The U.S. Bitcoin Reserve and the “Revenue Neutral” Illusion

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Imagine you walk into your bank, insist your house is still worth what you paid for it back in 1973, and [music] then ask them to lend against today's value anyway. They'd laugh you out of the lobby. Well, the US government is about to try almost exactly that. [music] The punchline is that it just might work.

[00:00:17]Welcome back to Money Monday. There's a bill moving through Congress called the American Reserve Modernization Act, or ARMA for short. It was introduced [music] on May 21st by Representative Nick Begich of Alaska, with Representative Jared Golden of Maine acting as co-lead, plus [music] more than a dozen bipartisan co-sponsors.

[00:00:35]It's a rewrite of last year's Bitcoin Act.

[00:00:38]Here's what it actually does. It directs the Treasury to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve, buying up to 200,000 [music] Bitcoin a year for 5 years.

[00:00:47]That's a target of 1 million coins, which is just under 5% [music] of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist.

[00:00:53]Once those coins are in federal hands, they're locked up [music] for at least 20 years, and they can only be sold to pay down the national debt, which just crossed $39 trillion. The whole reason for writing it into law is simple. The whole reason for writing it into law is simple.

[00:01:09]An executive order can be undone by the next president with a stroke of a pen.

[00:01:13]A statute is a lot harder to unwind.

[00:01:17]Now, here's the part that should make you sit up. [music] The bill's supporters keep using the phrase revenue neutral, meaning no new taxes and no new borrowing. So, how do you buy [music] tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin without taxing or borrowing? That's where it gets interesting.

[00:01:31]The [music] leading idea, and I want to be precise here, is something called gold revaluation. [music] I say precise because the bill itself only orders a study of these so-called budget neutral strategies. It doesn't actually name this one in the text. But, this is the mechanism everyone's pointing to, so stay [music] with me because once you see it, you can't unsee it.

[00:01:52]The US government holds about [music] 261 and 1/2 million ounces of gold. On the government's books, that gold is valued at $42