The writer is an FT contributing editor
In July, Cynthia Lummis, a US senator from Wyoming, introduced a bill to establish what she called a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, a programme instructing the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy a million bitcoins over the next five years to then hold them for at least 20 more years.
Donald Trump made vague noises in support of bitcoin and crypto during his campaign. With his election, the hope behind Lummis’s bill has started to gather weight, particularly among the people with private bitcoin holdings of their own. This stands to reason. If you held a portfolio of Andy Warhol paintings and someone in Washington proposed a strategic Warhol reserve, you’d be excited too.