Before gold, before paper, before anything with a president's face on it, there were seashells. Cowrie shells were real money. For centuries, traders across Africa and Asia used them to buy r
Before gold, before paper, before anything with a president's face on it, there were seashells.
Cowrie shells were real money. For centuries, traders across Africa and Asia used them to buy rice, cloth, even ships. Then the world moved on, and the shells went back to being shells.
Eric Wargotz thinks that's exactly where Bitcoin belongs. Next to the shells.
"If the United States truly wanted to anchor its wealth to an alternative asset, even physical seashells would make a better national reserve than Bitcoin," Wargotz wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed on Oct. 1.
His target is President Donald Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the plan to hold confiscated Bitcoin as a national asset, the way the U.S. holds gold at Fort Knox and oil in Louisiana salt caverns.
Related: Treasury's major decision made this risk asset beat gold by 10-to-1
Wargotz is a physician turned politician, a former Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Maryland and a past county commission president who now writes about policy.
And his problem isn't really the shells. It's the swing or what traders call it volitility.
Bitcoin can drop 10% in a week. Gold mostly can't. A reserve, Wargotz argues, is supposed to be the boring thing a country leans on when everything else is on fire. Build it out of the most volatile major asset on Earth, and you've institutionalized the fire.
He's also gone after the reserve's favorite talking points one by one. Bitcoin as "digital gold"? He doesn't buy the comparison. Seized coins as a free win for taxpayers? Not free, he says, if the government's balance sheet now moves with the crypto market.
Here's the part most people get wrong: the government is not out buying Bitcoin.
The reserve was born as a campaign promise. At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Trump pledged a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile" and vowed to make America the "crypto capital of the planet." The crowd loved it.
President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Saturday, July 27, 2024.On March 6, 2025, he signed the executive order. The fine print mattered. The reserve holds Bitcoin the government already seized from criminals, coins it generally can't sell, and any new purchases have to cost taxpayers nothing extra.
Nineteen months later, not one coin has been bought on the open market.
Even the law behind it is half-built. The American Reserve Modernization Act, the bill meant to make the reserve permanent, squeaked through the House Financial Services Committee 28-21 on Sept. 16. It still has to survive the rest of Congress.
So the "strategic reserve," as of today, is a government wallet full of confiscated crypto and a bill that passed one committee by seven votes.
Some of the young crypto investors who powered Trump's 2024 run now accuse him of "cashing in" on the industry he promised to champion, The Washington Post reported the same day the seashell op-ed landed.
For context, the Trump family co-founded World Liberty Financial in 2024, a crypto venture that issues USD1, a stablecoin pegged to the dollar. Days before the inauguration, Trump launched his own $TRUMP memecoin, a token with no purpose beyond the name on it.
The money followed. Financial disclosures showed more than $1.4 billion flowing to the family from crypto ventures in 2025.
Trump's answer to questions about all of it, in July: "I don't get involved."
Related: Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow as October kicks off
