White House Bitcoin Chief on BTC Accumulation Plans, CLARITY Act Timeline | Bitcoin Backstage

**Patrick Witt** (0:00)
Once the US government speaks on an issue and blesses a particular technology or a certain financial product, then the more traditional institutions go, okay, it's safe for us to get in the pool now. They're just dipping their toe in the pool right now. I think they're gonna dive in headfirst once this legislation gets passed.

**Isabella Santos** (0:19)
We're here with Patrick Witt in the Bitcoin Conference. How are you doing, Patrick?

**Patrick Witt** (0:24)
Doing great, thank you for having me.

**Isabella Santos** (0:25)
Well, thank you for coming. You're pretty important. You've done many, many things. You've been a Yale quarterback, Harvard Law, McKinsey, the Pentagon, and now you're the White House point person on Bitcoin. How on earth, how did you find time to do all those things?
Tell me.

**Patrick Witt** (0:45)
I feel like a cat. I've lived nine lives, so I've had amazing experiences. And in this current role, I just feel like I'm a steward of the industry's interest, and I take that very seriously. And I hope that I'm doing a good job to steward the industry's interest further when it comes to policy in DC.

**Isabella Santos** (1:02)
And who, like, orange-pilled you, or how did you become this first person?

**Patrick Witt** (1:07)
Really, my first exposure to Bitcoin and digital assets was back when I lived in France. This was 2013, 2014
Anybody that's lived abroad and has tried to transfer money to friends, this was before there were other platforms that you could do peer-to-peer transfers. And obviously, crypto was becoming a hot topic back then. So I had friends that were starting to get into it a little bit more, and they introduced me to it back when I was living abroad.

**Isabella Santos** (1:35)
Wow. And France, like the wrench attack capital of the world.

**Patrick Witt** (1:39)
I know, I know. It's bad. It's bad.

**Isabella Santos** (1:41)
So Bitcoin has primacy. You said those words publicly. For a room full of people who spent years watching Washington treat Bitcoin like it was the same as everything else.
What does that actually mean in practice?

**Patrick Witt** (1:56)
I think as you saw with the president's executive order last year, we created the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and then we created the Digital Asset Stockpile. And the reason why we did that is we wanted to signal to folks that we appreciate that Bitcoin stands alone. It is unique and has those characteristics that everyone looks for. It is truly decentralized. It is permissionless. It is uncensorable. And so we view that in a class of its own. And we wanted to make sure that people understood, both in government and outside of government, how seriously we take Bitcoin, the fact that we recognize it as a strategic asset for national security reasons, for economic security reasons.
We really think that it's important that the United States adopts a policy towards Bitcoin that factors it into all the decisions that we're making on economic terms and also from a geopolitical standpoint.

**Isabella Santos** (2:52)
No, I do have to ask, you mentioned permissionless, and this year it was tax season, and the 1099 DA, can you tell me about that? How did that come to be, and like, how is that going to impact Bitcoin in itself?

**Patrick Witt** (3:09)
So it impacts anybody that is a holder of digital assets. I think, you know, this being the first year, there's going to be some growing pains as people get used to filling out these forms, as some of the intermediaries that, you know, like TurboTax, when you're filing income taxes in the US., there's going to be different platforms that develop and make the user experience a lot more seamless so that it minimizes the burden that this places on people to have to report their crypto positions for tax purposes. I know there were a lot of issues with the basis for people's different positions wasn't necessarily being reported, people were having to go in there manually and fill this out with many, many different crypto assets. In some cases, tens or hundreds of these different positions that they were having to go back and figure out their basis.
Obviously, we're not looking to add a headache to people. We want to make it as seamless as possible to be in compliance so that we don't have a situation where people are trying to hide things. We want them to be able to engage with digital assets and for it to just be in the same way that if you're trading stocks and traditional assets like that, it's understood how to report for tax purposes. We need to make crypto as easy as it is to report for those other assets.