Las Vegas, Nevada – Marathon Digital Holdings (Mara) CEO Fred Thiel has an idea of how US President Donald Trump’s administration can benefit from his promises to build a strategic Bitcoin Reserve: Start Mining.
Thiel said on a panel in Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, saying the US government has many potential ways to generate Bitcoin to fill the strategic Bitcoin reserve that would comply with the “budget neutral” acquisition strategy described in Trump’s march-performing order, including using excess hydro-energy to my Bitcoin.
Although it is almost three months since Trump approved the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, it is still unclear how – and when – the government will take steps to actually start filling it, a source of obvious frustration among a number of speakers at the conference.
“I think it’s critical,” Thiel said of acquiring Bitcoin for the reserve. “The United States that makes a statement that we want a strategic reserve is an empty statement unless you start putting things into it.”
At this point, the reserve must have all the bitcoin that has been sized by the government of civilians and criminal perdition – estimated to be about 200,000 bitcoins. But many in the industry and the government, including senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WYO.), Believe it is only a first step to get the government’s existing stocks of Bitcoin into a strategic reserve to be followed by larger, more meaningful acquisitions.
In March, Lummis introduced the legislation of the so-called Bitcoin Act of 2025-with the purpose of codifying Trump’s plans for a strategically Bitcoin reserve. Under Lummis’s plan, after getting all the lost bitcoin in the reserve, the US government would spend the next two to five years converting some of its gold certificates to Bitcoin.
“We have enough assets in the execution of assets, which we can get five percent of the world’s bitcoin without spending a single crown,” said Lummis.
However, the Lummis acknowledged that it is unlikely that any real movement on the Bitcoin Act – or, more broadly to take any significant step to fill the strategic reserve with something other than lost assets – will come before Congress works through stableecoin and market structure legislation.
“It’s going to be a heavier lift than I thought because so many people don’t understand Bitcoin,” Lummis said.
