At this point, your choice is you can ignore it and let

someone else benefit from it. You can hope that your enemy doesn't control it or you

can dance with it a little bit and flirt with it. Maybe you make a little bit of money

and you get a little bit of power. Or you can embrace it. If you recall what they say

about John D. Rockefeller is, he was bullish on oil at the bottom, bullish on oil at the

top, bullish on oil in the middle. He was always the buyer. He was never the seller. When

the entire rest of the world thought oil was crazy, it was too volatile. It wasn't profitable.

He believed that the future of the nation, the future of standard oil was petroleum. Because

of that dogged determination, the United States was the energy leader when World War

One came along. We were the energy leader when World War Two came along. That's why we're

speaking, which right now, because we embraced the idea of power, nuclear power, electrical

power, chemical power, air power, naval power. The 21st century is going to be defined

by digital power. Bitcoin miners are spitting out digital power by the exohash. We should

control, we should own the network. Bitcoin is digital energy. Only one nation can own

the majority of it or the great plurality of it. It's either going to be us or it's going

to be our enemy or it's going to be the next future superpower of the world. Why are

they going to be the superpower? They're the ones that embrace digital energy. Why are

we not going to be? We depend on donkey carts and steam engines and antiquated technology.

It will pass us by the digital energy network is the network of the AI economy. The AI's

going to think a million times faster than us. There's going to be a million times more

of them. There's going to be a million times smarter than us. They're going to want to

move digital energy on a digital network with a digital asset. Whoever owns controls that

network is going to be the beneficiary. I think it couldn't be clear right now. This

is an opportunity we can buy the entire thing for a nickel. It's nearly free for us and

then we'll make $100 trillion off of it. Or we can ignore it and we can all just raise

our taxes, cut our costs, work harder and lament the fact that every time you see some

shmo that's worth infinite money and you look and you're like, how could that person be

worth so much money when they just seem so stupid? You just remember they moved to Silicon

Valley and they made it by using a computer. Satoshi gave us money on a computer. We should

accept the gift. We should not give the gift to our enemies or our frenemies. We should

just take it. It's free. Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana territory for a few million dollars.

Nobody knew why we needed the Louisiana territory or Texas or California. I think we're lucky

we have it. Soared was considered to be a moron. Soared's folly. Don't buy Alaska. What's

in Alaska? There's nothing in Alaska that is a trillion dollars of oil. People can't imagine

they're like, well, I can't imagine living in cyberspace. You know, you can't but the AI

can and the AI is going to be doing all the work shortly. That's exactly where they want to live.

They want to live in cyberspace. So if you don't want to buy it, you know, because you think it's

useful for you, buy it because it'll be useful for them and otherwise it'll be Russian and

Chinese AI bots living in cyberspace dominating the network and not us. So I think it's there.

It's ours. We should take it. It's manifest destiny for the United States of America.

Michael, a brief follow up for you. We're talking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve,

but there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies out there. Is there a second best?

There's no second best. I thought it was a brief follow up.

A short answer. There's a trillion dollars of smart capital invested in this network. 99% of

the electricity driving crypto security is in this network. 99% of digital power of hash rate

is in this network. 99% of the political support of the brand acceptance of the regulatory

acceptance is in this network. It's the winner, right? Don't sell the winner to buy the loser.

And you've got a winner. It's like debating with John D. Rockefeller. I think petroleum sort of works,

but I have to find the next form of liquid fuel or debating with Oppenheimer saying, I know you're

nuclear bomb works, but I just want a different one. You know, or debating with Westinghouse saying,

I know your AC electricity at works and electricity is kind of cool, but I want to find something

different. It's like we have the thing. It's going to be a million times more valuable and scale up.

We should just scale up the network. So both of you touched on the counterfactuals a little bit

here, and I think that's important when we're analyzing the decision of this magnitude. So my next

question, Senator Lomba, started with you. What happens if we don't create a strategic Bitcoin reserve?

