I don't support a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and neither should you | Hacker News Reader

I don't support a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and neither should you

bitcoinmagazine.com

23 pointsnoch25 comments

Announcing your plan to soon buy a large amount of bitcoin sounds like a great way to pay more for that amount of bitcoin — right?

They've already bought. Now announcing to pump their portfolio with federal money.

Bitcoin is terrible for the environment and impractical for everyday transactions. If I want to buy a cup of coffee am I supposed to pay a $2 transaction fee and wait around for ten minutes for the transaction to complete?

First time I'm hearing about a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve", so I'm not fully sure what the purpose of it is. But I don't think it's meant to be for people to use to buy coffees with? Sounds like it's supposed to do something a bit broader, but again, not 100% sure what they propose it for.

I just think bitcoin is a scam and the US government shouldn't get involved with it. It would be like if the US government invested in a Strategic "Beanie-Baby Reserve" in the late 1990s.

probably means Elon has a bunch of it he wants to offload at a markup.

Doesn't scam require intent to defraud? Are you saying Bitcoin was created to defraud?

The proponents of crypto are scam artists. Whether they operate ponzi schemes like FTX, or whether they are just trying to inflate its value to pull the rug at a later date. They see BTC as an investment rather than a currency.

> They see BTC as an investment rather than a currency.

So you'd argue that the stock market is a scam too, since people use stocks not as a "what a company is worth" but as a investment they expect to gain in value, and they try to push narratives to support that?

Nobody believes that Coca-Cola shares will be the basis of the coming economic system.

Bitcoin lacks anything resembling intrinsic value. The intrinsic value of a Coca-Cola share is that you will receive a part of the profit of the company.

You don't think good money has an intrinsic value as good money?

Bitcoin is terrible money. It is less private than any bank account. It is significantly slower and pricier than any bank account for transactions. It removes control over money from governments and other institutions (which is by itself a death sentence).

Incorrect on all points. Bitcoin is as private or transparent as we need it to be. Bank account transactions are done on a higher-layer payment network than the base inter-bank clearance network, and the equivalent payment system for bitcoin would be either a bank account nominated in bitcoin, or for a decentralised solution, the lightning network which is instant and can cost less than 0.1% per transaction (compare that to 3% or more for VISA/Mastercard transactions). The bitcoin base layer can transfer trillions of dollars worth of value around the world with full final clearance in less than an hour and for around $2 currently (i.e. 0.0000002% transaction fee for $1B).

As for removing control of the supply from government - that is exactly the point: https://x.com/KenOKeefe1TJP/status/1875962999195816261

>They see BTC as an investment rather than a currency.

Which guarantees that it is useless as a currency. The other thing that guarantees that, is that Bitcoin is very bad at being a currency.

It's literally just a pilfering of the American public to enrich crypto holders.

If you have a lot of something, and you can get the government to buy a lot of it, that's very good for you.

Bitcoin at this point is probably running out of retail rubes to buy it to keep the price going and the tether ponzi will eventually break if there isn't new money flowing into the system. Getting the government to buy and hold it would be an amazing coup and let current holders of bitcoin profit handsomely at the expense of the rest of society.

It makes no sense in terms of economics, foreign policy, monetary policy, etc. But it makes a ton of sense in terms of "How can I extract the maximum amount of wealth from the public using my political power".

Yeah, guess why JD Vance is VP: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/17/g-s1-11654/five-things-to-kno...

> First time I'm hearing about a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve"

You should definitely know what your government might be involved in, after all government is made up of people many of whom are bitcoiners. Here is a report that's a good primer: "Digital Gold: Evaluating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the United States" https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/digital-gold-evaluating-a...

Here's the "Strengthening American Leadership In Digital Financial Technology" executive order that discusses policy direction in the context of cryptocurrency: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/stre...

No idea why you get down voted, but it is extremely clear that Bitcoin is useless as a currency. It is many orders of magnitude worse as payment network over existing solution.

The one advantage it has, trustless transactions without the double spending problem, is not even desirable for governments. Why would any government want a payment system it can not control.

Bitcoin is a literal meme, it's worth is entirely derived from the beliefs of some subculture.

No, no, Bitcoin's actually incredibly useful for fraud, money laundering, tax avoidance, and other crimes.

Not really. Monero is far superior on every metric. In the BTC network all transactions are publicly traceable, that makes it far too easy to identify people.

Monero is inferior on several metrics. Such as needing to keep track of all TXO rather than the orders of magnitude smaller set of UTXO. Or having a much more front-loaded emission (40% in first year, with intentionally crippled public miner).

But anonymity is your #1 concern when doing fraud, money laundering or criminal transactions.

Everyone uses the Lightning Network on top of bitcoin to have immediate settlement and almost zero fees for small payments. Where I am around 30% of all restaurants accept bitcoin and all of them over lightning, the transaction usually settles in 2 seconds and the fee is around 1-10 cents (USD) depending on amount you send.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Holding Bitcoin as a long term store of value works until people don’t want it anymore. The second it falls out of fashion, you’re Bitcoin horde isn’t even worth the paper it’s not printed on.

To those who say Bitcoin is a revolutionary something something and I don’t get it, maybe that’s true. But as I see it, Bitcoin is only worth what it was last traded at, and there’s no way to predict whether or not someone will want to buy it for more than it’s current value. Thats just not an interesting investment to me, and it feels like gambling, so I don’t want to take participate. I hope your Bitcoin goes to the moon. If it does, send me a postcard from Shackleton Crater.

Please explain what intrinsic value is

Reply on news.ycombinator.com