Senator Lummis Urges Americans to Safeguard their Future with Bitcoin
Wyoming‘s Senator Cynthia Lummis has made it clear in an interview with Ylan Mui during the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit on June 29, 2021, that she currently holds 5 BTC and sees the digital currency as a good store of value.
Hodl Bitcoin for Your Retirement Future
While the bitcoin (BTC) price has crashed by over 50 percent from its $64k all-time high earlier in May 2021, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has made it clear that she remains bullish on the long term future of the highly volatile digital asset.
During the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit on June 29, the 66-year-old Senator revealed that she currently holds 5 BTC in her portfolio but she bought her first bitcoin in 2013 for about $330.
Lummis says she sees bitcoin as a good store of value rather than a medium of exchange and as such, it is wise for individuals to buy and hold bitcoin in their retirement accounts for a better future.
In her words:
“So whether you’re an employee that has a retirement fund- I’d like to see those retirement funds invested in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that are good stores of value. But I’d also like to see individuals be able to use bitcoin and altcoins of their preference that are safe, that have met the hurdles of anti-money laundering and the Bank Secrecy Act. But that allows people to use their cell phones to send stores of value, bitcoin, to each other.”
Fighting for Amenable Crypto Regulations
At the federal level, the U.S. is still far behind in terms of implementing clear-cut and fair regulations for its crypto industry, and there have even been calls for an outright bitcoin ban from some lawmakers in the past.
However, bitcoin has continued to gain ground in the country, thanks to forward-thinking people like Lummis and others, who fully understand the workings of bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology powering it.
Last May, Senator Lummis and her colleagues, including Sen.Kyrsten Sinema, launched a Financial Innovation Caucus whose primary objective is to bring more clarity to crypto regulations and foster responsible innovation in the United States.
Now, Lummis has made it clear that the Financial Innovation Caucus has been holding constructive talks with key financial regulators including the Commodities Futures Commission (CFTC), to come up with the best possible regulation for crypto.
“Well, we certainly want to comply with things like the anti-money laundering laws. We want to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act, but we also want to make sure that we’re not stifling innovation in the way it’s implemented. We don’t want to over-regulate or differently regulate traditional banking and non-fiat currency banking because we want them to have a level playing field,” she declared.
At press time, bitcoin (BTC) is exchanging hands for $34,962, with a market cap of $655 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.