Texas Rep. Files Bill Letting Cities Invest $10 Million in Bitcoin

What happened

Ron Reynolds filed House Bill 815 on Monday, allowing each Texas city or county to put up to $10 million of public money into bitcoin starting. Files Bill Letting Cities Invest $10 Million in Bitcoin A Texas lawmaker filed a bill Monday that would let each city and county in the state invest up to $10 million of public money in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, without setting any rules for how those coins would be held.

The introduced text , posted on the Texas Legislature’s site, is two sections long. Files Bill Letting Cities Invest $10 Million in Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

Ron Reynolds, a Missouri City Democrat, on the first day of prefiling for the 90th Texas Legislature, carries the caption “Relating to the authority of a municipality or county to invest money in cryptocurrencies.” The bill would amend the Public Funds Investment Act, Chapter 2256 of the Texas Government Code, by adding a new Section 2256.0165, titled “Authorized Investments: Cryptocurrency.”

1, 2027, if the bill becomes law. The $10 million figure is a cap on each city or county, not a single statewide pool.

School districts and other local governments covered by the investment act are left out. What the bill does and does not say The measure borrows its definitions of “Bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” from Section 403.701 of the Government Code, the definitions written into law last year by Senate Bill 21, which created the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve .

Bitcoin is defined as a decentralized cryptocurrency created by a peer-to-peer network that operates independently of any central authority or bank. Cryptocurrency is defined more broadly as a virtual currency that operates with cryptography to secure transactions recorded on a distributed ledger, such as a blockchain.