Congressman Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) Introduces bitcoin For America Act — And Ohio’s Long Game Finally Goes National
On November 20, 2025, Congressman Warren Davidson stood in Washington and did something that would have sounded almost utopian when Bitcoiners in Ohio were swapping tips on obscure forums a decade ago: he introduced the bitcoin For America Act, a federal bill that would let Americans pay their federal taxes in bitcoin and route every satoshi of those payments into a new Strategic bitcoin Reserve. ()
For readers of OhioBitcoin.com, the moment is more than another headline out of D.C. It’s the point where a quiet, eleven-year Ohio experiment in bitcoin education and data finally intersects with federal lawmaking.
What the bitcoin For America Act Actually Does
Davidson’s bill, filed in the House as H.R. 6180, has three core pillars: ()
- Pay federal taxes in bitcoin
Individuals and businesses could choose to settle federal tax liabilities—including penalties and interest—in BTC rather than dollars. - No capital-gains hit on those payments
Under current law, spending appreciated bitcoin triggers a taxable capital gain. The bill would carve out an exception when BTC is used to pay federal taxes, so taxpayers aren’t punished for using the very asset the government is asking them to remit. () - All coins go into the Strategic bitcoin Reserve
Every bitcoin paid to the IRS would be swept into the U.S. Strategic bitcoin Reserve, a national BTC treasury created by President Donald Trump’s March 6, 2025 executive order. ()
In his official statement, Davidson framed the bill as both monetary modernization and a balance-sheet strategy:
“By allowing taxpayers to pay federal taxes in bitcoin and having the proceeds placed into the Strategic bitcoin Reserve, the nation will benefit by having a tangible asset that appreciates in value over time—unlike the U.S. dollar, which has steadily lost value under inflationary pressures.” ()
The bill has been referred to the House Ways and Means and Financial Services Committees, where it will likely be debated alongside broader digital-asset tax and market-structure proposals. ()
How Big Could This Be? The 1% Scenario
To put some numbers on Davidson’s proposal, the bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) built a modeling tool for lawmakers. Using Treasury’s fiscal-year 2025 federal receipts of roughly $5.23 trillion, it asks a simple question: what if 1% of all federal taxes were paid in bitcoin under this bill? ()
- 1% of $5.23T ≈ $52.3 billion per year in BTC flows into the Strategic bitcoin Reserve at current revenue levels. ()
- Over two decades, BPI estimates that the combination of those inflows plus assumed BTC price appreciation could generate up to $14 trillion in cumulative economic value relative to maintaining a purely dollar-denominated balance sheet. ()
That projection is far from guaranteed—bitcoin’s future price path is uncertain—but it frames the bill as a long-term fiscal hedge rather than a tech novelty.
Chart 1 – Modeled scale of BTC tax payments
- The bar chart below compares total FY 2025 federal tax receipts to a 1% “bitcoin share” of those receipts.
- Both are shown in billions of dollars:
Download Chart 1: Modeled Scale of bitcoin Tax Payments Under the bitcoin For America Act
Even at just one percent, the BTC stream is large enough to matter in Washington—but still opt-in and modest compared with the broader tax base.
From Seized Coins to a Strategic Reserve
The bitcoin For America Act doesn’t appear out of thin air. It plugs directly into the Strategic bitcoin Reserve President Trump ordered earlier this year. ()
That March 6 executive order instructed federal agencies to:
- Consolidate previously seized bitcoin into a single national reserve.
- Halt the old practice of auctioning coins and instead treat them as a long-term strategic asset.
- Audit federal digital-asset holdings and design ways to acquire more bitcoin without new taxpayer spending, for example through forfeitures or operational efficiencies. ()
Analysts estimate the U.S. government already controls hundreds of thousands of BTC from past law-enforcement actions. ()
Davidson’s bill adds a new, voluntary acquisition channel: taxpayers themselves, who can choose to send bitcoin directly into that reserve and receive both tax credit and capital-gains relief in return.
Conner Brown, Head of Strategy at BPI, calls it “the first truly democratic, market-driven model for national bitcoin accumulation.” ()
Ohio Has Been Here Before
For Ohio readers, the idea of paying taxes in bitcoin carries a strong sense of déjà vu.
In late 2018, then-Treasurer Josh Mandel launched OhioCrypto.com, an online portal that allowed businesses to pay 23 different state taxes in bitcoin. At the time, Ohio became the first state in the country to advertise cryptocurrency tax payments. ()
The program never handled bitcoin directly; payments were processed by BitPay and converted to dollars before reaching the state. Uptake was tiny—fewer than 10 businesses used it in its first 10 months—and in October 2019 Mandel’s successor, Treasurer Robert Sprague, suspended the program over procurement concerns. ()
A few weeks later, Ohio’s Attorney General concluded that the treasurer had violated state law by contracting with BitPay without the proper bidding process and approvals. The finding didn’t ban future crypto tax experiments outright, but it effectively killed OhioCrypto.com. ()
Fast-forward to 2025, and Ohio is back in the bitcoin policy conversation:
- Senate Bill 57, the Ohio bitcoin Reserve Act, would authorize investment of state funds in bitcoin and require state entities to accept payment in cryptocurrency. ()
- Ohio has also seen a surge of bitcoin ATMs and mining development, alongside debates over consumer protection and energy use. ()
In other words, Ohio has been experimenting—with successes and missteps—for years. Davidson’s federal bill is the first attempt to scale the idea of bitcoin-based tax payments from a state-level pilot to the core of the U.S. fiscal system.
