CHPS Podcast Episode 2: Bitcoin in the Halls of Power

In this episode of 'CHPS of Insight,' host Chris White sits down with Bryan Jacoutot, Senior Director of Clark Hill Public Strategies and Clark Hill Economics, to discuss the U.S. federal and state approaches to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency regulation. This episode delves into the impact of current government policies on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets, discussing the implications of executive orders and legislative actions such as the Bitcoin Act and FIT21. They also explore the potential establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve by the U.S. government as well as state-level Bitcoin reserve proposals. Tune in for a comprehensive analysis on how these developments may shape the future of digital assets. 

This podcast is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice or a solicitation to provide legal services. The information in this podcast is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, a lawyer-client relationship. Listeners should not act upon this information without seeking professional legal counsel. The views and opinions expressed in the podcast represent those of the individual speaker only and are not necessarily the views of Clark Hill PLC.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of Chips of Insight Clark Hill's podcast where we try to bring our perspective on current policies regulations, and new postures from the administration and dissect them for you a little bit. 

I'm your host, Chris White. I'm an associate in our Government Contracts Practice Group, as well as a Senior Director in Clark Hill Public Strategies and Clark Hill Economics.

Today it's my honor to bring on a new guest for you Brian Jacoutot, who works out of Atlanta, and I'll let Brian talk a little bit about himself and how he fits in here. Thanks, Chris. Glad to glad to be part of the the kind of opening foray of this podcast. I hope the viewers find this topic interesting.

As I said, my name is Brian Jacoutot and I I came on board here at Clark Hill a few months ago in the Atlanta office, the newly opened Atlanta office. And mostly what I do is election litigation through Clark Hill public strategies and Clark Hill broader law firm. I also am. Senior director at the newly launched Clark Hill Economics unit within Clark Hill Public Strategies.

And as part of that role, I, I analyze trends in the Bitcoin and broader cryptocurrency market, sort of how they, you know, how those apply on a macro level and on an individual level and really focus on, on understanding and research in this very new, it's still a new industry.

It has, you know, Bitcoin's been around 16 years, but Nevertheless, the industry is still very, very new, not very widely understood. So we're hoping to bring to our clients a better understanding of both the industry. And then of course, through the Clark Hill public strategies umbrella, we're hoping to bring that understanding to government officials who are now.

Increasingly interacting with Bitcoin specifically and kind of more broadly the cryptocurrency industry in a way that they were very reticent to do in the past. So we've kind of got a new a new dynamic and we're trying to break in and educate as many people as possible to understand not just the underlying asset, but it's sort of macro effect on you know, the economy. 

That's awesome. Yeah, it seems like Bitcoin's here to stay. Obviously, it's had a couple ups and downs and it seemed like it was in maybe a brief withdrawal but now it's surging on back. So, I'm sure it's something that people need to pay attention to, especially as more and more  countries around the globe and more and more people get involved in it.

It's something that we want to make sure we all understand. And so it seems like this administration especially has taken a keen interest in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin itself. What have you seen so far from executive orders and language that's being put out there from, from this administration? 

Yeah, right now from the administration, you know, Trump coming in, I think it was maybe day two which is pretty phenomenal given the sheer volume of executive orders the Trump administration has undertaken in its first few weeks or months in office. So I think it was day two that they, they put out the executive order on digital assets, which sort of set the tone for the administration and really differentiated it from prior administrations, including really Trump 1.

0 you know, he was not particularly enthralled with Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. I think I remember him kind of taking a neutral, maybe slightly negative approach to it, and, and now he seems very much on board, very positive, very willing to work with the industry. And he, and that's evidenced through primarily not just his campaign promises, but also this executive order that he did early on, which established a working group to examine the industry broadly, and then also the.

the possibility of establishing what's becoming known as the strategic Bitcoin reserve for the U. S. Take a look at whether that's feasible, you know, how to accomplish it legally and politically, and sort of whether it's worth accomplishing legally and politically.  So that's a really interesting interesting aspect.

