Texas Buys $5 Million In BTC ETF As States Edge Toward First Government Crypto Reserves (coindesk.com)
- Reference: 0180210791
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/11/26/0010222/texas-buys-5-million-in-btc-etf-as-states-edge-toward-first-government-crypto-reserves
- Source link: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/11/25/texas-buys-usd5m-in-btc-etf-as-states-edge-toward-first-government-crypto-reserves
> A few weeks ago, Texas moved past its deadline to "capture the industry's best practices so it can utilize these practices in the implementation and management" of its bitcoin BTC reserve, according to [2]its formal request for information issued in September. Entities across the industry provided input on how it could set up and manage the stockpile conceived of in the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act.
>
> Last week, the state comptroller's office moved to secure $5 million in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as a placeholder, a spokesman for the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts told CoinDesk on Tuesday. It's an opening move as the state continues to work toward a contract with a custodian, he said, which will take place after it develops its formal request for proposal.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/11/25/texas-buys-usd5m-in-btc-etf-as-states-edge-toward-first-government-crypto-reserves
[2] https://media.governmentnavigator.com/media/bid/1757366263_09-08-2025_RFI311-26-090825AK.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Re: (Score:1)
Feynman died in 1988. But OK.
No complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
You’re getting exactly what you voted for.
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... and in Texas, you are getting it very hot in the summer and suddenly freezing cold in the winter and with insufficient electricity grid and rapidly diminishing water resources and increasing political strain with your biggest trading partner and a rising culture that is proudly pro-faith and anti-science
Jesus fuck you could not pay me to move there
Pyrite Pete's failed prediction (Score:2, Informative)
On Monday April 26, 2021 @02:16AM UTC, [1]Pyrite Pete [urbandictionary.com] had said:
> [2]Wait 1-2 months, and BTC will be twice its value. [slashdot.org]
That was back when bitcoin had already fallen, and down to about $47K at the time. It should've been back up to "twice its value" no later than June 26 2021 - it took over 3 years to get anywhere near the $94K Pyrite Pete promised us.
Now that's what I call a prediction #FAIL!
Want more LOLs @ Pyrite Pete shitposts? Here are but a sample:
[3]"It is pretty much a given that BTC will be up to 100,000 [slashdot.org]
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pyrite+Pete#16198517
[2] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18758928&cid=61313682
[3] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21309506&cid=62524784
As stupid as this is (Score:4, Interesting)
Im old enough to remember when state pension funds would invest their employees money in stamp and coin collections. So, yeah, sometimes state agencies are just as dumb as that uncle that believes everything he hears from Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, and gold is the *smartest* thing on his investment portfolio. At this point Im cheering stuff like this. Theres a shakeout coming in the financial world and Id like to see the idiots get burned as deeply as possible.
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A lot of other people are likely to get burned in the process. Possibly worse than those responsible.
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Those responsible may well be setting themselves up to be the ones to sell the state the crypto, then once they've drained the public coffers they have even more excuse to cut the public services they can no longer afford.
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I would be surprised if Black Rock (who really need to be broken up, private equity looks exactly like a 1900's trust) hadn't hedged themselves against a crypto collapse, and if this fund goes bust they'll be fine. Texas won't be. The people in Texas' government who decided to make this investment might cost themselves their pensions, but that little bit of justice will be overwhelmed by the innocents being ruined.
Though I'd say the people ultimately responsible are the ones who invented this garbage in
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A lot of times that sort of thing was corruption, not stupidity. (Although I'm sure there were plenty of suckers, too.)
A pension fund would buy some old man's stamp collection as an "investment". Just so happened the old man was a relative of the fund manager.
Sounds almost quaint compared to Kushner selling the country to Mr. Bone Saw.
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As of late, Gold has been too volatile for a pension fund to invest in as well. If you look at the price chart for gold this year, it looks more like a tech stock with huge gains and large dips.
It also looks overvalued and is probably due for a correction, just like most other assets are at the moment.
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Of course the primary Gold Bug thesis is that Gold does in fact skyrocket up precisely when all other asset classes are discovered to be in a bubble
look ma, (Score:2)
Magic beans!
At least with magic beans, at the end of the day, you at least still have beans.
