🟪 One use case to rule them all

_{Brought to you by:}

Various use cases for bitcoin and crypto as a whole have been proffered over the many years I’ve covered digital assets.

Remittances. Tipping. Micropayments. Initial coin offerings. Resources for distributed computing. The list goes on.

This week’s strategic bitcoin reserve, announced last night by the Trump White House, is perhaps the final confirmation of the digital asset’s ultimate use case: holding.

Yes, per an executive order signed by Trump, the US will stop selling the bitcoin in its possession and, in a yet-to-be-determined process, acquire more bitcoin in a “budget-neutral” way. 

(Small aside: It seems like the general take on that conspicuous language is that there’ll be some kind of off-setting financial wizardry; I think it just means the government wants to find a way to do it without involving all those people in Congress who may have negative opinions about the reserve). 

Anyway, here we are: The US government is probably more of a bitcoiner than Donald “Have Fun With Your Bitcoin” Trump will ever be. It’s a remarkable announcement, but as always, I think the devil’s in the details and those will be far more interesting than the broad strokes sketched today.

The market, however, seems to have wanted to hear something more along the lines of “the US government will commence immediate market buys in perpetuity" and, because that’s not what Trump said, prices sagged. 

You can’t please everyone, I guess.

— Michael McSweeney

Brought to you by:

Arkham is a crypto exchange and a blockchain analytics platform that lets you look inside the wallets of the best crypto traders — and then act on that information.

Arkham’s Intel Platform has a suite of features including real-time alerts, customisable dashboards, a transaction visualization tool, and advanced transaction filtering — all of which is accessible on all major blockchain networks, and completely free.