Trump Signs Order To Establish Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
- Reference: 0176646483
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/07/2224215/trump-signs-order-to-establish-strategic-bitcoin-reserve
- Source link:
> A "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social media platform X. The order kept open the possibility of the government buying bitcoin in future. The U.S. commerce and treasury secretaries "are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers," a factsheet on the White House website said.
"This is the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week," Charles Edwards, founder of bitcoin-focused hedge fund Capriole Investments, wrote in a post on X. "No active buying means this is just a fancy title for Bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick."
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/establishment-of-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserveand-united-states-digital-asset-stockpile/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-signs-order-establish-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-white-house-crypto-czar-2025-03-07/
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
In case there was any doubt as to whether the cryptobros wanted this to be anything more than the US government socializing the costs of a pump & dump scheme for them, here's your answer.
Second mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
They believed him.
...The first one was all the anarcho-capitalist I-are-a-sovereign types duping themselves in the first place and then running to Daddy Government for a bailout like Ayn Rand.
Re: (Score:2)
TFS says this is just a relocation of crypto reserves already owned by the federal government. ("seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings")
It also says the commerce and treasury secretaries "are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers". That sounds like just more seizure, not buying, of crypto -- although buying wasn't ruled out.
Honestly, this sounds like it's mo
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And I'm sure his private holdings didn't invest in any of the shit he includes in this "reserve" that he's basically promising that the government won't sell (i.e. self-identified as a bagholder), and absolutely didn't ride the value increase based on that announcement.
Oh wait, that would be insider trading, wouldn't it? I guess it doesn't matter since he's immune from prosecution from anything even remotely adjacent to an "official act" right?
This is nakedly corrupt, and saying anything else is ridiculous
The crypto bros are freaking out (Score:5, Insightful)
Because They can't possibly compete with the president of the United States when it comes to scamming marks and although there's a sucker born every minute even that's not enough to keep a supply of Marks large enough going for both Donald Trump and themselves.
Basically we've reached peak sucker. There's only so many People dumb enough to part with money to these crooks to go around and Trump is bleeding them dry leaving nothing for the rest of the cryptocurrency scammers to scam.
Re: (Score:2)
Relax. Trump just put a fancy name on something the federal government already owns. I wouldn't put it past him to have some kind of angle, but for now it just looks like showboating.
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Trump is done multiple pump and dumps involving cryptocurrencies and NFTs already. Not to mention all the other scams he's got going targeted to the less than intelligent.
There really is only so many people who have money to scam in this world and Trump has taken them for literally billions. A lot of scammers are out a lot of money because of Trump and they know it. Just like if a new organized crime ring muscles in on your territory you know it.
Re:The crypto bros are freaking out (Score:4, Informative)
They're "freaking out" because they expected the Fed to hoover up a whole bunch of coins and jack up the value of their HODLings. Presumably, that wasn't the intent (see that part about "by using tokens already owned by the government" in TFS?), so the crypto bros have gone all sad panda over it.
Personally, on my list of things to be miffed about the current administration, this turned out to be a big ol' nothingburger. If Uncle Sam wants to sit on its seized crypto until it isn't worth the ones and zeros it's printed on, that's fine by me. As they say, "nothing of value was lost."
Re: The crypto bros are freaking out (Score:2)
Personally, I would like them to sell seized crypto once everything has gone through and the courts and the owner will officially never recover them. It would not do much for the budget, buy it would help temper the value of crypto so it is less attractive to speculators.
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> Basically we've reached peak sucker.
That's really optimistic.
"Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.” -- Slavoj Zizek . It doesn't just have to be love.
Not so bad (Score:3)
> "This is the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week," Charles Edwards, founder of bitcoin-focused hedge fund Capriole Investments, wrote in a post on X. "No active buying means this is just a fancy title for Bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick."
On the other hand, the fact that the U.S. government won't immediately sell off its bitcoins means that its exchange rate won't be hit as hard.
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Or it means they're pre-announcing themselves as a bagholder for any future rug-pulling that may happen. I'm sure that's awesome for the average taxpayer, right?
Too volatile. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is probably a typical story. Back in 2011 or so I screwed around with Bitcoin. Back then it was possible to mine it without using the power output of Argentina. I figured it was a nice proof of concept, but figured that it wouldn't go anywhere. Then in 2015 I bought some back when it was valued much less. I sold it later at a profit. Then I forgot about the whole thing. I look now and if I'd sold at the recent top somewhere in the $90,000 range, I'd be a multimillionaire, even after I fed the IRS. In retrospect, of course, what I should have done was buy as much as possible back in 2011-2012, keep buying, and then worry about how to dump it.