They also for as someone who's in this space and actually uses Bitcoin personally, they took a very firm rhetorical  stance supporting the idea of self custody of Bitcoin. So you don't have to go through some third party. I mean, that really is  the, I think the original and prop for, Probably most important value proposition of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency more broadly is the ability to use this peer to peer and not have to go through a third party the way you have to do with traditional finance.

So it's nice to see there's support there. And then he also took a very firm rhetorical anti central bank digital currency stance, which I think from someone who is a proponent of, you know, general. You know, freedom of choice and people's individual liberties. I think it's a very good thing that the administration has come out very forcefully against central bank, digital currencies.

I can talk about what those are if we want, or we could, we could get down that rabbit hole very quickly. I can give you a kind of high level view as to why that's a good thing, but you know, however, however we want to do it. Yeah. I mean, I think I think at the very least a high level view on why, why that's a good thing and what that really means, because.

As you mentioned, this is something that has kind of been in the, in the periphery and, you know, and, and not quite central focus. So I think for a lot of people obviously people know what Bitcoin is. People wish they bought Bitcoin when it was, you know, $200 a coin, and now they can be retiring and sipping pina coladas somewhere based on their Bitcoin.

But getting into this whole realm of now bitcoin's not just a, a thing and they read about, oh, I lost a hard drive or this or that, and so now I, I've missed all these bitcoins. I think, what does that mean? Like, what, what does it mean to have a, you know, a central or a strategic reserve of a Bitcoin?

And, you know, people, I think, kind of understand what a centralized bank is for currency or, you know, Fort Knox with gold because those are tangibles. But we're in the world of intangibles, so I think giving a little bit of that background could be would be helpful here.  Yeah, I think really the best way to describe what a central bank digital currency is, is it is almost the opposite of what Bitcoin is, whereas I say Bitcoin allows you to sort of transact and save in a medium of, in a medium that you don't require permission to use or to even get exposed to central bank digital currencies are quite the opposite.

They are. They are  using similar underlying technology, but that technology, rather than being dispersed and distributed, is controlled by the central bank itself. And a central bank is like a Federal Reserve Bank, which is a currency issuer and interest rate setter and things like that. But the central bank would allow, digital currency would essentially allow a direct link from consumer or customer or client, however you want to phrase it, to the central bank.

Itself allow you to open up wallets and accounts directly with them. And that does sound great. You know, conceptually it sounds very convenient. And I think to a degree it is very convenient. However, what you sacrifice for that convenience is complete control of your finances. And if you wrap you at least now there are layers of private enterprises standing between a potentially problematic or discriminatory entity and your finances,  but that the adoption of central bank digital currency, would remove all those layers and would really allow folks on the front end to potentially freeze assets,  flag transactions, or create disfavored transactions and you know, a myriad other, other  problematic developments.

And so the, you know, the, the, the stance against it is essentially like, yes, we understand that this may be more convenient, but it introduces layers and layers of potential control over over the average American in a way that we're not. It used to, in a way that I would argue is antithetical to the American sort of experiment here, and Yeah, so that's why I think the Trump administration came out so forcefully against the idea, and It's not re the idea of a central bank digital currency is not really gaining a great deal of traction, at least in this country. 

Yeah, I mean, I understand from one perspective, you know, you talk about in the news  efforts, FBI, law enforcement has to do if they're trying to track down, you know, an illicit activity has been funded by Bitcoin and it's just gone through, you know, walled exchanges or whatever else and now it's untraceable or whatever.

And then I imagine a central exchange might make it easier for those law enforcement actions, I'd imagine it also makes it easier to tax and to track who owns that that central currency, but it seems like decentralized currency by centralizing it. But I imagine at the same time, what I think people like, and from what you're saying is, they like being able to own it and hold it, and they just have to find any exchange, and then they can go and they can trade and they can sell it that way, or they could just You know, theoretically hand a thumb drive to somebody that has X number of Bitcoin or whatever on there and that has some value to it.

And if it's a centralized bank, now you have to go and get approval from them before you do anything with your, with your assets. Is that, is that a fair summary?  I think so. And, and I think, you know, the central bank digital currency would enable even more than just getting approval individually. It could enable, I mean, truly economic favoritism in a way that, where the, the government would have a great deal of control.

