The point of Bitcoin is clear enough: It is widely used, these days, as a sort of “digital gold,” a store of value that might hedge against some sorts of risk. You buy Bitcoin not because you think it will do anything, but because you think it will retain its value. That story might annoy you, but I think it’s basically fine.

"Why does the US government need a 'strategic reserve' of Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA) tokens? Bitcoin, fine, I guess: Bitcoin is a sort of digital gold, the US government has a stash of gold, it can have a stash of Bitcoin if it wants."

There is obviously an alternative story of Solana, or whatever, that is like “all of the stuff about platforms is window dressing, none of this could ever be all that useful in the real world, the tokens are just a gambling game and the goal is to pump up the price of the tokens by saying stuff.”

1. "All the stuff about platforms and real-world uses was real, it was frozen under the SEC’s previous reign of terror, and now it will come roaring back and people will build all sorts of useful stuff on these blockchains."
2. "All the stuff about platforms and real-world uses was fake and the newly permissive environment will lead to a wave of pump-and-dumps and nothing else."

Solana is a kind of equity bet on a particular technological platform, one that is still at this point pretty speculative. Why is it a strategic reserve asset? Why not, like, SpaceX shares? “If the United States is willing to put these tokens on their balance sheet, we should also be willing to put stock from Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Palantir, and Gamestop,” writes crypto booster Anthony Pompliano.