It seems that is what is going on here. People have accumulated Bitcoin, and for some reason it refuses to die. But it's a deflationary currency, and the value will just continue to go up. That encourages people to hold on to it. But you still have an incredibly volatile price, which makes it not the best idea to convert some of your Bitcoin back to fiat currency for liquidity purposes. I figured that the crytobros out there would be salivating at this, but the "no buy" kind of makes it pointless. As a result, Bitcoin started up about $3500 today, and has swung all over the place, now down about $4000. That's a huge range. The point is that sooner or later people are going to start to mass cashout, and the price is going to dive like the world's fastest lawn dart and make a stock market crash look tame.
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> I figured it was a nice proof of concept, but figured that it wouldn't go anywhere.
I figured that since it could be infinitely forked, there is no intrinsic value to cryptocurrency. What I didn't factor in was that to people dumping money into the scheme, that didn't matter. The market is happy to share in the collective delusion that a Bitcoin is somehow more valuable than any of the numerous alt-coins, even though fundamentally they all operate in a similar manner. People just desired to play a greater fool investing game with real money and cryptocurrency made it possible.
At this po
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"But it's a deflationary currency, and the value will just continue to go up. " It's not deflationary. This is a common point most people get wrong. It just inflates slowly. Currently at the rate of about $70 million USD per day. If people don't buy up that much supply, the value is more likely to drop than rise.
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That depends what you mean. If you mean cryptocurrency, it inflates wildly. I can "print" a million quadrillion tokens right now, no problem.
If you mean bitcoin, I can also fork it and double the amount in existence whenever I want. There are over a hundred major forks already.
If you mean Bitcoin, the particular fork the most people think is "real," then that's true... for the moment anyway. It's based entirely on that "most people think is 'real'" though.
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> If you mean Bitcoin, the particular fork the most people think is "real," then that's true... for the moment anyway. It's based entirely on that "most people think is 'real'" though.
Exactly - people treat it as 'real' because it happened to be the first (or as some say, 'the original shitcoin').... until something else becomes 'real' enough to gain traction against it.
Now the crypto bros will all try to claim that can't happen, but Bitcoin is living proof that an alternative form of money can gain traction - if it happened once, it can happen again. And there's nothing Bitcoin can do to prevent that from happening.
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Bitcoin is deflationary in the long term. Every 4 years the number of bitcoins mined per hour is halved and at some point where will be no new coins generated, but that point is 100 years away. Also, coins can be destroyed.
The idea AFAIK was to model the output of a gold mine or oil well, where the output is high at first, but then goes down until eventually everything has been dug up.
It's the camel's nose under the tent. (Score:4, Insightful)
This isa camel's nose under the tent. It sounds not too bad right now, but I guarantee you it won't be long the US will be buying crypto to " stabilze the market to protect the savings of hard working Americans"
Uh, no (Score:2)
This may work for a while, at some point the government will want to sell those Bitcoin to "provide services" like welfare or whatever. Politicians or their constituents will get greedy, it's guaranteed. When that happens, the price of Bitcoin will collapse rapidly.
And this is all assuming nobody cracks SHA256 and RIPEMD-160.
Slush fund (Score:3, Insightful)
The short-fingered vulgarian is stealing it for his personal fun-money account. He got interested in "strategic reserves" after Biden managed to successfully use the SOR to simultaneously keep gas prices in line, hurt Russia during the early stages of their invasion of Ukraine, and turn a profit.
Stumpfingers, of course, is not concerned with turning a profit for the commonweal, it'll end up in his pocket.
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"This may work for a while..."
No. There is no definition of "work" here. A reserve is a strategic cache of a resource, bitcoin is not a resource. There is no definition of "work" that can possibly apply.
The intention of such a government "reserve" is specifically as the greatest pump and dump of all time. Trump wouldn't care if the price cratered, so long as he can predict it for personal benefit.
Also, such an act by the government cannot be declared by executive order. It is illegal and corrupt.
Exit liquidity (Score:5, Insightful)
So there you have it. All the shitty liquidity that old wallet stores are waiting to dump on is becoming available. Finally they can afford to sell 1,000 BTC at a drop of a hat without tanking the price.
You see the story of BT is that of creating liquidity. When liquidity is good the price goes up and when it's bad it goes down...meanwhile all those wallets held in escrow agreements and others were just waiting for there to be sufficient REAL money in the mix to dump their shitcoin for actual dollars.
