Our friends at Texas Observer are reporting that your elected Republican officials — Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and GOP state senator Charles Schwertner, specifically — want to establish a Bitcoin reserve for Texas. If that isn’t the dumbest sentence you’ve read this morning, let’s keep going! The “Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act” would establish a fund, using your taxpayer money, to invest in $20 million worth of Bitcoin. Why? To cheerlead the crypto industry, and in Schwertner’s words, to “send a message rebuking the federal government’s ballooning debt.”
As for how exactly putting state money into a crypto asset that is speculative, and not a store of value “sends a message” about debt, Schwertner doesn’t elaborate, but if this sounds like a bad idea to you, there’s more! A provision in his bill also allows you to donate to the Texas crypto reserve. In a way that’s more in line with what crypto is generally used for: money laundering, black market activity, and financing bribes. As a way of sucking up to the Trump administration and the various Silicon Valley billionaires who put him in office, it makes sense, but personally I’d rather not fund Republican ass kissing.
It’s also, of course, a bet that bandwagoning might pay off, which could happen if Trump and Musk hype crypto so much that it behaves like a memestock and its performance has nothing to do with its underlying value. Musk is no stranger to memestocks, either. Tesla (TSLA)’s entire value is heavily tied to Musk himself, and Tesla stock is down in recent months, thanks to Elon’s shenanigans. Turns out, the market doesn’t like it when C-level executives on ketamine benders wield chainsaws on television.
But here’s the rub: Traditionally, strategic reserves are supposed to be safe investments. Bitcoin is probably the safest of the crypto offerings on the market, but that’s a bar lower than Dante’s fifth circle. It is not, fundamentally, where you’d put money to hedge against adverse events, unless you’re the kind of person who believes society will collapse and take the U.S. dollar with it. This administration is full of techno fascists and idiots who seem to think the world’s reserve currency — the dollar — will inexplicably disappear, so we maybe can’t rule that sort of thing out. But if it did happen, no amount of Bitcoin would shield us from the consequences.