Over the economy. Again, there are benefits to that, particularly in crises and things like that, but it also could create a great deal of unfairness and, and  undeserved favorable treatment to one industry saying, Hey, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna load up your wallet with. 1, 000 to stimulate the housing economy.

So, you know, go to Home Depot or, or purchase a home, you know, do something related to housing and you can spend that money and they can, they can literally control the economy in that way with the central bank digital currency by, because they'll have all the wallets. And so they'll be able to kind of program the money to be used in a certain sector only for a certain period of time.

And while that might help push the needle, if there's a area of the economy that is struggling, it is again sort of antithetical to the way we think of the free market operating, and there are knock on effects that can result from that, that I don't think anyone truly appreciates or can really appreciate until it's, it's occurred.

And so again, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very tightly controlled government top down way of doing things for the economy in a, in a, and it's a way that the U. S. just has historically has, has been very committed to avoiding.   Sure, no, no, that all makes sense. And does this tie into what I think has been recently drafted, but, and you mentioned it, this strategic Bitcoin reserve or the Bitcoin Act?

Is that something that's, you know, is that meant to form this or how does that relate to this centralized bank for cryptocurrency or how else does it affect cryptocurrency?  I don't think the Bitcoin Act itself, when it's called the Bitcoin Act because it's it's called the boosting innovation and technology and something.

It's a very interesting acronym. I don't know who makes these laws names, but they deserve a raise because I don't know how they can always fit it into such a clever, clever acronym. But yeah, so I don't think it really discusses CBDC specifically. It's more focused on  establishing, essentially having the United States government purchase Bitcoin as almost an investment vehicle, as a reserve, in the same way it uses gold and has gold reserves.

They want to kind of tie, make a similar investment in Bitcoin just as a, as a backstop in case this, this technology or digital asset really takes off into the future and countries start using it with one another perhaps, or large, you know, large organizations start using it to, to underpin transactions with one another.

You know, the U. S. wants to be positioned to. to take advantage of that, that eventuality. And, you know, there's obviously everything, anything can change and there's no past past results or no guarantee, guarantee of future results. But the last 16 years have shown this digital commodity go from 0 to 108, 000, I think under nothing more than, you know, with, again, with heavy, heavy headwinds from the government.

A lot of times the government has been. Difficult to get around for, for the industry, but nevertheless, it, it, it's been going on. It's completely global, completely decentralized. And the U. S. is now taking a position. At least some of the senators within the U. S. Senate, some of our new administration are taking the position that the U.

S. would benefit from having exposure to this. And that's what the Bitcoin Act does is it kind of sets the, The guide rails for how that would take place and it's done at the congressional level as distinct from maybe an executive order or something like that. So you get the idea being we want to get broad consensus before we dive into this new thing.

Because as anyone who's in the industry or owns Bitcoin can tell you, it is very volatile and it's scary to hold for long periods of time. So if we're going to do it as a nation, we want to make sure we have that critical mass, critical consensus among our elected representatives so that we don't You know, go in and out and potentially harm the American people as opposed to helping the American people. 

Sure, yeah, no, so it sounds like it's diversifying those strategic reserves so it's not just gold. Does the Bitcoin Act discuss gold holdings in general or how they'll play into this or how they'll factor in?  Yeah, it's a really interesting idea that Senator Lummis has proposed. Senator Lummis from Wyoming is, she's the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Banking and Digital Assets, which is a newly created subcommittee in this administration.

Or in this, in this Congress and she wrote the act and she provides that the gold reserves have been statutorily valued by the United States since 1974, I believe, at a rate of 40, 40 something dollars an ounce. I want to say it's, it's either 43, mid 40s per ounce. So if you go on the, if you go on the market, you go online, look at what the current spot price per ounce of gold is.

You'll notice there's a disjunction there, and that gold is, I think, trading at nearly 3, 000 an ounce right now.  And so one of the parts of this, of this bill proposes to do is to effectively revalue the gold, the statutory value of gold from what it was in 1974 to what it is now, and take that difference of price.

Remit the difference to the, to the treasury department and then have the treasury department purchase Bitcoin with that difference essentially. And the way I've kind of, in my own mind categorized it as it's almost like buying Bitcoin, which is a disinflationary kind of finite, scarce asset. Buying that asset with  the product of the last 50 or so years of inflation.

