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- Admiral Samuel Paparo said the U.S. government is currently running a Bitcoin node to support operational network-security testing.
- He told lawmakers the military is not mining Bitcoin, but is studying the protocol’s cryptography, blockchain design and proof-of-work model for cybersecurity applications.
The U.S. military has disclosed that it is actively running a node on the Bitcoin network, a notable admission that brings the world’s largest blockchain a little closer to the national security conversation.
Speaking before Congress, Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, said the government currently has “a node on the Bitcoin network” and is using it for operational testing tied to securing and protecting networks. He also made a point of drawing a line between infrastructure participation and speculation. “We’re not mining Bitcoin,” Paparo said.
Bitcoin is being treated as a cybersecurity tool, not a treasury asset
Paparo’s remarks suggest the military is looking at Bitcoin less as money and more as a technical system. In separate congressional comments, he described the government’s research as focused on Bitcoin “as a computer science tool,” specifically the combination of cryptography, blockchain architecture and proof-of-work. He said those features have important cybersecurity applications beyond the asset’s economic use.
That framing matters. Running a node does not mean controlling the network or earning block rewards. A Bitcoin node simply validates and relays network data independently, helping monitor transactions and verify that the protocol is functioning as expected. The broader Bitcoin network is maintained by tens of thousands of nodes globally, and its decentralization is precisely what prevents any single party from controlling validation.
The disclosure widens Bitcoin’s role in Washington
The comments came during a hearing about U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific, where lawmakers also touched on strategic competition with China. Paparo said Bitcoin is a “peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value” and argued that anything supporting American national power is worth understanding.
The immediate significance is not that the Pentagon has become a Bitcoin buyer. It has not said that. The more interesting signal is that parts of the U.S. security establishment now appear willing to study Bitcoin’s underlying protocol as infrastructure, and not merely as a financial phenomenon sitting outside government systems.