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OFC this actually exists: magic [1]Bean Coin [coinmarketcap.com]. It was an inflationary coin (holding coins generated more coins). I met one of the developers a few years ago. He was a really smart thoughtful principled guy. Just chose a really weird goal to throw himself into and not much formal economics education (but lots of "alternative economics"). I just checked first time in a decade, the 24 hour volume was like six bucks and the project webpage is gone
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bean-cash/
YAFS (Yet Another Financial System) (Score:4, Insightful)
Like I've [1]said before [slashdot.org], this is just yet another financial system being created to have a minority of people manage the majority of the wealth, to their own advantage. This is just a new competing system with less regulation created by the crypto bros to wrestle the current system away from the Wall St. bros.
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23517431&cid=64937203
Government-backed MLM is still MLM (Score:2)
Except now it has taxpayer backing of crypto crooks to speculate and commit fraud.
who came up with this, dr evil? (Score:2)
"Five Million Dollars" /puts pinky up to mouth
5 million dollars is 0.000014% of the Texas budget. If push came to shove and they needed to cash this out to run state operations, the could keep the state going for about seven minutes.
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Kind of what I was thinking. I imagine this is more than anything a carrot to the BTC industry in TX to prop it up. 5M is rounding error for the 6.3B budget the city of Austin has this year. As you say, for TX, not even rounding error. In a way this is the problem of any large budget. For an average person, a lifetime of money. For a large entity, nothing, but millions of those nothings add up. Makes it easy to favor your lobbyist without much notice.
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It's not much money because it's a bad idea. This is about legitimizing crypto coins paving the way for additional marks.
Re: who came up with this, dr evil? (Score:2)
I'm with you on not wanting to legitimise it, but it's got value either way. And I'm not sure how I feel about paying ransoms, but having a budget allocated and ready to go could save some lives when a hospital is hit. Advertising you have it is not good though.
what is a reserve? (Score:2)
a government or anyone may decide they need a reserve of something in case it later becomes unaccessible when needed. When can a government *need* BTC? Needing oil or food or water or weapons or gold is understandable, those are real things and it is possible to run out of these items and be in a position where access is limited.
If one "needs" crypto currency they may either purchase it in the market freely or just start their own, even Trump has done this on multiple occasions.
Note, it says "a reserve"
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For governments, "reserve currencies" lubricate trade with foreign countries. Crypto "reserves" are nothing but more fraud, it is a deliberate misrepresentation of what the investment is, the "reserve" serves no purpose whatsoever other than to prop up the fake currency and enable private "investors" to take taxpayer money.
The dedollarisation is in progress (Score:2)
Texas has purchased $5 million worth of BlackRock's bitcoin ETF as an initial step toward creating the first state-level bitcoin reserve in the U.S.
a. Move the planet off the Dollar as the worlds reserve currency.
b. Transfer the US debt to cryptocurrency.
c. Wait for the cryptocurrency to tank.
d. In the process, wiping out the US debt
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Are you nuts? el Bunko is likely to glom onto an idea like that and make it cornerstone of his toy administration. You are not helping.
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"b. Transfer the US debt to cryptocurrency."
What does that mean? Debt is money owed, the US doesn't get to declare what currency the debt will be paid back "in".
And if the US government needs crypto to pay its loans, why would that crypto tank?
You can make a list, but that doesn't make you smart.
Why does Texas need to launder money? (Score:2)
Why does Texas need to launder money? Or are they doing this to get experience in wash trading?
Either way, buying an ETF is doing it wrong.
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Only stupid people launder money with Bitcoin. SHUM!
why is this being called a "reserve" (Score:2)
In what way is this investment a "reserve"? It serves no function of a currency reserve. It is a speculative investment of the worst kind, and almost certainly a corrupt one.
NFTs to diversify (Score:2)
Soon, Texas will announce their investments in NFTs to diversify their retirement portfolio.
At last. (Score:5, Informative)
Greater Fool scheme finds Greatest Possible Fools (goverments) to keep pumping money into their zero-sum game.
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There's seemingly unlimited ways to leech off the govt. Modern welfare, everyone has some angle to get at public coffers. A bunch of people bought at or near all time highs under the dream it'll go up forever (get rich quick scheme #3151). Now that they realize its an auction and when there's no buyers, the price will crash. Look at the price chats, plenty of trading at level well above what btc is going for today. Now they want govt to come in and bail it out basically. Hey can I have my lotto ticket money
Difference in fundamental rights. (Score:2)
Jokes aside about Thanksgiving...
