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The additional spike in price after Trump’s election offers a circular argument. Bitcoin is even more valuable because Trump will embrace it. Trump must embrace it because it is becoming more valuable.
A [bitcoin] reserve would present both a consummation and an irony for bitcoin’s hardcore supporters — the hodlers. The state would recognise what hodlers call freedom money, but also prop that up with a state programme. The preamble to Lummis’s bill argues that in return, a million bitcoin would diversify America’s assets...Unlike a traditional banking reserve, however, they would be held by the Treasury and couldn’t start to be sold until 2045. An asset you cannot sell does not give you resilience. It gives you storage costs.
A bitcoin reserve would serve exactly one strategy. A Treasury with a million bitcoin would be trapped by its own portfolio. Congress could never exercise monetary sovereignty by limiting bitcoin mining or trading, because the price of the Treasury’s own assets would immediately collapse. The strategic bitcoin reserve is not a resilience strategy for the US. It’s a resilience strategy for the hodlers.
There are lots of examples of a class or group of people who invest a lot in influencing the political system so the state basically bakes in their investment or monopoly. There is the famous railroad giveaway, the oil barons etc, but also car sales in the US are kept artificially high because the car dealership industry has a big lobby that spends a lot of money to secure them a near monopoly.
We are seeing that in real time with this, a mostly useless security that can't be used as money as well as actual money but has a lot of people who invested a lot of money in it use their money to influence the political system to buy into and "de-risk" an incredibly volatile security and stop any future government regulation or threat to their assets basically.
There's nothing here!