And we don't necessarily sell gold to do so. So you don't have to trade a winner for a loser. For something else, you can keep gold and you can use the, use the inflationary pressures that have occurred over the last 50 years to help purchase Bitcoin with it.  That's that's actually incredible. I didn't know that the reserve had capped the price of gold down at 40 some odd dollars.

So, you know, that's, yeah, I think as of today, it's like 2, 800 and that's, that's an insane difference. And then I guess do they have plans as far as to, I think one of the biggest concerns maybe to rephrase. With buying Bitcoin, as you said, it can be scary to hold. And so you talk about as people have seen, if they're tracking the news, you know, diamond hands and, and this and that, and so is there any language in there to, to try to prevent this nervousness or every four years of fluctuation from causing this to be like a massive loss if Bitcoin happens to dip, or a way to, is there any, any language talking about that? 

Yeah, as it's currently written and it's still in, I think it hasn't even been introduced into the bank, the digital assets subcommittee yet, but that's, that's forthcoming. So, all I have to say is there could be very, you know, things could be ripped up and changed. That's just the nature of legislation and getting it passed.

But as it's currently written in this version that's available now is that part of purchasing the Bitcoin is a requirement to hold it for 20 years. So it's a statutory holding period of 20 years, which is longer than the asset has been around. So, I mean, it's a very significantly long period of time and the, the, I think the, the point of that is to kind of ameliorate some of the obvious volatility in the space by just creating a period of holding that allows you to kind of just ride those waves of volatility.

To a, to a, hopefully a, a, a better place, a higher place and show that this was a, this was a decent investment on the part of the United States, but Bitcoin is very interesting because it has, it does have these blow off tops where it just goes up, you know, 2000% in like a year. And then it goes down in this very next year, like 60 percent or 80 percent and things like that.

And it's kind of become part, part for the course, unfortunately, or  fortunately, depending on how you look at it. But the, the reality is though, over a four to five year timeframe.  The the compound annual growth rate of Bitcoin has been even in the worst five year time frame, it's been about 20%, which is eating the lunch of, you know, traditional metric like this S& P 500, which I think is a compound annual growth rate of eight or 9%.

And I think it obviously makes up for the money supply increase that happens over time, which I think is a similar seven or 8 percent annual money supply increase right now.  Yeah, that sounds incredible. And yeah, 20 years is obviously a major investment, but if you're making a big change like this you would think that you'd want to commit to it to give it a chance to, to actually do something and not to be able to run away at the first first sign of trouble or first first, you know, either change of administration or, you know, discontent with cryptocurrency. 

Yeah. And, and, and I think that's the point of  using Congress to do this. I mean, I think executive order to this, to a similar effect would be, A great starting point. But we really need the backstop of Congress passing something like the Bitcoin Act because it just creates that stability where, you know, you're hopefully aren't getting, you're not getting repeals of laws very often administration to administration.

But as we saw with the Trump administration. It came in and issued executive orders, repealing old executive orders or, or tweaking them to their own to their own sort of standards. And, and I, nothing against that. I think that's perfectly legitimate practice. But it's a lot harder to repeal a law to get the, to get the consents to repeal a law.

So it will help ensure that long term stability if we get it done through Congress. In addition to having, you know, the president's, the president's working group recommending it or maybe starting the process themselves.  Yeah, that makes total sense. And obviously if you want to see something like this going to work if we bought gold and sold it five years later, or, you know, even four or three years later, who knows where it would have gone, it would have been 47 and not worth, you know, 3, 000.

And so something that does require a commitment to see if it's going to work. Yeah. If you bought gold, for example, during the peak of the housing crisis around 2010. You did not see it. It collapsed thereafter significantly, and you did not see a profit, I don't think, until  2019 or 2020 during the COVID run on.

So it's just, it's part and parcel to the, to this action of doing this of purchasing a reserve asset or acquiring a reserve asset. But yeah, so it's not unique to Bitcoin. I mean, the, the old, the old faithful gold also has suffered from the same sort of problems, maybe to a more muted degree, but nevertheless, it's there. 