> Thanksgiving dinner costs a little more this year, govt can I has a few thousand in free money? What's the difference between those examples and texas buying btc?
The difference is that food is part of(*) rights to an adequate standard of living as per Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Not dying of starvation is a fundamental human right.
So yeah, I get that you're joking about somebody throwing an excessively opulent Thanksgiving party and then complaining that it costs a bit much.
But making sure that every single person has access to sufficient food is a core job that government has to do(**). You can make jokes around what const
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> But making sure that every single person has access to sufficient food is a core job that government has to do(**)...I understand that from the US' point of view, I am an evil
The scary/evil part is when the government is in complete control of the food supply, because that's how you get Holodomor (ie, the government exports food out of the country during a famine in order to oppress enemies of the regime).
[1]There are exceptions [existentialcomics.com], but the vast majority of Americans believe people shouldn't starve (and most would like the government to do something about it). Even Libertarians think people shouldn't starve, although they don't agree on how to stop it.
[1] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/258
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> You do understand that government budgets don't work like balancing your home expenses, right?
People keep saying this but where is the real evidence for it?
We have been doing this pure fiat experiment for less half a century. It seems to me it works only as long as people are willing buy government bonds and that is only as long as they think the interest paid outweighs the time depreciation + whatever value they place on the 'security in terms of capital preservation'
This is exactly the same as my home budget, I can spend more than I make as long as people will continue to extend me credit ...
Once
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Unlike your home budget, a government also controls the currency in which it borrows. It can therefore print money and spend it, which governments do. The beauty of a growing economy, along with a policy of inflation, is that it allows the government to manufacture quite a bit of free money rather than borrow it.
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He's a smart guy he knows better, he just hopes to confuse bystanders.
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As I said; I can default. A bankruptcy would let me even keep quite a lot of the property. Government printing is the same as that default, or at least the opposite side the coin. They get to keep their spending, your savings get devalued.
inflation isn't free, and it is not magic - (there are other reasons it might be better for growth than deflation) but in terms of government purchasing power, a growing economy without and increase in money supply would just mean the existing money buys more, so govern
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> People keep saying this but where is the real evidence for it?
Literally the entire subject. This is like asking if you can get airline status by running up tech debt.
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> But making sure that every single person has access to sufficient food is a core job that government has to do(**). You can make jokes around what constitutes "sufficient", but you can't deny that nobody should die of starvation.
There isn't a shortage of food available to the poor in the US. Between local/state governments and charitable organizations, food is available to anyone in need. Organizations are always looking for volunteers to help serve the food, but all the food gets distributed to people who are willing to come pick it up, or sign up to have it delivered to them.
As an example, for 1999-2020 over 30,000 malnutrition-related deaths in the US were related to hospice "care". That's 3-ish percent of the total 103,000 mal
Re: At last. (Score:1)
Why assume prices are rational in the first place? If inflation is noise, i.e. there is plenty of food but prices are set by monopolists at their discretion, why not index everything to inflation so real purchasing power doesn't suffer?
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Just be sure who the fools are. While this applies to the Federal government more, Texas might know something and might be hedging.
I mean if I was a large government with structural financial problems, deficits that politically I could never close and mountain of existing debt.. I might be very interested say transitioning the real economy to something like bitcoins, (giving my wealthiest friends a heads up on that of course).
Get business selling stuff in btc, paying employees in btc, collect taxes in btc,
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Think about it for a few more seconds with your engineering hat on. The use case Bitcoin is designed for is peer-to-peer electronic cash. Internet money transfers, with no central authority.
That has two parts:
Internet money transfer
No central authority
Number 1 has been a solved problem for over a decade now. Between credit cards, ApplePay/Venmo/PayPal/CashApp/etc etc, cash transfer over the internet is virtually instantaneous and acceptably small cost.
Number 2 is of absolutely no interest to governme
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1) - Entirely correct; a block chain currency is stupid
2) - Also correct and the reality is governments need these things, which is why I think it would be about the dumbest move in history but..
lets again say your goals are
* Dodge the legislature and the existing body of law
* Get people to continue participating in your economy, while also doing something that will completely destroy any faith and trust in your ability to control a currency for generations because you're effectively going to swipe their li
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Correct, now those government retirement funds are free for the taking, as designed.