Critics on the right and left say the bitcoin reserve is a pointless industry handout — and using tariff revenue is even dumber.
IF DONALD TRUMP’S sweeping global tariffs send household good prices soaring and drive the economy into recession, at least one industry could profit.
The Trump administration is considering using tariff revenues to buy Bitcoin for a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” a top administration crypto official said in an interview last week.
The White House’s proposal is driving interest from crypto industry figures who have made building the reserve one of their top priorities.
It is uniting critics on the right and left, however, who have cast the reserve as a pointless industry giveaway that will come at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. Using tariff money would add insult to injury, they say.
Right... So what happens is you dump money into it, the government then dumps money into it, you cash out, then the government is out money and you grain money... Assuming you have capital to fuck around with prior.
If this regime has the government buy crypto; the government will lose access to it. These people will either "lose the encryption codes", actually loose the encryption codes, steel it, let it be stolen, ect..
Honestly, using the country's surplus to fund a sovereign wealth fund like Norway instead of throwing it into the black hole of the military industrial complex seems like it would be a pretty good idea.
Too bad they're stealing taxpayer dollars through tariffs to throw into the additional black hole of crypto market manipulation instead.
There’s no surplus, even with the extreme tariffs that trump is pushing. Given the economic destruction that they’re likely to cause, they’re probably a net loss for the treasury (and certainly are if one considers the damage that they’re doing to the IRS).
The reasons that the ‘sovereign wealth fund’ idea keeps coming up are:
All of the cool authoritarians have one
trump really, really, wants a slush fund to grift off of
Yeah, we can't let them do this... Bitcoin is electric cash, once they have public funds in Bitcoin, they have turned it into private funds, they've already pocketed it. We can't let them steal from the country like that...
I’m assuming the plan is to buy bitcoin from themselves and their friends with taxpayer cash. They don’t care about the bitcoin after that. They’ll have the cash.