Crypto takes a dip as Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto tumbled, and recovered somewhat, as people processed …
Yeah, there sure is the putrid whiff of British Union of Fascists (BUF) founder Oswald Mosley in the haphazard domophobic Orange psychodrama queen in Chief's whiplash economics (eg. tariffs), aimed then at making the British economy healthy again by a corporate state (DOGE) where "fascism alone can preserve the Peace, because alone it removes the causes of war".
A complete and utterly stenchy turd (as unequivocally demonstrated by real actual history)!
Hacker?
Going by the handle realDonT?
In a rare case of actually thinking ahead, if his plan for Tsarship fails and he has to leave at the end of the four years, the cryptowallet will somehow vanish into his house at Magaritaville (or whatever it is called).
Leaving behind a lot of (by then) really pissed off cryptobros[1] who have to choose between letting him get sway with the spoils or running the coin value into the floor, taking their stash along with his.
[1] everyone will be really pissed off with him, this'll be after his plans for perma-Trump have ben revealed and failed, remember
1. Cryptocurrency used for illegal purposes is forfeited to the state
2. State locks said currency in a box
3. Remaining cryptocurrency continues to be used for what it's normally used for
4. Loop while any cryptocurrency remains in circulation
5. Price of cryptocurrency attains its true value.
From Wikipedia: The consumption of gold produced in the world is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry
Now, what are the figures for whatever crypto represents and how similar is it?
Could it be that your are talking bollocks?
True. Upvoted.
They've indicated though that they are keeping it. As that stash grows, it could be used as an "index" for Bitcoin's value, as the scarcity of Bitcoin in general circulation will impact its liquidity, hence squeezing Bitcoin's value skywards. However, if Trump changes his mind (haha... tomorrow maybe), then Bitcoin's value may crater.
TL;DR On balance this probably won't have any effect on Bitcoin's volatility.
To prevent people hoarding assets, imagine a crypto-currency that "times out" after a year. That way, you can earn some money by doing good work, spend it to live and enjoy life and not worry about criminals (hackers, governments, drug cartels) getting too involved because they can't seriously grow their empires with it.
Every time this sort of thing happens, there's someone who doesn't understand that currency is a hard problem that has to assume the presence of bad actors who will take advantage of any scheme that can lead to more money.
Most national currency producers have worked out enough of the more obvious schemes to stop crime that crypto just ignores, with it's enabling by default.
Theoretically, there are several possible benefits. In practice, many of them don't actually work. For example, transferring that money to a different country is slow with paper money, and depending on the quality of the postal service, it may disappear before arriving. Transferring it from account to account might work depending on the countries involved, but there are often delays, fees, restrictions, and other things that can get in the way. Cryptocurrency could, and sometimes does, make it faster to send value anywhere, although some of the more popular ones do so more slowly or expensively than was originally advertised. This feature is also useful to criminals who hope to avoid controls, but that doesn't mean they're the only one who would like it. Cryptocurrency's other deficiencies mean that this benefit is not used as often as the less convenient transfer mechanisms that function with the money people have on them.
"Enough of the more obvious schemes"
Yeah, preventing the few at the expense of the many. The huge inconvenience of KYC and AML and all the other crap that comes with it probably isn't worth it.
The sheer wasted time and money that is put into enforcing financial controls is pointless and only treats the symptoms not the causes.
Money laundering etc is a symptom of a wider crime going on. Preventing the laundering doesn't prevent the main crime. It just shifts it somewhere you can't see it.
Making it impossible to launder money doesn't change the supply and demand for drugs for example.
The rules that I have had to describe should have been implicit (and obvious) from my original statement of how it could work. I was surprised people needed them expressed as examples.
I didn't feel obliged to give a more complex description because this is a fairly general tech forum and nothing would come from this discussion.
The real issue would simply be that people would store their assets in rare / commodities (including housing property). Those workarounds would need to be dealt with with in more specific ways. Preventing the government and estates from hoarding land and property is an ongoing issue that cryptocurrencies won't be able to solve.
