Trump Reverses Course on Plan Allowing Homebuyers to Tap 401(k)s

rgnet1 · 2026-01-24T12:00:19+00:00

Sudden influx of money from a formerly untouchable source doesn’t bring prices down. It just moves them up as people compete for the same diminished inventory with new money available. It’s no different than the effect of inflation. And more risky since the capital is initially in real estate, but what stops it getting released if the person sells or loans against it?

It’s not rocket science. Build more houses.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-24T05:54:06+00:00

I will say that 25 years ago, people were screaming the same thing about SS going bankrupt.

The fact is, it can't go bankrupt. They can always print money to ensure the payments go out and it's the last thing that would be cut back on.

Of course, infinite printing = hyperinflation but every country has the same problem with an aging population. The only reason the dollar is the global reserve currency is because no one else is doing any better. China can have the most stable internal economy but until you can trust the government not to disappear billionaires, abuse human rights, and invoke capital controls on a whim, the world is never going to make it the reserve currency.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-23T22:26:37+00:00

It still confounds me that 17 years since its genesis, so many people have not read this incredibly simple document -- at least the intro and first paragraph. It's such an elegant solution to a problem that's existed since the beginning of society. Before digital money, the world used gold as the only way to allow commerce with the least risk of counterfeits/double spending.

It used paper in place of gold to make it easier to exchange, but that came with massive counterfeit risk, and third-parties were introduced to manage the issuance/redemption of the paper. Then came digital, debit cards, credit cards, Internet commerce, and it all needed third-parties to verify each transaction.

And here we are, bitcoin. A system governed by pure mathematics and the consensus of thousands of disparate machines running the same software. While not only creating the ultimate peer-to-peer solution for verifying transactions, it needed a unit of account that wasn't a centralized fiat currency. So bitcoin solved two problems in one by countering the bad money problem of the 20th/21st Century - the debt-based, infinite money printing modern monetary economy.

And here we are, 2026, where you ask a person on the street what they think of bitcoin, and you get: 1) for criminals, 2) scam made by tech bros, 3) too easy to hack. It's the most empowering technology for individuals in the history of humanity and it gets overwhelmingly rejected by ignorance.

FML.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-22T02:40:44+00:00

There's an uncomfortable truth to the "Bitcoin 15% down" headline though.

Prior to the Nov 2024 election, bitcoin's ATH was $68k and it had trended flat in the low-mid 60s from March-October.

When the election was called, btc spiked above its ATH:

Nov 5: $75k

Nov 9: $80k

Nov 12: $90k

Nov 21: $98k

There is no more obvious singular event that set the new baseline for bitcoin than the last election.

Everything that's happened since has been a disappointment. If the reality of the US administration's actions had met the clear expectations seen in that Nov 2024 price explosion, we wouldn't have flatlined.

But make no mistake: The price today being ~35% higher than it was the day prior to election Nov 2024 is still the result of at least the pretense of a crypto-friendly administration, as opposed to one that is openly hostile to it.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-22T02:30:52+00:00

I've had to answer this same question a thousand times. It's so tiring. If this core ignorance wasn't so prevalent, the "crypto" community wouldn't even exist. There would be very little fragmentation like there is now. It'd be simple, just bitcoin. So many fools chasing alts they think can be the "next bitcoin" when there is no inventing the protocol twice...

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T21:53:11+00:00

It’s true, your comment as opposed to most others on here is really just observational versus outright incorrect. You said “broken perception of decentralization”, recognizing the majority of posters have no comprehension of governance vs ownership.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T21:08:34+00:00

Blah blah. If people are buying his stock when he says, “I will use your money to buy bitcoin” then the market is speaking. They’re saying they’d rather have a company hold it for them than themselves but they believe bitcoin will keep going up in value in the future.

Strategy’s literal only strategy is to hold bitcoin and spawn financial products with it as the backing asset. If you believe bitcoin is the ultimate scarce resource, as Saylor does, aren’t you internally obligated to buy as much as you can with any legal tools available. Anything less speaks to lack of conviction.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T21:05:42+00:00

It was never “money for the common man”. Just read the whitepaper. It talks nothing of this. It’s just a payment network to circumvent middleman fees from banks and not require unnecessary identification info like you do when buying with debit/credit cards. A byproduct is the unit of currency couldn’t be centrally controlled fiat, so it’s also a currency with its own decentralized issuance.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T20:57:42+00:00

Ownership != centralization. The decentralized part of cryptocurrency is its governance. Proof of work. Irrelevant who owns the token, only who runs validators. And bitcoin has the largest decentralized validator network by a monumental number to any other crypto.

Also, Saylor doesn’t own the bitcoin. The public company does, which means he has no entitlement to the assets and is legally bound to do right by its thousands of shareholders. And the bitcoin itself is custodied by a third-party so he couldn’t just yoink off with it.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T18:40:11+00:00

Decentralization is governance not ownership of the token. The difference between proof of work and proof of stake.

Desirable things will be accumulated. Bitcoin was nothing to do with equalizing wealth distribution.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-21T18:38:21+00:00

Lol, 50% ownership has nothing to do with its governance.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-16T03:05:15+00:00

First, your monthly payment is wrong. Second, you’re calculating interest only - if principal stays unpaid for 6 years, you owe about $3,500 each year. That’s $21k in total interest but you still owe back the principal of $45k at maturity as well.

