Alaska Congressman Nick Begich is a fan of Bitcoin. And he’s made a lot of money from it, turning a small investment into an asset now worth $760,000. Now he’s sponsoring a bill that would make the United States a crypto owner, too.
Begich said his experience in crypto began in 2013 with a $100 purchase of Bitcoin.
“I was just curious about how it worked,” he said. “And so I bought a little bit, and I bought a little bit more, and I think I put maybe $5,100 into Bitcoin.”
He felt the industry’s growing pains in 2014, when the Mt. Gox exchange, where he had most of his Bitcoins stored, went bankrupt, leaving customers in the lurch.
Today, if he still had those 440 Bitcoins, they’d be worth $48 million.
But the first Bitcoins he bought for $100? Those Bitcoins were not in Mt. Gox. He held onto those. And they’ve skyrocketed in value.
As a U.S. House member, he’s only required to report his assets in broad value categories.
“So it's between half a million and $1 million,” he said, citing what his latest personal financial disclosure shows.
Doing math on the figures Begich provided in an interview yields a more specific number: His $100 investment is now worth roughly $760,000.
Begich confirmed that’s about right.
Cryptocurrencies are essentially digital money. Instead of banks keeping track, thousands of computers around the world share the ledger book. The price of crypto swings based on demand.
Begich’s Bitcoin bill echoes an executive order President Trump signed in March, creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” Begich describes it as a place to store wealth and he likens it to U.S. gold reserves.
“It's a good idea, I believe, to retain those cryptocurrency assets that we have acquired in a reserve, fulfilling a similar function to that of gold,” he said.
Begich’s bill, and the companion Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo, goes further than Trump’s executive order by requiring the government to purchase large amounts of Bitcoin — 200,000 a year for five years. At today’s price, that would be more than $20 billion annually.
“This raises all sorts of red flags,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Even assuming Begich’s motives are pure, he said, the bill would increase the value of the specific cryptocurrency Begich owns — Bitcoin. It’s legal, Bookbinder said, but not a good look.
“We want our members of Congress to be making decisions that are in the best interest of the country, not in their personal financial interest,” he said.
Begich said the bill specifies Bitcoin — as opposed to Ethereum or other crypto coins — because that’s the most established of the cryptocurrencies, and there’s a finite supply: no more than 21 million, per Bitcoin’s founding code.
It would be better, Begich said, if the government acquired Bitcoin for the reserve without buying it, like when it seizes someone’s assets in a legal case.
“To the extent that you can, you can simply retain that which you have legally acquired,” he said. “It doesn't impact the price of the underlying asset.”
A future version of the bill might eliminate the purchase requirement, he said.
As for concerns that his bill would increase the value of his own asset portfolio, Begich said a lot of Americans own Bitcoin now, and he has a variety of other assets. He said he can’t avoid advocating for things just because he, among many other Americans, would gain from it.
“I'm a homeowner who would benefit from lower interest rates, but I advocate for lower interest rates,” he said. “So, you know, at the end of the day, I think you’ve got to look at what's in the macro-interest of the public. I believe this is in the macro-interest of the public.”
He points out that he doesn’t trade in Bitcoin and he didn’t buy more when he became a congressman. His only purchases were in 2013, the first of which did incredibly well.
And he didn’t exactly lose his $5,000 investment in the Mt. Gox fiasco. He and his business partners eventually took a payout worth more than $1 million.
“It was a significant loss. I mean, relative to what the value of those Bitcoin is today,” he said. “Significantly less. But I'm not complaining about it.”
His Bitcoin bill was sent to the House banking committee but hasn’t had a hearing, nor has the Senate version.
