Bitcoin faces a brutal irony as the Treasury refuses to save BTC from its own political success
The post Bitcoin faces a brutal irony as the Treasury refuses to save BTC from its own political success appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress he has no authority to bail out Bitcoin. The exchange came during a Senate Banking Committee hearing, when Senator Brad Sherman asked whether the Treasury could intervene to support cryptocurrency prices. Bessent’s answer was direct: he cannot use taxpayer dollars to buy Bitcoin, and the question falls outside his mandate as chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. Sherman’s question was a challenge, not a policy proposal. Could the President Donald Trump administration use taxpayer money to prop up assets aligned with the president’s interests? Bitcoin, along with Trump-branded tokens, sat at the center of that concern. The question itself reveals an irony that the Bitcoin community spent 15 years trying to avoid. Bitcoin launched in 2009 as a response to bank bailouts, a system designed to operate without a central authority and to be insulated from government intervention. Now it sits close enough to political interests that members of Congress ask whether the government might step in. The irony runs deeper than rhetoric. If the US ever “bails out crypto,” it won’t happen by buying Bitcoin. It will happen by protecting the plumbing Bitcoin now relies on. Timeline shows Bitcoin’s evolution from its 2009 anti-bailout origins to February 2026 Senate hearing where Treasury confirmed no authority to bail out Bitcoin. What a bailout actually means The word “bailout” combines three distinct actions into a single term. The first is direct price support: the government buys an asset to prevent its price from falling. This is what Sherman’s question implied: whether the Treasury would step in as a buyer of last resort when Bitcoin drops. The second is liquidity backstops for intermediaries. The government provides emergency funding or guarantees to institutions that facilitate trading, custody, or settlement. This protects market functioning rather than asset…
Filed under: News - @ February 5, 2026 3:29 pm