The Long Arc from OhioBitcoin.com to Capitol Hill
While politicians cycled through experiments, OhioBitcoin.com quietly kept doing the daily work of bitcoin education.
The site describes itself as a “pioneering bitcoin market capitalization index” founded in January 2014, designed to provide live price data, charts, and educational resources about bitcoin and related markets. (ohiobitcoin.com)
Over eleven years, that “proof of work” has grown to include:
- Local bitcoin meetups and startup support
- Mining seminars and hardware deployment
- Open-source development and node operation
- Podcasts, livestreams, and mobile apps
- Curated news and long-form explainers about bitcoin’s monetary properties (ohiobitcoin.com)
In 2025 the site notes that it is celebrating its eleventh anniversary, and proudly points out that its analytics suggest it has “orange-pilled” an exponential number of visitors across Ohio and the world. (ohiobitcoin.com)
For long-time users, the bitcoin For America Act feels less like a sudden change and more like an overdue acknowledgment of a reality they’ve watched unfold in real time on this very site: bitcoin has moved from fringe curiosity to the center of serious economic policy.
Chart 2 – Ohio & U.S. bitcoin milestones
To see how those threads line up, the timeline chart below marks a few key points:
- 2014 – OhioBitcoin.com launches.
- 2018 – Ohio becomes the first state to pilot business tax payments in BTC. ()
- 2019 – The state’s crypto tax portal is suspended and later ruled illegal. ()
- 2021 – Industrial-scale Ohio bitcoin mining backed by nuclear power makes headlines. ()
- 2025 – Ohio bitcoin Reserve Act (SB57) in Columbus and bitcoin For America Act in Washington put reserves and tax payments back on the agenda. ()
Download Chart 2: Timeline of Ohio and U.S. bitcoin Policy Milestones
It has taken more than a decade, but the through-line is clear: Ohio’s early adopters, data wonks, and local educators built a culture that made it politically conceivable for one of its members of Congress to champion a national bitcoin tax bill.
Why This Matters Now
Davidson has been a visible bitcoin advocate since at least 2016. He has pushed for clear definitions of digital assets, criticized over-reach by financial regulators, and often argued that open, permissionless monetary networks are as much a civil-liberties issue as a financial one. ()
The bitcoin For America Act lands at a moment when:
- bitcoin trades near its all-time highs, with a market cap around $1.7 trillion and dominance above 50%. (ohiobitcoin.com)
- Other countries—from El Salvador to smaller Asian and European states—have begun experimenting with national bitcoin reserves or legal-tender frameworks. ()
- The U.S. is facing a federal debt above $38 trillion, reviving debates about inflation, reserve assets, and long-term fiscal sustainability. ()
Supporters see the bill as a way to:
- Diversify national assets away from a 100% dollar-based reserve.
- Give taxpayers more flexibility, especially those who already hold bitcoin and don’t want to sell into fiat before paying the IRS.
- Signal that the U.S. intends to compete with other nations that are accumulating BTC at the sovereign level. ()
Critics, including some traditional fiscal hawks, worry about:
- Volatility—reserves marked to market could swing sharply with bitcoin’s price.
- Governance—who controls private keys, and under what transparency rules?
- The precedent of embedding a single non-sovereign asset so deeply into the federal balance sheet. ()
Those debates will play out in committee rooms and think-tank white papers over the coming months. But whatever happens to H.R. 6180, the conversation has shifted. Paying federal taxes in bitcoin is no longer a sci-fi thought experiment; it is a numbered bill before the U.S. House of Representatives.
What It Means for Ohio and OhioBitcoin.com
For OhioBitcoin.com and its community, Davidson’s bill is both validation and challenge.
It validates more than a decade of work that began in 2014, when the site’s founders started publishing live bitcoin market-cap data long before ETFs, reserve calculators, or presidential executive orders. (ohiobitcoin.com)
But it also raises the stakes. If the bitcoin For America Act moves forward, questions Ohioans have wrestled with since the OhioCrypto.com days will return at a much larger scale:
- Education – Will ordinary taxpayers understand the trade-offs of sending BTC instead of dollars to the IRS?
- Infrastructure – Which Ohio-based exchanges, custodians, or payment processors might support federal BTC tax payments, and under what rules?
- State-federal alignment – How will Ohio’s own bitcoin Reserve Act and any renewed state-level payment options mesh with the federal Strategic bitcoin Reserve? ()
Those are questions this site is uniquely positioned to cover—in charts, explainers, and data dashboards.
For now, one thing is clear: when an Ohio congressman introduces a bill that could eventually funnel billions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin into a national reserve, it’s not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in the shadow of a small but persistent 2014 project called OhioBitcoin.com, whose mission statement could easily double as a summary of the bitcoin For America Act’s ambitions:
“We are living in historical times… This site’s proof of work has likely resulted in an exponential number of people within Ohio and around the world being ‘orange pilled’ to the priceless bitcoin network.” (ohiobitcoin.com)
Whether in a basement node, a Columbus meetup, or a House committee hearing, Ohio has been rehearsing this moment for more than a decade. Now the rest of America is being invited to join in—one satoshi, and perhaps one tax payment, at a time.