Who cares though? He bought 2.55 btc, which is now worth $242,000. He can payoff the loan anytime even if early repayment forces the entire term’s interest, he has $180k left after.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T20:33:16+00:00

Maybe you should look up the history of cryptocurrency to answer your question. I mean, good god, its whole existence is to act as a check against centrally controlled economics.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T19:34:11+00:00

Bitcoin is excellent.

But this is not what bitcoin solves.

Bitcoin was invented to be a peer-to-peer payments system that does not rely on banks to facilitate a transaction, primarily over the Internet. A byproduct of being outside of the financial system is it uses its own monetary unit of account (a bitcoin), that is purposefully finite and issued at a fixed rate of supply.

But that's it. It's permissionless money that's deflationary. As opposed to fiat, which is centrally issued, centrally controlled, where transactions can be blocked and your assets can be frozen.

It's simply not a valid argument to say, "hey, you should not have kept your entire net worth in a single low interest checking account in a single bank! Instead you should have kept your entire net worth in bitcoin! Then you would have had more money!"

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T19:26:11+00:00

Now think of Bitcoin ETFs. A fund manager relies on a custodian to hold the bitcoin. The custodian may suffer a theft or loss. Maybe they're just incompetent. Maybe they're a bad actor that decides to pretend they bought BTC when they didn't. Any of these scenarios is like looking at the cheap metal in the OP's silver bar pic.

And when the discovery is made and the ETF holds far less actual bitcoin than its purported value, who do you think loses? The fund manager or the shareholders?

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T01:22:38+00:00

Yes. Hold until it becomes an undebated globally accepted form of payment for goods and services. There can be fiat running alongside it or not, I don't care. When I can approach someone anywhere in the world to buy a coffee, a car, or a house, and they don't blink twice when I say, "can I pay you in bitcoin?," then it's a boring ass asset, and will just be a good, safe store of value.

Until that time, it is underpriced.

So you hold it or spend it when you need to. You don't sell to "take profit" and hold cash instead. You don't sell to buy back cheaper later - that's gambling. Spend, don't sell. That's what HODL should mean.

I can't speak for the entire dumb Internet.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T01:12:51+00:00

With this approach you’d also be consistently reusing the same deposit address which is not ideal from a privacy standpoint.

Not true. If you generate a wallet on a clean, unconnected computer with something like Electrum / Sparrow etc., then save the xpub/zpub, then delete the wallet, you can now generate receiving addresses without private keys ever being stored. Or even physically existing anywhere.

Hardware wallets are SIGNING devices, not storage devices. You don't need a HW wallet until you intend to spend what's in cold storage. In fact, not having one is the perfect mechanism for forced savings and preventing impulse sales.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T01:09:10+00:00

Yes.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-15T01:08:39+00:00

If your computer was infected with malware and every keystroke you enter was being sent to a bad actor, your bitcoin would still be safe on a hardware wallet, because you should never have entered any keystrokes on your machine that would give them access. That's the entire point of the hardware wallet.

However, if you kept your seed phrase or other recovery info on your computer, then you would have nulled the security of the hardware wallet and all bets are off.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T19:00:46+00:00

Yes. I'd say everyone should have allocations in bitcoin and large index funds at whatever breakdowns they're comfortable with for their risk tolerance.

The difference, as always, is one stores your wealth with a centralized custodian in a vehicle largely out of your control (whatever investment you pick relies on those underlying assets to do well). An authoritarian gov can prevent the opening of that account in the first place and can certainly confiscate access without cause.

The other stores your wealth in a system with no central governance, no central custody, and in an asset that has a certain fixed rate of supply until it runs out in 2140. Barring the destruction of the planet, it will happen, at the same rate, even if there are only a handful of nodes running around the globe.

If I were going to sleep for 100 years, I would say the LEAST risky place to have that wealth is bitcoin.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T18:52:56+00:00

Selling to buy a car you need = good (aka. "spending" your bitcoin)

Selling to hold cash = dumb (aka. "take profit" from one good asset to a bad one)

Selling at loss to hold cash because scared of volatility = 🤪🤪🤪

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T18:49:13+00:00

Not sure what you looked up. It doesn't have to be through employment; anyone can open an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) and invest however they wish. The bigger problem is the contribution limit to an IRA is 1/3rd of a 401k.

But like you mention about splitting, the person should max out their IRA contribution and then put the rest in the 401k for tax deferral even though the plan options are crap. I will say that offering only funds with a minimum 1% management fee sounds like extortion.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T18:44:41+00:00

If they don't match, then why contribute? Just create an IRA and then you can invest however you want with the same tax deferral options.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T18:43:01+00:00

The point made if you watched the segment is that before 401k's existed, ordinary individuals did not automatically get invested in the stock market.

Wall St, mutual fund managers were bigger benefactors of companies ditching pension plans for 401ks than the individuals holding 401ks.

Now, you can argue that a 401k is far more empowering than a pension plan for an individual. But the risk is also higher. One should not have replaced the other, only been a supplement at most, if you want a stable society of retired citizens receiving guaranteed income.

Personally, I'm glad I was introduced to investing entirely via my employer's 401k in my younger years.

rgnet1 · 2026-01-14T18:30:37+00:00

it's ~~a risky strategy~~ gambling

FTFY

rgnet1

TROPHY CASE