LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) CEO Fred Thiel has an idea for how U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration can make good on its promises to build out a strategic bitcoin reserve: start mining.
Speaking on a panel at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Thiel said that the U.S. government has many potential ways to generate bitcoin to fill the strategic bitcoin reserve that would adhere to the “budget-neutral” acquisition strategy laid out in Trump’s March executive order, including using excess hydroenergy to mine bitcoin domestically.
Though it’s been nearly three months since Trump authorized the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve, it remains unclear exactly how — and when — the government will take steps to actually begin filling it, a source of evident frustration among a number of speakers at the conference.
“I think it’s critical,” Thiel said of acquiring bitcoin for the reserve. “The U.S. making a statement that we’re going to have a strategic reserve is an empty statement unless you start putting stuff into it.”
At this point, the reserve is supposed to hold all of the bitcoin that has been sized by the government in civil and criminal forfeitures — estimated to be approximately 200,000 bitcoins. But many in the industry and government, including Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), think that getting the government’s existing stockpile of bitcoin into a strategic reserve is merely a first step, to be followed by bigger, more meaningful acquisitions.
In March, Lummis re-introduced legislation — the so-called BITCOIN Act of 2025 — aimed at codifying Trump’s plans for a strategic bitcoin reserve. Under Lummis’ plan, after getting all of the forfeited bitcoin into the reserve, the U.S. government would spend the next two to five years converting a portion of its gold certificates into bitcoin.
“We have enough assets in under performing assets that we can get five percent of the world’s bitcoin without spending a single dime,” Lummis said.
However, Lummis acknowledged that it’s unlikely that any real movement on the BITCOIN Act — or, more broadly, taking any significant steps to fill the strategic reserve with anything other than forfeited assets — will come before Congress works its way through stablecoin 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.