While establishing a U.S. Crypto Strategic Reserve might legitimize crypto assets, doesn’t government ownership fundamentally undermine the decentralized ethos that drew us to crypto in the first place? 

Curious to hear how the community sees this potential paradox.

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Ethereum is for everyone.

Decentralized crypto is for everyone, including governments. The power is that it puts individuals on equal footing as nation states for the first time. We can't expect governments to not participate, but they participate as equals to us.

i like tech stuff and sometimes politics also running, last one memes

Decentralized crypto is for everyone, including governments. The power is that it puts individuals on equal footing as nation states for the first time. We can't expect governments to not participate, but they participate as equals to us.

https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0x3add1f5a

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Traditionally when governments participate in markets, they have powers that individuals don't have. They can freeze assets, seize them, etc. They don't have these powers onchain (though they can certainly apply pressure offchain).

Governments buying crypto isn't exactly new either. El Salvador is the obvious example, but plenty of countries receive and hold crypto including Ukraine. US and China have seized huge amounts of crypto over the years too.

Is it smart for the US to speculate and pick winners? I don't think the US is doing anything smart lately. Obviously the administration is pumping their own bags at the cost of the tax payers.

Is this a problem for decentralized crypto? No, I think this is a scenario we should be expecting, and I'm sure we'll see worse in years to come.

To be clear, I don't think of this as a boon, but rather a threat vector that we will outlive.

I get your point—but governments participating equally with individuals in asset markets isn’t exactly new—it’s how they’ve always engaged with gold or other traditional reserves.

What’s genuinely unprecedented here is the U.S. government using taxpayer dollars to speculate on digital assets that don’t yet have a clear, scaled economic function. Given that we’re still actively building out crypto’s practical utility, is it truly wise or justifiable for the U.S. government to intervene by essentially picking winners among thousands of cryptocurrencies? Doesn’t that inadvertently give them outsized influence, undermining the very decentralization we’re striving to preserve?