On Friday (November 13), Cynthia Lummis, the newly-elected U.S. senator for the state of Wyoming, spoke about Bitcoin on live TV during an interview with ABC News.
The 66-year conservative Republican, who was endorsed byPresident Donald Trump, was declared the winner of the U.S. Senate race in Wyoming on November 3, thereby becoming Wyoming’s first female senator-elect. Interestingly, one of the nicknames for Wyoming is “the Equality State” (because, according to Lummis, it was “the first state to grant women continuously the right to vote”).
Lummis served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives between 3 January 3 2009 and 3 January 2017. And prior to that, for eight years, she served as the 27th Treasurer of Wyoming.
On Friday, Lummis was interviewed on ABC News show “Good Morning America” (GMA).
During this interview, one of the GMA co-anchors told Lummis that because the first Bitcoiner to join the U.S. Senate, some people believe that she “should be an advocate for this type of currency” while there are “other people who are raising some concerns that this could be a front for money laundering or for some sort of tax evasion”, and then went on to ask Lummis whether she plans to bring Bitcoin into the “national conversation”.
Lumis replied:
“I do hope to bring Bitcoin into the national conversation.
“I’m a former state treasurer and I invested our state’s permanent funds; so I was always looking for a good store of value, and Bitcoin fits that bill.
“Our own currency inflates. Bitcoin does not. It’s 21 million bitcoin will be mined and that’s it. It is a finite supply.
“So, I have confidence that this is going to be an important player in stores of value for a long time to come.”
In case you are wondering how Lummis first got into Bitcoin, according to an article by Fortune published on November 4, “Lummis bought Bitcoin in 2013 on a tip from her son-in-law”.
As Fortune pointed out, Wyoming is “branding itself as a haven for cryptocurrency entrepreneurs” and during the past couple of years it has “has passed a series of laws to facilitate crypto commerce and recently granted charters to two banks that will allow them to perform a variety of transactions using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”
According to a report by Bitcoin.com, Lummis revealed on September 27 during Wyoming Blockchain Stampede 2020 that she is a Bitcoin HODLER:
“It was during my time in Congress that I first learned about bitcoin. I was struck by how innovative bitcoin is with its decentralized public ledger and a fixed supply….
“Knowing that there’re only going to be 21 million bitcoin makes it an attractive store of value. I have long worried about the Federal Reserve’s program of quantitative easing and the amount of debt on which our nation’s economy’s future rests…
“I want to address America’s debt when I go to the U.S. Senate. But I also want to protect the value that America’s workers generate through their labor. We cannot continue to debase our currency and expect that the American workers’ wages and savings will be unaffected…
“Bitcoin to me has shown great promise and may rise as a viable alternative store of value to the US dollar both on the institutional level and the personal level.”
The report goes on to say that Lummis also talked about why she first bought Bitcoin and why she is a Bitcoin HODLer:
“I bought my first bitcoin in 2013 because I believe in the economic power of scarcity and the potential for bitcoin to address some of the manipulations in our financial system … Now I am a hodler and I hodl because like gold I want to preserve the relative value of my labor over time.”
More recently, on November 10, Lummis explained in a tweet why she is excited about Bitcoin:
This is how Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long, the founder and CEO of Wyoming-based Avanti Bank and Trust, who is one of the strongest advocates for crypto, congratulated Lummis on November 4:
