A senior United States military commander has broken ranks with conventional Pentagon scepticism on cryptocurrency. In a Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing on April 21, Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), endorsed Bitcoin's potential for national power. The backdrop to Paparo's testimony is an intensifying strategic rivalry with China. Beijing sits on a formidable crypto stockpile. According to some estimates, the country might have at least 194,000 BTC in government hands. Much of it traces back to the PlusToken Ponzi scheme bust of 2019, one of the largest ... (full story)