You think BTC will become the world reserve currency?! Just HODL through the next 10 years you'll be fine as you live on dividens...or not.
Look my 500k "asset" and "store of value" rose 8000% when rich people saw away to create yet ANOTHER vehicle for wealth transfer and pumped it and dumped it. No store of value drops 70% due to lack of liquidity because a store of value isn't pumped (read leveraged) 20 to 1 or even as much as 100 to 1 in the early days.
The price of BTC is the same price as a crypto kitty. It's whatever the next guy is willing to pay for it. Sure BTC has more value or utility worth than a crypto kitty as a specualtion investment but don;t confuse it with an actual store of value.
All the stocks and brokerages are competition so someone created a "free range eggs" variety of trading with an "asset class" called crypto. Pump the big one, pump the small ones shift the money around until most people lose their DOALLRS for the SHITCOINs.
Told you to buy BTC at 3k, told you to buy BTC at 17k - now telling you not to fucking buy BTC at 100k FFS - just because it might pump to $1m does not make it a sound or wise investment FFS.
IF you buy BTC just undestand you;re swimming with sharks. When shit hits the fan it'll tank hard like it always does because it's not a store of value for you, retail You're liquidity like this BS reserve act is just liquidity to cash out influential rich people. Good luck.
Re: Exit liquidity (Score:2)
Yeah, that's about right. Also though you gotta have a big laugh that Fat Donnie spotted the cryptomarks. I mean crypto markets. The Mob is fair. He'll take fifty percent. Superb way for you to show your gratitude. Here's a laugh though , the markets might not react the way any one wants ... probably have a downward pressure on the price ....oh, the irony... congrats to "I love it because I'm free from The Man telling what to do" crowd. The Man wants in..
No different than gold (Score:1)
Or foreign reserves. For it to be truly useful, though, they will have to eventually sell some.
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It's quite a bit different than gold.
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Yes because gold and foreign reserves often sublimate >50% of their value.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick.
I'm confused (Score:2)
What does this have to do with grocery prices?
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> What does this have to do with grocery prices?
I really don't think you're confused.
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Not a god damn thing, just like everything else they're doing.
Except the tariffs - that will effect grocery prices. Just not in the way anyone wants, except the corporations that will tack on their own extra few percent and blame the tariffs while they record record profits.
Just like 2020. Same merry-go-round, same guy at the operator panel. Just different music.
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> What does this have to do with grocery prices?
Price of a dozen eggs: $5.99
Bitcoin price: $85,999.44
5.99 / 85,999.44 = 0.00006968 BTC
0.00006968 is a smaller number than 5.99, so now your grocery prices are smaller! /s
everyone in the world already knows the plan... (Score:3)
Trump/Musk buys billions in crypto, maybe with Putin's money, the directs the government to buy far more with the federal budget. Inflexible demand drives prices up, Trump/Musk sells then orders the government to liquidate Lather, rinse, repeat. This is why we have laws, and why we are officially fucked now that SCOTUS granted Trump blanket immunity.
Corruption? (Score:3)
So he is rooting out corruption by diving head first into a nest of it with our tax dollars. What a scumbag.
It's just good planning (Score:2)
I mean, could you imagine what would happen if we ran out of bitcoins? It could spell the end of civilization as we know it.
Let's see... (Score:3, Interesting)
... how this confuses and bewilders the trrumpers who are also bitcoin-haters...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
There are Trumpers who are also bitcoin haters? Why? Who would this be? Bitcoin and Trumpers are like rancid peanut butter and moldy chocolate, they go so well together.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Excluding Putin and possibly Kim Jong Un (haven't heard from him in a long time come to think of it) are there any economic experts, legal scholars, or otherwise educated individuals who can say that any of Trump's decisions and policies are sound?
I mean honestly who can stand up and say "You know what those tariffs are a fantastic idea". Anyone at all?
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Getting rid of the penny is pretty sound...
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I actually agree with that but his logic is stupid. Yes a penny costs three cents to manufacture but it will be in circulation for years. It’s not like they spend three cents and then sell the penny to the public at face value. The author John Green looked into the penny and the zinc lobby keeps it going.
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> ... how this confuses and bewilders the trrumpers who are also bitcoin-haters...
It's a cult. If Trump's for it, they're for it now too. See: the reversal of opinion towards the TikTok ban
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Ah, such a simplistic mind you have.
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I voted for Trump and I think that a National Bit Coin reserve is an absurd idea.