#Gate广场五月交易分享 Bitcoin is classified by the U.S. military as a military strategic tool

On April 23, 2026, at a U.S. Congress hearing, Vice Admiral John C. Pappalardo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, publicly defined Bitcoin as a "computer science tool" and "power projection" tool serving national security, marking its first formal inclusion into the military strategic framework by the U.S. military's top combat commander.

The U.S. military's specific definition and technical considerations
1. Detaching from financial attributes, positioning as a military technological asset: Pappalardo's testimony completely strips Bitcoin of its financial or speculative properties, redefining it as a military technological asset. The U.S. military values the technical characteristics of Bitcoin's underlying protocol rather than its value as a digital currency.
2. Focusing on two core technical features: peer-to-peer, zero-trust value transmission mechanism: This decentralized, intermediary-free feature is considered useful for building more secure, censorship-resistant military communication and command systems.
High defense costs of the proof-of-work mechanism: Pappalardo pointed out that Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism makes network attacks require "physical costs far beyond conventional algorithms," which is viewed as a powerful cybersecurity defense capability that can be directly used to strengthen military networks.

3. Serving the "comprehensive national power": Pappalardo emphasized that Bitcoin "transcends economic attributes, possesses key computer science application value in cybersecurity, and is a tool to support the United States' comprehensive national power."

U.S. military's strategic intent and deeper goals
This statement reveals multiple layers of the U.S. military's intention to incorporate Bitcoin technology into national strategy:
1. Network situational awareness and monitoring: By operating full Bitcoin nodes, the U.S. military can monitor real-time network transaction flows, node distribution, and hash rate changes, aiming to track cross-border fund flows and potential threat activities (such as terrorism financing and hacking attacks), thereby gaining insight into global crypto asset dynamics.
2. Cyber attack and defense technology testing: Using the Bitcoin protocol to test the resilience of U.S. military networks against attacks, while researching the application of mechanisms like proof-of-work in cyber warfare, both to reinforce their own systems and to explore attack paths against enemy distributed systems.
3. Competing for technological standards and rule dominance: As a military entity, the goal is to seize the discourse power over future standards and rules of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, ensuring that technological development aligns with U.S. national security interests and suppressing other strategic competitors (such as China) from making breakthroughs in this field.
4. Integrating into geopolitical strategy and financial hegemony: Pappalardo directly incorporates Bitcoin into the U.S. military's "Indo-Pacific strategy" technological competition system, viewing it as a new strategic chip to counter China and consolidate technological dominance. He also supports integrating Bitcoin with compliant stablecoin ecosystems, believing this will help reinforce the dollar's global leadership and embed crypto technology into the U.S. financial-military hegemony system.

Event