By David Yaffe-Bellany NYTimes News Service
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A pair of 50-page policy proposals laying out the plan in detail. Discussions about the specifics with President-elect Donald Trump and his advisers. And talks with Cabinet nominees about how to pay for it.

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the cryptocurrency industry is pushing his incoming administration to execute an audacious plan that would have seemed unimaginable just a year ago: a government program to buy and hold billions of dollars in bitcoin.

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As he campaigned last summer, Trump vowed to create a federal “bitcoin stockpile” that would serve as a “permanent national asset to benefit all Americans.” Bitcoin enthusiasts hailed the idea as potentially transformative, claiming that it would help reduce the national debt. Trump could still abandon the plan, and its details are under debate. But industry executives have spent weeks lobbying to shape the proposal, raising hopes that Trump might act soon after taking office.

In recent days, crypto executives have offered input to David Sacks, a venture capitalist whom Trump appointed to oversee crypto and artificial intelligence, on a possible executive order that covers several areas of crypto policy, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The bitcoin stockpile is part of those discussions, two of them said.

“This could be the Day One initiative,” said Pete Rizzo, an editor at Bitcoin Magazine, an industry news publication. “It’s certainly an idea that has come a long way in a short amount of time.”

By some estimates, the United States owns as much as $19 billion in bitcoin that it has seized from criminals over time, a stash that the government has recently moved to sell. Some crypto executives are calling on Trump to simply hold on to that bitcoin, which he could most likely do with an executive order. Others are pushing a more ambitious plan in which the government would acquire tens of billions of dollars in new bitcoin, building a “strategic reserve” similar to federal stockpiles of gold and oil. That amount of spending may require congressional approval.

The profits from a bitcoin stockpile would help chip away at the $36 trillion national debt, proponents of the plan have argued, and ensure U.S. economic dominance if the global economy someday runs on cryptocurrencies.

But the most obvious beneficiaries would be people who already own bitcoin, which surged to a record price of $100,000 last month. Any indication that the government plans to buy it is likely to send prices even higher. In September, Trump rolled out his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

Privately, some crypto executives say they are concerned the plan could make the industry seem greedy, and many financial experts have dismissed it as a self-serving stunt, noting that bitcoin’s price has swung wildly over the years.

“There’s nothing strategic or sensible about this idea,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University. “This would certainly be great for current bitcoin holders and equally certainly be a bad deal for taxpayers.”

But the mere fact that a bitcoin stockpile is under consideration is a sign of how drastically the political winds have shifted after a yearslong regulatory crackdown on the crypto industry.

“He cares about really living up to his desired legacy of being the crypto president,” Garlinghouse said.