White House Says Gold Reserves May Be Used to Purchase Bitcoin
White House Says Gold Reserves May Be Used to Purchase Bitcoin
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/289657
What a great fucking idea. Let's take a physical limited resource mineral and trade it for an untraceable and unregulated made up currency.
Holy shit I'm gonna have a stroke.
If you want to reward your high profile friends so they can cash out with tangible assets before the whole currency or economy crashes, this is how you would do things.
Step 1: Put everything in crypto
Step 2: Economy crashes, society no longer has power or running water.
Step 3: Try to sell crypto but for some reason computer won't turn on.
Step 4: the rich that bought the gold uses it to privatize all water and power to get it working again, now becomes even more rich.
Don't worry, if you can't afford a computer to manage your crypto, your employer can manage it for you (for a fee)
So couple things:
*Edit - A silly caveat to this is that if the US government starts regularly transacting in Bitcoin, it would be very easy to audit... using blockchain means there's a built-in transaction record... anybody with a little bit of experience in reading the ledger could just track everything.
Other than that you're absolutely right.
It seems likely to me that a play to distribute gold from the reserve is about having an excuse to open it and take gold out, and disappear some of it in the process. It's a cover for a plan to rob the US.
Ocean’sGulf of America's Eleven
Bitcoin absolutely is traceable. Addresses might not be clear names, but all transactions are public. Which makes me wonder why the government wants to use Bitcoin.
Because the crypto currency industry spent an absolutely ungodly amount of money helping Trump get elected.
The government buying and holding Bitcoin pumps up the price of Bitcoin. This is just the other side of the quid pro quo. They got him elected, now he has to make them richer.
That's correct. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. If you can find the identity of a party to any bitcoin transaction, you then can know about every transaction they ever made with that ID.
Which makes me wonder why the government wants to use Bitcoin.
Because Trump is a fucking imbecile, but thinks there's an opportunity for a scam.
Because they'll pass it through a mixer on the way to boss Putin.
untraceable
Literally every transaction is stored in a public ledger that anyone can read. That's not exactly untraceable. Eventually someone will convert the Bitcoin to regular currency, which then links the transaction chain to the real world. Transactions can be clustered based on accounts at exchanges, and often patterns emerge once you do this. This is how some ransomware groups are uncovered.
Everyone here is forgetting xmr.
Shhhh... Let them.
I know very little about crypto other than the theory behind it. What does XMR do differently?
It’s private as in it doesn’t trace, who sent how much to whom. It’s also really stable, but I’m not too sure how they do that.
Some of us didn't know what it was in the first place
If your problem with Bitcoin is that it's a made up currency then I have vers bad news about gold for you.
And all other currencies.
That plan is ludicrous for a lot of reasons but you chose to mention the only two that are not it
limited resource
Gold can be created in supernovae and then found in asteroids.
There will only be 21 million bitcoins ever.
Who is going to fund the network security when the block reward is only 0.01 BTC?
The purchasing power of a block reward used to be a lot lower than that!
