Support grows for Lummis’ plan to buy 1M BTC
The BITCOIN Act now has 13 sponsors in total — up from one last year
Senator Cynthia Lummis | Gage Skidmore/”Cynthia Lummis” (CC license)
This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
The arc of crypto is long, but it bends toward ₿itcoin.
Pete Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian, has just launched a brand-new Bitcoin podcast with Blockworks, Supply Shock.
Read more about the Supply Shock vision.
Now, time to run through the most memorable Bitcoin moments from the past week:
Zero to 13
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis has been plugging Bitcoin from as long as it was — or at least since 2013 when she bought her first bitcoin.
Now, Lummis’ passion for Bitcoin is coalescing. Last Tuesday, Lummis reintroduced her monumental BITCOIN Act to the Senate, which if passed, would expand Trump’s strategic reserve by buying 1 million BTC ($83.6 billion) over five years — “mirroring the scale and strategic importance of US gold reserves.”
Lummis first introduced the bill last July with no co-sponsors. This time around, there were five — all Republican — while Alaska representative Nick Begich told the National Press Club that he would be introducing Lummis’ bill to the House of Representatives along with six co-sponsors, bringing the total number of sponsors across both bills to 13.
There’s still a long road ahead before the bills would pass with majority votes in both the House and Senate. Then again, nothing says Bitcoin like steady, incremental progress.
Honest work
Bitcoin mining is everything, everywhere, all at once: a multi-billion dollar industry covered by Wall Street; a techno-vocation to uncensorable peer-to-peer cash; a critical revenue stream for communities big and small.
It’s also a lottery system for hobbyists. And it’s paying out again. Early last week, yet another bitcoin miner running DIY equipment discovered a block to immediately earn 3.125 BTC ($262,000), plus an additional 0.025 BTC in fees ($1,950).
Data logs indicate the miner was using an open-source BitAxe capable of up to 480 GH/s of hash rate — which is a measly 0.000000894% of the hash rate wielded by industry giant Marathon.
The BitAxe was pointed to Solo CKPool, which despite its name is not a pool but more of a web proxy which facilitates bitcoin mining without running a full node. This was the sixth block mined by a SoloCK participant in the past six months.
Cold War II: Bitcoin Boogaloo
On the world stage, Bitcoin is no longer a theoretical construct. Case in point: Some Russian oil companies are now using BTC during trade with India and China, alongside ETH and USDT, according to a Reuters report.
It goes like this: A Chinese buyer of Russian oil pays yuan into the offshore account of a middleman, who converts the yuan into crypto before sending it onto a second and then finally a third account in Russia, where it’s converted into Russian rubles.
In one case, tens of millions of dollars in oil are reportedly traded in this way every month. Bolivia’s state energy provider YPFB meanwhile told reporters that it will use crypto to pay for energy imports as dollar and fuel shortages persist.
Separately, guests on this week’s Supply Shock roundup wondered whether BTC could be adopted by BRICS nations as both the pricing and settlement system for global oil trade separate from the US, “because then you’re not allowing any country to take over the oil market and America could live with that,” said Nolan Bauerle.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