Oh, some of them were, but that doesn't fix your problem. For example, it was obvious that you would need to charge a transfer fee, but this leaves you in an uncomfortable dichotomy. Depending on how large the fee is, you end up in one of the following positions:
1. The fee is low. If, for example, it's a 2% fee and the money expires after a year, then a criminal can exchange it over and over and has a long time to spend it. Eroding it to nothing would take far more than a lifetime, and although they might be a little annoyed that they won't get full value, unless they're the type of criminal that spends their ill-gotten cash immediately, criminals have dealt with worse.
2. The fee is high. This means that everyone has to live with, not just the fact that all their money expires if they don't do something about it, but that every transaction costs them a lot more than the transactions they used to make before. Many transfers are cheaper than this and even the most expensive credit card transactions don't have as high a fee as you'll need to prevent account-to-account transfers from being feasible.
Your initial proposal seemed to be designed to promote spending, but by charging large fees and eroding savings every time someone does spend, you're reducing it again. In some ways, that's an advantage, because there won't be as much immediate spending from people who are about to be robbed of their savings. The inflation problem is just going to get worse though, and the unpopularity would be even higher.
Of course, another set of rules you haven't clarified is how this works with investments. I've been speaking of this from the perspective of people who put all their money in a bank account and leave it there until they want to spend it. I know some people who do that. It doesn't explain what would happen to someone who invests their savings in a variety of funds or securities. Do those expire too, or is this an acceptable form of saving? If it works as it does today, your solution is broken because it just eliminates a long-term bank account but everyone can still save as before after learning about low-risk investment options. If it expires, it is not broken but several new things are because those investments did a lot of things that you will now need to replace.
And one further problem is that you haven't explained very much why this is a good thing. Why is saving a problem that we need to eliminate by changing how money works? How do we deal with the problem of someone who would have saved for a necessity, they followed the spirit of your proposal and spent it before expiration instead of finding a loophole, and now they have a problem and no money to use to solve it? It's not just that you have a lot of loopholes to close for your proposal to work, but that the stated purpose of it will break some other things which, if you want anyone to agree to it, you will have to fix.
Not exactly.
I think you'll find Jerry Pournelle's "Yet another modest proposal" and the "Roentgen Standard" might get you something relevant.
This being the FOCF you know someone's going to benefit out of it.
Just probably not the people who backed it thinking it was going to be them.
Close, but no banana[1]
It was Larry Niven, not his buddy Jerry (that page also has a link to the story itself).
[1] nowhere near radioactive enough!
It's been proposed. It's a stupid idea for many obvious reasons, but it's also easily defeated by exchanging all my money before it's going to expire with others whose money is also going to expire. It just happens that we did similar amounts of work for one another around that time which we feel deserve similar amounts of repayment. Clock reset. It also doesn't do a thing to prevent criminals from using it; criminals want to spend their gains too, so how does preventing saving do anything against them? Of course, you could build in lots of extra features to make it harder for criminals to use it, most of which would be detrimental to and detested by law-abiding users.
A lot of effort has gone into encouraging people to save money because people who have money available when they need it tend to do better than people who spent all of it. Forcing people who want to save to spend it anyway kind of breaks all of that, generating exactly the opposite of the benefits from it. You'd also get some fun bonus problems from people who didn't need to be convinced to save and now face a use or lose situation. You also get two groups of angry people who might want to attack you because either you took away their money, or to avoid you taking away their money, they invested it in something that doesn't expire but wasn't a good choice. True, that second one normally isn't your fault, but since they had to invest or you would have confiscated it through automatic expiration, they'll ascribe any downstream negative consequences to you. Meanwhile, I see no positives whatsoever.
then we have coin mixers and washers.
You give the coin to them, resetting the transaction, and they give it (or a different one) right back. Your coin is good as new again, no (other) transaction needed. If you make it so it can never hit the same wallet again, you prevent some legitimate transactions, dupe some into receiving coins that are about to time out specifically for them, or in the coin changer, instead of random distribution or return, rotate-right and you always get someone else's new coin.
