Friday on FNC’s “Hannity,” Trump artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks touted cryptocurrency as a store of value for the federal government.
According to Sacks, the federal government had obtained Bitcoin through civil and criminal seizures and forfeitures. He told host Sean Hannity that with Bitcoin on the federal balance sheet, it needed to be securely stored.
“All right. I got a lot to ask you because I did invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum,” Hannity said. “I watched the fluctuations. If you tried for the entire hour to explain to me Bitcoin’s algorithm, and I have had friends spend hours trying to get this through my thick skull, you will never be able to penetrate the way my brain thinks. And I will never get an understanding of it. However, it has proven to be a pretty good investment for me. What do you make of the president’s crypto and what do you make of the fluctuations in the crypto market?”
Sacks replied, “Well, Sean, good to be here. You’re right. I mean, Bitcoin has proven over time to be a very good investment. It’s proven to be very secure. I mean, the thing you just need to know about the security of the protocol is that it’s worked. I mean, Bitcoin has now been around for over 15 years. The price has gone up from basically zero to roughly $90,000 per coin, and we think this stuff is scarce it’s like digital gold and we want to keep it in a digital Fort Knox. Now, what we’re talking about is Bitcoin that’s already on the federal balance sheet. So the federal government as a result of civil and criminal seizures and forfeitures had accumulated roughly 400,000 Bitcoin over the past decade. And unfortunately, the federal government sold off roughly half of that at very low prices.”
“I think we made something like $400 million or less than $400 million and if we had held that Bitcoin, it’d be worth over $17 billion today,” he continued. “So that has cost taxpayers dearly, that we did not have a long-term strategy. So, President Trump has now signed an executive order we talked about it at the crypto summit, to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We think we’ve got about 200,000 Bitcoin left. We want to maximize the value of those and the way that you do them is you hold them for the long term. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re creating a digital Fort Knox, and I should just say one more thing, which is we don’t know for sure that there is 200,000 Bitcoin left because no one’s ever done a full and complete accounting or audit and that is one of the things that President Trump has directed is we need to do a full accounting right away, everything needs to be audited because we need to maximize the value of these assets for the American people.”
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