Well, if you look from my seat in the US Senate, we're trying right now to find a way to match our

revenues to our expenditures finally for the first time since the 1990s. Even if we were to do that,

which is herculean and will take several years to do without having a dramatic impact on our

economic well-being, we're still $36 trillion in debt. I don't want to hand that to my children

and grandchildren. So without a Bitcoin strategic reserve that can dramatically reduce the debt,

cut it in half, even if we only have 5% of all the Bitcoin in the world, we're going to have to find

ways to continue to pay interest on that $36 trillion. Now right now, the interest on that $36 trillion

that Congress pays every year exceeds the amount we pay on defense and it exceeds the amount we pay on

Medicare. So if we don't find ways to diminish that debt, we are going to continue to chew up all

the taxpayer dollars on interest on the national debt and have nothing to spare to keep Medicare

social security, our defense obligations pursuant to the US Constitution. And we're crowding out

expenditures that can help grow our economy with something that cannot, which is interest payments

on the national debt. That's why a strategic Bitcoin reserve is so important and that's why not having

one creates a hole from which our economy may never recover.

Yeah, Michael, I'd be very interested to hear your take on this as well because many people would say

Bitcoin doesn't need America. America needs Bitcoin, but the US could drop the ball on a strategic

Bitcoin reserve here. What do you think? I think the Bitcoin is unstoppable. So the truth is,

Bitcoin doesn't need America. America does need Bitcoin. The idea of a strategic reserve is a

monetary strategy among other things. So you use glass beads as money and then Europeans come along

and notice that you think they're valuable and so they manufacture a million glass beads and buy

everything in Africa and they own you, you're in poverty. And at some point you wake up and you

realize that actually the glass beads didn't make good money. And then if you're using silver and

someone demonetizes the silver with gold, they end up owning everything or the giant stone coin

of the Yat people is they thought that giant stone coins were money and then some European with

a ship came along and realized he could just bring giant stone coins to the island. He did that

until he bought up half the island and then they realized they were impoverished and they were

the slaves of the dude with the wooden boat and the giant stone coins were pretty stupid money.

Now what's money in the modern world? The 20th century world has 450 trillion dollars of capital

money and it's sitting in the form of private and public equity, foreign real estate, sovereign debt,

especially foreign sovereign debt, other people's currency, corporate bonds. Bitcoin is better

money. So we can either just leave the world the way it is or we introduce this idea Bitcoin. Now by

the way we can't stop it. Satoshi started the fire. The fire is burning and every single day tens or

hundreds of millions of dollars of capital are flowing into the network. It's going to go from

two billion to 20 billion to 200 billion to two trillion to 20 trillion to 200 trillion and when

it gets to 200 trillion it will chop along at plus 20% to eventually 300, 400, 500 trillion dollars.

And where is that capital we're going to come from? It's going to come from Russian real estate. It's

going to come from Chinese private equity. It's going to come from everything in Africa, everything in

South America. You have capital flowing from foreign financial and physical assets to Bitcoin.

You have capital flowing from 20th century assets to Bitcoin. Capital is going to flow from the 20th

century to the 21st century. It's going to flow from physical to digital. It's going to flow from

currency based derivatives to a digital commodity derivative. So it's already happening. It's unstoppable.

It's literally like for me to say Bitcoin is going to demonetize gold under states. It's

going to demonetize gold. Then it's going to demonetize the real estate that's 10X more than gold.

Then it's going to demonetize every long term store of value. So what you have is a situation like

the European show up and they give like some Dutch guilders or some pieces of paper or some

glass beads or seashells or stone coins to people using a more primitive form of money.

We have the opportunity to, in essence, just grab 10, 20, 25% of the network,

let the entire dynamic flow. It's going to accelerate. When the dust settles,

the American people will own 25%, 30% of that capital, which right now is sitting in 20th century

foreign assets. It's a very elegant strategy. Maybe it's a little bit of a evil genius strategy.

But it's no different than the Europeans trading glass to the Africans.

During the 49ers rush, we discovered gold in California and we used technology to pull the gold out

of California. One of the little vignettes of history is we created hyperinflation in Europe when

we actually pulled the gold out of California because we traded all this gold for all the European

commodities and manufactured goods. The European suffered a recession. America was built on the

gold that the 49ers brought. And so this is the modern digital gold rush. We should just go grab

the digital gold. Eventually the rest of the world will trade all of their stuff for it. But when

they buy it, they'll be buying it at 10 million coin or 20 million coin or 50 million coin.