Someone will always find a way to hoard and scam.
Interesting idea, needs more thought.
Crypto fees are presented by the exchanges too fleece you - sorry, offset the cost of maintaining their infrastructure for your convenience.
If bad actors need to shuttle enough coin around just to kep it from vanishing they can set up their own exchange - or "acquire" a "legitimate" one. Then open it to public use as well, why not, - for a fee.
Absolutely, but if you're comparing it to definitely losing all of it, you can excuse the fee. Everyone paying the fee will get a reminder every time they do it why they hate the person who came up with this idea, because they're being forced to pay to maintain access to their money and if they ever forget, they'll lose it. People hate bank fees which are charged automatically, and making them manual will just make the idea less popular.
"Everyone paying the fee will get a reminder every time they do it why they hate the person who came up with this idea, because they're being forced to pay to maintain access to their money and if they ever forget, they'll lose it. "
Everybody will need more space so they can store things in bulk such as Aluminum. The usual example is "precious" metals, but any metal that isn't going to corrode into a messy green pile by next week is a safer store of value than crypto. For somebody to come and rob you of your Aluminum horde is going to need a couple of friends, a medium truck and a packed lunch to get enough to offset the risk.
I have bad news for you. if you have "pure" aluminium, it will oxidise with time.
However, If you have the right alloy, it will last a lot longer, but you'll have to keep it in extruded sections / rolled sheets to be ready to sell to your buyer, who will want to use it. Congratulations, instead of having savings, you are now in the metal warehousing and shipping business! Wouldn't it be easier to just have a normal bank account?
"then we have coin mixers and washers."
And? That's just what banks do with normal money. There's published estimates that US money laundering is around $216bn a year, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. There's notably higher percentages (but lower absolute value) for all European and Western-aligned economies.
The Bitcoin in the reserve "shall not be sold and shall be maintained as reserve assets of the United States,"
There is a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" in Newport, South Wales established in 2013. Although it's size is somewhat modest compared to the US one, it too won't be sold.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/bitcoin_drive_landfill/
"That makes about as much sense as digging some shiny metal out of the ground and burying it in another hole in the ground"
If your government is going to ruin your monetary system, having a load of metal or other industrial commodity stored away might be a good hedge. I wouldn't be surprised if the price of copper stays at least even with inflation. While it might not earn you any money, it could be a good store of value.
Budgeted? Budgeted?
He hasn't budgeted for the fallout effects of anything else (like paying for DOGE and the pointless damage that is causing, the lawsuits it is piling up - threatening to sack judges who don't respond to the "five bulletpoints" email!).
Why would he think to budget for keeping track of cryptocurrency, it is heavy, like gold, isn't it, you can't just move it without a great big truck!
""One day"? It's going there now."
Not to his big investor. Tesla drop forty something bucks a share today. Who's to say if they are over $200/share at the end of the week with informal sales figures coming in that look pretty bad. That makes Elon's "wealth" dropping more in the last couple of months than the budgets of a bunch of small nations. I'm guessing that we can forget the rumors of Elon buying Greenland.
My preference would surely be to see it sold progressively to pay for US weaponry sent over to Ukraine to help its valorous freedom fighters better combat the cowardly yellow-bellied Russian invasion of godless former commies and emaciated North-Korean porn addicts.
In Europe, France seems to be quantum-simultaneously both warmed to this idea and opposed to it, with the expected rugby melee with the UK over those $350B ... but as long as that concept rattles the Kremlin's cage good, I say it's a true and unerring #winner!
It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news.
In the meantime, someone over at North Korea said: Own it like I stole it!
From my limited understanding of the impenetrable processes of the US government I have an inkling that executive orders (which I think roughly correspond to ministerial regulations in saner parts) can actually be overturned by the legislature (senate or senate+house?)
