When Conner Brown made his case for Bitcoin in Taipei, he did not begin with price charts. He began with 1949.
"A big part of why Taiwan was able to survive was the gold reserves," said Brown, Managing Director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI). The gold the Republic of China government carried across the Taiwan Strait gave an isolated regime the capacity to function when all external channels were severed.
Bitcoin, in his view, plays the same role today — "providing that same resilience in the digital world, giving governments flexibility and agency under any set of circumstances."
Brown visited Taipei on June 10 alongside BPI researcher Jacob Langenkamp for an exclusive interview with The Storm Media. A principal drafter of the Bitcoin Act, the GENIUS Act, and the CLARITY Act, and a former legal counsel to Senator Cynthia Lummis, he came not to pitch a cryptocurrency — but to reframe a strategic question.
Why Modern Conflict Is No Longer Just Military
Geopolitical competition, Brown argued, has moved well beyond the battlefield.
"In Ukraine, in Iran, we've seen physical conflict and monetary conflict happening simultaneously," he said. "Reserves get frozen. Assets get seized."
Bitcoin's peer-to-peer architecture — no central issuer, no intermediary — means holders retain control of their assets regardless of what happens in the external financial system. That property, he argues, is what makes Bitcoin relevant to governments. Not its price.
Build the Regulatory Toolbox First
Asked how Taiwan should advance Bitcoin policy, Brown was direct: the legislative framework must come before any discussion of reserves.
"The first step is building the legislative framework — like a toolbox," he said, pointing to the U.S. legislation he helped draft as a working model. Its core purpose, he explained, is to draw clear legal boundaries: which Bitcoin services are permitted, how stablecoins are issued, how businesses operate within a structured legal environment.
Taiwan, he said, faces the same foundational question. "Once you have the framework, you can move to the next problem: how do we use this technology strategically, in a way that benefits Taiwan?"
Brown described his Taipei meetings with cautious optimism. "Both the Legislative Yuan and the Financial Supervisory Commission are seriously engaging with this. That's a good sign. They're not rushing to a decision — they're thinking carefully about how to get it right."
His visit came just days after Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Finance Committee passed a preliminary draft of the Virtual Asset Service Act on June 3 — the island's first dedicated legislation for the digital asset sector. The draft establishes a licensing regime for virtual asset service providers, replacing the existing registration system, and requires stablecoin issuers to obtain FSC approval with central bank consent. Committee convener Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) set a target of completing three readings before the end of July.
The toolbox Brown described is being assembled, piece by piece.
The Semiconductor Precedent: Betting on What Others Dismissed
Taiwan's central bank governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) has consistently characterized Bitcoin as a highly speculative virtual commodity, citing price volatility as grounds for keeping it out of national reserves. Brown did not challenge that view head-on. Instead, he reached for a domestic analogy.
"What really put Taiwan on the world stage was Taiwan's forward-looking judgment on semiconductors," he said.
In the 1970s, when the United States and Japan dominated global chip production, Taiwan was a latecomer. Policymakers assessed competing fabrication approaches and placed an early institutional bet on CMOS technology — then still in its infancy. "That bet changed Taiwan's future. At the time, who could say with certainty how it would turn out?"
Bitcoin, he argued, demands the same kind of institutional judgment. Not an assessment of short-term price swings, but a clear-eyed evaluation of long-term structural and strategic value. For Taiwan, the central question is not how much to acquire today — it is whether Bitcoin warrants inclusion at all among the options available to sovereign asset managers.
On Volatility: The Fundamentals Have Not Changed
Brown offered a counterintuitive frame on the question that central banks most frequently raise. Short-term price swings, he argued, are precisely the window in which governments should be assessing long-term fundamentals — not a reason to defer the conversation.
Bitcoin's supply side is permanently capped at 21 million coins. Volatility, he said, originates entirely on the demand side — the result of the world working through the meaning of a novel monetary phenomenon for the first time, with long-term holders and short-term speculators coexisting and amplifying near-term swings.
"Bitcoin's fundamentals haven't changed. There are still only 21 million. It's still censorship-resistant, still scarce, still durable. Short-term price volatility is simply an opportunity for countries to think seriously about this at relatively lower prices," he said.
He cited one data point to anchor the long-term record: in Bitcoin's 17-year history, there has never been a single day when a holder, looking back exactly four years, would have been at a loss. He acknowledged that record will eventually be broken — but said nearly two decades of positive four-year rolling returns represents a compelling track record.
The AI Agent Economy and the Case for Digital Money
Brown closed the interview with what he described as a structural demand driver that remains underappreciated in most policy discussions: the rise of AI agent economies.
"Just last week, the number of AI agents on the internet exceeded the number of human users for the first time," he said.
These agents are executing a growing share of economic decisions — processing payments, managing workflows, completing transactions. BPI research shows that among all digital payment formats, AI agents display the strongest preference for Bitcoin and stablecoins. The reason is architectural, not preferential: AI agents cannot hold gold, cannot open bank accounts, but can execute cryptographic transactions natively.
"The AI revolution and the Bitcoin revolution are, at their core, two parts of the same thing. Digital intelligence requires digital money."
He drew a parallel to strategic petroleum reserves: countries stockpiled oil because they foresaw an economy that would run on it. Taiwan — as the manufacturer of the chips at the center of the AI economy — has, in Brown's view, compelling reasons to consider whether it should also hold the scarce digital asset that economy runs on.
Taiwan Already Holds 210 Bitcoin. The Question Is What Comes Next.
On the question of first steps, Brown pointed to what Taiwan already has.
"There's a saying in the Bitcoin world: 'get off zero' — have at least some, so you can begin studying it, building custody capacity, thinking about how to use it," he said. Taiwan, he noted, currently holds 210 Bitcoin seized through law enforcement. "On the positive side, you're already ahead. The next step is to build on that intelligently."
He was careful to qualify the broader argument. Bitcoin is not a solution to every problem. Real resilience, he said, is the cumulative product of many sound decisions made over time. Bitcoin represents one layer — providing additional options and flexibility in specific scenarios where traditional reserve assets cannot perform their function.
The question for Taiwan, he suggested, is no longer whether it can hold Bitcoin.
It is whether it is ready to think seriously about whether it should.
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