And we will basically take our debt and we'll negate it and then we'll flip to being a creditor

nation. And what does it take to be rich? We'll ask Bill Gates or Steve Balmer or Mark Zuckerberg

or Blary Page or Sergey Brenn. What does it take to be rich? It just takes a little bit of vision,

a little bit of conviction and use technology. And so in this case, I think our country should be rich.

It is rich. We're rich because we bought California for a few million bucks before people knew that

before they knew Hollywood or Silicon Valley would be a thing. Now I think we should buy cyberspace

and it's the most powerful lover of a magical because you're paying a penny to get a dollar.

And not only you're paying a penny to get a dollar, but you're de-risking the thing,

right? Because in the process of adopting Bitcoin as the network, you force a

stampede of all of our allies, all of our frenemies, all of our enemies, and you accelerate

the monetization of the network. So everybody's a winner. I mean, arguably even the rest of the

world's a winner because they're going to be better off using digital capital as a store of value

than using Siberian warehouses. So I think we've established the case. We need to do this.

The cost of not doing this is meaningful. So I want to touch on how we are going to do this.

Senator Lemus, you introduced the Bitcoin Act. And of course the backdrop to this is President

Trump's executive order of March 6 establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So some might look

at this and say, well, the president's taken this executive action. We already have a strategic

Bitcoin reserve. What do you say to them? Well, I haven't researched whether the president can

establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve without congressional authorization or not. I mean,

client to think he can. The first 200,000 Bitcoin can come from the asset for your fund.

We are currently trying to find out from the US Marshall Service how much remains of that.

The Biden administration was selling that prior to turning the reigns of government over to the

Trump administration. So we're trying to analyze how much of that is still there. But that could

comprise the first year of a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Thereafter, we can easily achieve what was

in the Trump executive order by making this neutral in terms of we don't have to expand new taxpayer

dollars to buy Bitcoin. There are multiple ideas for garnering the 800,000 Bitcoin that would

comprise a million dollar Bitcoin reserve without spending a new dime of taxpayer dollars. Among those

are this. We could take our gold certificates, which are currently held at the Federal Reserve on

the books at their 1974 value, which is $42 an ounce. Now, most of us know that gold has gone

closer to 3,000 an ounce. So if we took those gold certificates, not physical gold, let's keep our

physical gold. Let's take the gold certificates, bring them up to current fair market value and convert

them to Bitcoin. Other possibilities that we were just discussing in the back room that are really

exciting is the United States has energy producing assets. Let's use those to convert the energy

production capabilities of the United States government to producing Bitcoin. That's another way

that we can convert our royalties that we usually get in cash into royalties in kind

by way of Bitcoin. And they're a myriad of other ideas for fulfilling the goals of President

Trump's executive order by creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve without expanding a single new dollar

from the taxpayers. Michael, no one knows how to accumulate hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin

better than you. Whether it's due to the executive order or through the Bitcoin Act, Senator

Lomas has proposed, how do you think the United States should go about accomplishing this?

Well, I think there's a lot of ways to do it, but however we're going to do it, we should do it by

January 0.99. By January 2035, when 99% of the Bitcoin has been mined because after that, there

won't be any Bitcoin left for you. We're in a digital gold rush. We've got about 10 years.

There was a lot of chaos in the world and a lot of Americans made sacrifices so that we could have

the Louisiana Territory and Texas and California and Wyoming and the Great West and St. Louis

and Alaska. We should figure out how to do it. It won't be nearly as painful as the sacrifices made

in order to make this country great the first time around. I look forward to seeing what all the

leadership in DC comes up with. Me as well. We covered a lot of ground today, Senator Lomas.

I think you made a very excellent case of why the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is an extremely

important tool to stopping, reversing the risk that is our national debt. Michael, as you said,

the 21st century is digital and Bitcoin is digital gold. So I want to thank both of you for your

leadership. You are without a doubt the tip of the spear for Bitcoin adoption in your respective

sectors in corporate America and in Congress. I know I speak for everyone in the crowd when I say

thank you for joining us today and thank you for sharing your time.