In two years time if the composition of the legislature were to significantly change towards sanity or to something more insane but contrary to the current lunacy, then a great wad of BTC might be dumped in the market. Given crypo's innate volatility I imagine then the price would rapidly head south.
If the US were to hold a much greater chunk of the issued BTC etc, I imagine other nations for sovereignty concerns and transnational entities to limit financial risk might eschew crypto altogether.
The next insanity might be fixing the BTC to the USD
eg 10μBTC = 1.00USD (about as sensible as the post war gold standard 1.0 oz. troy† = USD35.00)
I should start touting the advantages of bimetallism. ;)
† 31.1034768g
It's funny that you should say that.
I have been watching the shenanigans of certain right wing members of the Supreme Court and thought "Hold on, that's the sort of neutrality that Roland Freisler practised."
I thought that the idea of appointing Justices to the Supreme Court for life was to insulate them from political interference.
Of course that doesn't work if the justices are already card carrying members of the head of government's party.
Mid-terms? Assuming he hasn't been assassinated, impeached or declared medically unable to hold office (and if any of those happen, the US get to 'enjoy' the vice pres. stepping up <deity> help us all)....
I can see the line already: "I had great mid terms. Probably the bestest mid-terms of any president. The results show that 200% of the 150-180 year olds on social benefits voted for me, I love those people. My kind of people. And the young, also my kind of people. They voted for me. Over 300% of all young people voted for The Donald. FACT! The mid-terms were corrupted by the lazy Democrats. Just look at their voting records and you can see they tried to corrupt the vote by not voting for me. So did the Mexicans, they tried but they failed, and the result shows how much they tried. God voted for me. FACT!... cont. page 94.
Having lived through the whole Watergate era, I'd be more inclined to say that Spiro Agnew's nolo contendere plea to bribery and his subsequent resignation as VP was more of a stroke of good luck1 than it was a "step" toward ridding the Presidency of Nixon.
Agnew was a crook, pure and simple, but Nixon was much more complex.
I don't think Nixon did things out of pecuniary interest -- it was more in the interest of power and score settling. As comedian Harry Shearer2 put it, Nixon was a "sore winner" who sought to exact revenge upon anyone who slighted him or, in his estimation, reaped unearned rewards simply for being a son of privilege3.
In a perverse way, you can sort of sympathize with old Tricky Dick even as you despise his actions.
_________________
1 Had he not resigned, he would have been a strong bit of Impeachment Insurance and the prospect of an Agnew Presidency would have kept Nixon in office.
2 Bass player in This is Spinal Tap and multiple characters in The Simpsons including C Montgomery Burns.
3 For instance, the Harvard-educated East Coast elite, John F Kennedy, who thwarted Nixon by being assassinated before Nixon could wreak vengeance.
"The results show that 200% of the 150-180 year olds on social benefits voted for me"
Somebody that old might be in the database and not marked as deceased, but won't be collecting benefits. They would have passed away 100 years ago, more or less. A little before the beginnings of the Social Security benefits were being implemented. I wouldn't be surprised that some of the entries are just fat fingered mistakes. Somebody just eligible for SS old age benefits now would have been born circa 1960, long before computers were a thing. Loads of that information would need to have been computerized by people typing it in from paper records. Not exactly a mistake free method. Even OCR of scanned paperwork can be riddled with issues.
The issue of people of 150+ year old being on social benefits apparently was just down to how the antiquated COBOL system handled it if no DOB was inputted when they were added to the database, it would default to a value of 1890.
Of course Musks tech bros from DOGE probably worked that out quite quickly, but it doesn't make as good as a story as thousand of people 150+ years old are on the benefits system and if it wasn't for Trump and DOGE they would be getting away with fraudulent benefits claims.
Get all the coins held into one (two - why separate out bitcoin like that?) place, let everyone see how much is being held by feds for the first time.
Say it won't be traded, situation stays as it has been fof the last how many years. Ignore if a little bit was used to run FBI stings or whatever. Crypto prices bump at the announcement but go back to normal soon.