No, that makes sense. I think there's been probably an even larger one that maybe we want to touch the surface on shifting gears a little bit to this financial innovation and technology for the first 21st century act. I know that you know, a very lengthy act, but how does that tie in here or does it touch on different areas?

If you can give us a very broad overview. Yeah. Yeah. So fit 21 is the act that you're referring to. And It passed, actually, it was crafted in the last administration, and it passed the U. S. House already, and then it kind of died in the U. S. Senate. Just due to a lack of enthusiasm for it, but it's a much broader, as you said, it's a very long, lengthy document, I think it's over, I mean, for Washington, D.

C., I guess it's not that lengthy, it's about 250 pages, but it was a very comprehensive overhaul of the cryptocurrency industry, it's not specific to Bitcoin, it applies much more broadly  the, the big thing that it accomplished was attempting to refine the securities laws, really the kind of the turf war that was going on in the last administration between the Securities Exchange Commission and the, and the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, because those two entities, regulatory bodies were looked at as kind of the, the folks who should be regulating this space and they, they didn't necessarily always agree on, on who had jurisdiction.

And to the extent that they did have jurisdiction, they also didn't necessarily agree on what they should do, on what should be done, how this should be regulated. So, FIT21 sought to harmonize that and then, and also just update it a bit for, for this new asset class, because what was going on was the SEC was largely doing what, what industry,  Practitioners criticizes regulation by enforcement where they would  kind of wait for a while.

Let this, let some new digital asset kind of get a toehold get some critical massive adoption. And then they would attack it with a, Oh, you violated the securities laws lawsuit. And  in doing so, they, they called on a test for securities laws the investment contract test for under the United States Supreme court of  SEC versus Howie, I think it was.

And, the Howey test, as it's called, involved orange groves back in 1940s, so it was not tailor made necessarily for digital currencies and digital assets, and so there was a lot of pushback on the use of that, and people were saying it's unworkable. So Congress saw that, heard that from their constituents and said we're going to try to update these laws for digital assets.

And so 5th 21 went a long way to doing that as well. As I said though, it didn't end up passing the Senate or it kind of just kind of died in the Senate. So it's back on the table potentially for, for adjustment and, and revision. And under a new administration that is, and really a new Congress that is more accepting and accommodating of this industry.

I think you're going to see some major changes potentially. And it'll be interesting to see what they end up doing, but I think it's definitely back on the table and it's, it's been revived in this new administration and new Congress.   That's great. Yeah, I guess I hadn't realized it's stalled in the house, but hopefully now there's a new Congress and administration's focus and I think the American people focusing on it.

We can see if it can get a little more traction and get some attention in the Senate. I think   from there I focus a lot of the federal level and it seems like obviously that's, that's a great, the right starting point since Trump and his administration is focused on this, but. How is this trickling down to the state level?

I think I saw recently Georgia jumped in the mix by maybe pushing forward an idea for a Georgia strategic reserve. As can you talk about Georgia and what it's doing? And also under this Bitcoin Act is there discussion of ways to incorporate the state and does it touch on other states?

And where do we think it's gonna go now that, you know, like your state, Georgia, and other states maybe jumping on the bandwagon?   Yeah, it's interesting. It's the, in the, in this country, the states have long been the laboratories for innovation with regulations and with just, you know, governmental processes in general whether it's, I mean, if you think about cannabis that really got the traction in the states first and now the federal government is essentially taking a hands off role to it.

A number of other things that have occurred that way. And I think Bitcoin is going to be similar in that regard. Because as much as D. C. is a great place to, you know, effectuate policy from the top down it's a slow, it's a slow big ship that turns very slowly and these states are a little more nimble.

The states representatives have a little more access to their constituents in a way that just isn't really as possible when you have 700, 000 constituents per congressperson, and then often millions and millions per senator. So, yeah, the states have taken somewhat of a lead here and jumped out in front.

I think at the current mark there's about 24  states that have some version of a strategic Bitcoin reserve bill introduced, you know, been written and introduced into a committee.  Many of them are just kind of in their first committee, so they got a long way to go. Some have already been knocked down and, you know, they didn't pass out of committee or they died in a chamber.

