Interesting question. Consider, for example, Eisenhower's building the interstate highway system, which boosted the productivity of the entire nation.
Or the Apollo space program, which yielded back somewhere between 5 and 7 dollars for every dollar spent, by creating new technologies and whole new industries.
Contrast with the bitcoin reserve. Every dollar spent goes from the pockets of the taxpayers to the pockets of the bitcoin sellers, without doing anything to boost productivity, to create new technology, etc.
// That's what it means to hold an appreciating hard asset relative to fiat, in my opinion.
Well, bitcoin is not hard asset (it is created by consensus, and it has no intrinsic material form) nor is it intrinsically appreciating. It could be outlawed, have a flat tax imposed on it, or become obsoleted by, say, quantum computers.
But let's grant, for sake of argument, that in the long run, relative to puny fiat currencies like the dollar (which is merely backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.) the price of bitcoin will generally keep increasing, due to inflation of the various fiat currencies. You may very well be able to sell your bitcoin for nominally higher prices, but in constant dollars, if you add up every bitcoin transaction from its inception to infinity, the total amount of dollars will still be zero.
// Taxpayer money is a bit of a smokescreen in my opinion.
However you want to phrase it, if we create a trillion-dollar bitcoin reserve, that trillion dollars has to come from somewhere. There's no such thing as a magic money-generating machine. End of the day, wealth comes from the productivity of laborers. If you spend money to increase their productivity, total wealth increases. If you just shuffle your money back and forth between gold and bitcoin, that does nothing to increase anybody's productivity.
// think all voters have no qualms about transfer payments // Certainly, not enough voters have qualms about transfer payments. But morality is just for suckers, right?