Any time crypto bros whine in next few years, take into quiet room, show unsigned executive order: can dump it all in one go, just say the word and the price drops to floor.
If the US dollar has been put on a bro chain, and gold has been replaced with the pyramid scheme that is crypto gambling, What value does the physical dollar have anymore? It's traditionally been backed by the GDP, but currency on a block chain is imaginary, and doesn't have any more connection with the GDP. You cross that with all federal workers being cut, and the IRS being attacked during tax season, nobody has any clue what so ever what is actually happening with the us economy rn. People don't even know if they should be repaying their federal loans, or doing their taxes. Nobody can make budget plans or rely on any income. It's silly season. Total confusion. Is the US broke rn? We don't even have a reliable budget. We don't know.
> If the US dollar has been put on a bro chain, and gold has been replaced with the pyramid scheme that is crypto gambling
And if the crypto used are the common ones, like Bitcoin, these are relying on there being enough random systems scattered across the Internet to maintain the chain, by mining. Which leaves them open to 51% attacks. Other mechanisms than Bitcoin's "Proof of Work" are tried in other crypto, but they all rely on "no one player can ever get enough - whatever - to take control". Where "whatever" can be how much drive storage you've collected or how much of the coin you hold.
So, the second that you (functionally) tie $US to bitcoin is the second that China switches all its GPUs and NPUs and CPUs, company laptops and after-school Maths Clubs to churning out Bitcoin hashes[1]. The US then gets to watch a brand-new "trustworthy" copy of the ledger floodfill across the Internet. What do you think that new ledger will say?
[1] or all those SSDs on Ali Express are "given a soak test" for whichever coin(s) use that stoopid consensus mechanism and so on.
PS
Ah ha, we'll just convert everything into one of those that listens to whoever has the biggest holding of that coin. And now the US government explicitly controls that coin, all the libertarians drop it like a hot potato. Also, it becomes impossible for the feds to ever divest themselves of the coin, because then they'll lose control of it. And something that you can't divest is no longer an asset, so poof, there goes the ability to borrow against the USG. Oopsie. Would you like us to pack the USA for you? Did you bring your own bags?
Anyone who is foolish enough to buy a "currency" backed by nothing, supported by nothing, and valued by whimsy is foolish enough to suffer the consequences. Any more, all real money is issued by fiat but is usually backed by the full faith & credit of the issuing nation or by some tangible asset. The US gold reserves are no where near enough to support the US dollar by itself ($687B as of 2024 vs $2.333T cash in circulation).
Now, I’m certainly not an economist, but this line intrigued me;
"The Bitcoin in the reserve "shall not be sold and shall be maintained as reserve assets of the United States,””
Does that mean that the Bitcoin can never be sold, in which case surely they are worthless? After all an asset is only ‘worth’ something if it theoretically can be liquidated and exchanged for something else, ie ‘sold’!
But, like I said, I’m certainly not an expert in this field, and would happy listen to any other commutards on here who know more.
It's an executive order. That means the next person can change it, or Mango Mussolini can change it himself. So "can never be sold" is nonsense.
I'd rather see it outlawed and declared contraband for any US citizen to possess. And then be deleted. Give a brief grace period for it to be surrendered and exchanged for USD at the value it was when it was acquired, after which its value is zero and any cryptocurrency that's found anywhere in the country is summarily erased and the holder is fined for having it.
No, the executive order just means "don't sell them without getting explicit approval to do so". It is theoretically possible to make Bitcoin un-sellable by transferring them into a wallet and intentionally destroying the keys to that wallet, but that would be a bad goal and it would not allow them to be a reserve asset, so they're not going to do that. That means that, if they do later want to sell them, they can.
"On the other hand, the coins aren't being used in transactions and commerce."
That should be irrelevant. If they're taken off the market the price should rise, were they in circualtion. If, however, they are later dumped the price dives, but that is the same with anything. So surely price should be unaffected by this unless the market had priced some expectations in.
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