But nevertheless, there's a lot going around, you know, in these individual states, Georgia, as you mentioned, has to actually have one that was introduced by three republican senators and another that was introduced by a group of democrat senators. So you can see kind of bipartisan support for the concept.

In these, some of these states,  they don't, they don't necessarily want to attack it the same way, but they like the concept, I think. Texas is another one that it just passed out of the, one of the committees, the banking committee of the Texas Senate today, and so it's going to be onto the larger Senate chamber, and it's going to be put to a vote.

So, it's really interesting to see these, these bills make their way. through  the state legislative chambers pretty nimbly pretty quickly, whether it's to untimely demise or to, you know, onto the next chamber. But the states are working really quickly and it will be fascinating to see when one because it's really a question of if not when When one of these bills passes and how it's crafted and what the effect on the market is, what the effect on the other states are, because somebody's got to be the first guy through the door and it may, we'll see, I mean, they may get bloodied, they may, they may end up to see the doors wide open and it's, it's a great place to be, so I'm looking forward to watching that and then also seeing kind of how the states individually go about setting up it.

This idea of a, of a strategic Bitcoin reserve you know, how do you acquire it how do you store it what kind of input does, do the, do your constituents have in kind of the amount that you get, is it 5 percent of your budget or surplus, is it 10% all that, and you know, how long do you, do they have a sort of similar statutory holding period, the way that federal act has, has outlined so all that's up in the air, all that is ripe for Policy kind of lobbying and things like that.

You know, these, as I said, there's a lot of education that needs to be done in this space and the states, the state houses may be the best place to do it because you can really access these folks. They're genuinely curious. They want to talk to you. They want to understand this, this new class of asset, how it works and what the benefits are.

And, you know, I was talking about my role here at Clark Hill Economics, and it's a perfect, it's a perfect kind of cross section where we have Clark Hill Public Strategies does a great deal of house, you know, lobbying in the state legislatures, and now Clark Hill Economics can provide the, the persuasive economic proposition for legislators or industry kind of trade groups that want to make this pitch but don't necessarily, have all the data that they need to do so.

So it's really exciting time for us here at Clark Hill because I think we sit at a very cool, very interesting and potentially useful intersection and in a very new space with not a great d eal of incumbent players. So I'm excited for the next few years for sure.  Most definitely. One, one follow up on that.

Do you think that,  you know, and I agree with you completely that the states are generally the You know, the innovation hub and, you know, they're more nimble so they can, they can try things faster than the federal government unless it's, you know, by executive action. But do you think states here will pass their own and do their own strategic reserve on their own or do you think they'll wait until they can piggyback on what the federal government's doing?

That's a good question. State to state and comfort level there.  Yeah, it's, it's a good question. The benefit of waiting and piggybacking on the D. C. or exceeding the federal government is it really has the risk of doing so as of kind of putting your reputation out there and stepping out onto the ledge is greatly diminished at that point, because once it gets a.

Approval by the U. S. Government. It's gonna be a domino effect. And whatever risk there once was in this space about holding it is going to be diminished significantly, partially because if you go back five years. People thought that the U. S. government was going to outright ban something like Bitcoin.

Now we're having a conversation about whether they're going to gather it and store it for 20 years. So you know, if the U. S. government does that, the states are certainly going to jump out. However, the kind of downside of that, and this is more of like a, from an investment or almost trader type point of view being second to the U.S. federal government means you get behind them in the buying line, and Bitcoin is unique in that even unlike gold, you cannot produce more, even if it's, Becoming more popular. And then we can get into the technical details of why that is, but we might want to save that for another, another podcast. But it is, it is, you cannot create more just because it's becoming more popular.

That's, that's unique to Bitcoin. And it's unlike any other commodity we've ever seen where even gold, which is, I think most would argue is pretty scarce asset as it's, it's difficult to access. You got to go dig in the ground. It's tough, but if it ever hits a certain price where that becomes economically viable to.

To start mining gold in a, on a, in a big way, it'll be done and it, and you will find more gold. Like there, we're not at a shortage yet. What we have is just a sort of a practical shortage because it doesn't make a lot of sense to mine when its value is what it is. But you know, if, if it, if it shoots up to $10,000 now, so you can bet people are gonna turn on some mining rigs that have been turned off and they're gonna go find more gold.

