Is Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve A Threat To Freedom?

Donald Trump took office with plans to make the United States the world’s bitcoin mining capital, and supporters including Michael Saylor and Tether welcomed the idea of bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset. The concern raised in the piece is that greater institutional control could weaken the decentralisation and censorship resistance behind bitcoin’s reputation as “freedom money.”

It looks at how US dominance of mining could allow transactions to be censored through compliance with Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions, citing Marathon’s 2021 attempt to mine “OFAC-compliant” blocks and comments on block space from Marathon CEO Fred Thiel. It also covers US enforcement against Bitzlato and ChipMixer, Senator Cynthia Lummis’s case for a reserve, Tether’s holdings of US Treasuries and the launch of the $TRUMP meme coin, and discusses reforms such as Senator Mike Lee’s Saving Privacy Act.