That is not true with Bitcoin. So the, the, if the states get behind the federal government, they're gonna find that the only other. The only other balloon to step on is price. So if you can't increase the supply, you've got to increase the price. And if you have increased demand. And so,  the price will go up and it'll cost, you know, you won't be able to acquire as much as the states.

So I think it really is incumbent upon the states to kind of get there first. So that they don't have to line up behind the, the big burly U. S. federal government.  Yeah, I mean, so for, for Hoover Advantage here, or you know, whatever you want to call it, where you take on a little extra risk, but then, I mean, I imagine as soon as the government, the US government, they go through with this and they buy as much as they're looking at buying, that price is going to skyrocket pretty quick. 

Yeah, I mean, just as a quick aside, the Bitcoin Act seeks to purchase or acquire a million bitcoins in five years. That's 200, 000 a year. There are only 21 million Bitcoin that can be created and that, that last 21 million Bitcoin will not. Be created until the year 2140. So  the, there the U S is looking to eat up a sizable chunk of the supply.

And that will, because of a static infinite supply of Bitcoin, that is, as I said, unique to it the price could, could go very, very high, very, very quickly out of sheer supply demand side dynamics to say little of the kind of once the U. S. government makes this move, how the market will react and say, Oh, my God, it has the support of the U.S. government. I mean, who knows what that will be? The price could go, go bonkers. I don't love talking about price because I think it's it's the oftentimes the least interesting aspect of Bitcoin, but it certainly can be interesting to talk about. And so I just think that there's if the U. S. government decides to go, go in on this, the.

The market dynamic is going to be fascinating to watch.  Most definitely. I mean, I know I've read in the news about, you know, whales causing a lot of a fluctuation at different times because they have so many of them and buying, selling what that does. And you know, I don't, I don't want to focus on the price, but from a state perspective, they have much, you know, they want to buy a much smaller amount or much less capital to go towards it because they don't have this.

You know, surplus from gold profits that they might be using price is obviously a very important factor, factor for them getting in while the while the price makes sense so they can take full advantage of it. Yeah.  Alright any other save rounds, save thoughts you have you know, ideas that popped up or recent news things you want to touch on before we wrap up this episode?

Not much. There's just I think the broad thing to keep in mind is that we're sitting at a spot where we've really never been before. Policy wise. As I as I mentioned, 24 states have introduced strategic Bitcoin reserve bills. We have the federal counterpart already. We have a new Senate digital asset committee and subcommittee in the U.S. Senate. And even just today a freshman congressman out of, I think it was California, introduced it was literally called the meme coin act and it had to do with the ability of politicians to launch these meme coins that they've been lately doing you know, for better or for worse, I'm not going to comment on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but you know, they're trying to kind of cabin that in a little bit so that politicians aren't really, doing this sort of thing given their position that they have in a position of authority and, and put their positions of respect.

So they're, they're trying to stabilize that aspect of it. But the, the, the upshot of it all is that this is very much top of mind. In these areas where it used to be kind of a back alley conversation and now there's just legislation nonstop. Some of it's good. Some of it's not so good. We're going to have to work to to refine everything and get it where where we need it to be in a responsible way.

And again, that's where shameless plug Clark Hill Public Strategies comes in and Clark Hill Economics comes in because these are very difficult topics. They're technologically complicated, they're economically complicated, and they're complicated as a policy matter. And you know, we need, I think the industry needs all the help it can get.

So, as I said, I'm very excited for the next couple of years. We are in the conversation in a way that we haven't been before, and I'm excited to see what happens.  That's great, Brian. And if you want to learn more about this, I think you just recently had a article that we published where you dive into this a little bit more deeply as well.

So, and I'm sure there'll be more to come as as things keep popping up.  Yes, absolutely.  Awesome. Well, thank you, Brian. Appreciate your time. And I appreciate all the listeners bearing with us as we as we try to tackle a topic that we could probably talk about for days and still barely, barely scratched the surface there, but there's a lot of movement going on right now. 

Thanks everybody. Thanks, Chris.