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.
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.
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
I am guessing that Musk will create a Muskcoin, and offer to 'sell' it for a preferable rate to the US government. Coincidentally, the Muskcoin uses the X Everything platform for all transactions.
With each day that passes, I am becoming more convinced that shifting 99% of my money into Euros is the right call.
How much money do you have? At the current state of affairs the best possible investment is to buy pallets of ammo and crates full of AR lowers.
Many times more than $500, but far below $100,000. In any case, I am thinking that if WW3 starts up, I can buy war bonds from the places that oppose Dogey America. Probably fiscally safer and more effective than buying ammo as an individual, since states can do better bulk purchases and negotiations with that money. Hopefully my neck of the woods would disobey Trump orders to outlaw the purchase of foreign war bonds.
touches nose Why risk your money on gold or silver when you can invest in brass? Pretty good odds on another spicy summer in America.
With each day that passes, I am becoming more convinced that shifting 99% of my money into Euros is the right call.
Yeah, until fElon "enters the chat" on the EU situation just like he has in the U.S.
So Trump wanted to get the gold from fort Knox so he could hand it over to Chinese hackers?
North Korea is more famous for that
The looting of US treasure begins.
It started the day Pig Boy got back into office.
I thought the greedy little pig boy was on Reddit.
So they want to trade something that is almost always worth a lot for something that is sometimes worth a theoretical shitload or less than a loaf of bread, depending on the day?
Brilliant, very good. Nothing stupid will come of this I'm sure. /s
Kinda makes trump the most relevant libertarian
This reality is so fucking stupid. Let's sell something of value to buy something that is only valuable if someone really wants it bad enough.
To be fair, gold is the same. It's just more well established since it's been around much longer.
Not defending this shit, just pointing out that gold is also only worth what people are willing to pay for it. That's kind of how all markets work.
Gold works without energy. It doesnt oxidise or decay as other materials
The difference is gold has carried high monetary value among human societies for nearly 3000 years while Bitcoin is a non tangible digital asset that's existed for less than two decades and remains incredibly volatile.
This comes across as another Trump scam. He's going to bankrupt the American government by siphoning public money to himself and other private entities and the American people are going to be stuck hodling the bag.
Gold has value by itself, just look up it's applications in the semiconductor industry
Hey everybody, check out THIS metal, its all yellowy and pretty!
Copying my comment from this same story, other thread on another instance/community:
...
These actual mouth breathing morons have no idea what they are even attempting to describe.
...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/does-the-federal-reserve-own-or-hold-gold.htm
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate_(United_States)
...
The Federal Reserve doesn't actually own, nor physically possess, any physical gold, that they could just sell off or speculate with.
When FDR outlawed gold private ownership in 1934, all physical gold was handed over to the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve (and other banks) were given gold certificates, valued at $42.22... per ounce... a set value that hasn't changed, and is used for the Fed's modest valuation of its previously held gold reserves... which are utterly insignificant and dwarfed by the other assets it holds.
(This isn't super current, but it gives you an idea. Light blue is gold certificates. Its a one pixel thin line at the bottom. The overall balance is even more huge than this now after Covid, and Gold Certs, even if they were revalued from $42.2222 to the current market rate, would basically be small, it would go from about 10 billion to 750 billion, when the Fed's current total assets are about 7 trillion)
About 5% of the US Treasury's gold is held at the New York Fed, but the Fed doesn't own it, it's just there because there is a vault there. The rest of the US's gold is physically held at Treasury operated locations.
...
What the Fed does own are Gold Certificates, back from 1934, which are still valued at the old $42.2222 price, in terms of the Fed calculating its own balance sheet.
To... have the US gov... order the Fed to sell off its gold certificates... that's not a thing the US gov can actually legally do, not without asserting total direct control over the Fed, and thus basically instantly making its existence pointless...
Again, to repeat, the US government cannot legally command the Fed to sell off its gold certificates, the Fed cannot legally sell its gold certificates, nor could said certificates be legally exchanged for actual physical gold from the US Treasury.
This would be approximately analagous to the US government ordering a corporation to sell off its own capital assets and then just sending the money from that sale to a government account.
It is expropriation.
For this to be any kind of legal, they'd have to repeal or greatly amend ... at least the laws that established the Federal Reserve, and the Gold Reserve Act, likely many more... or basically do a whole bunch of rat fuckery to get their own people in positions on various Fed Reserve boards, and possibly prevent other people on Fed Reserve boards from actually voting on motions.
This would amount to basically performing a coup on the US's central banking system, and putting total control of the monetary system within the Treasury.
...
This would upend the century old bedrock of the US's financial system.
Now, I am no full, uncritical advocate of the Federal Reserve system in its current form... but this is what it is, a complete usurpation of the US's existing monetary system, which would then be put in charge of the astoundingly incompetent current administration.
This is how you get hyperinflation.
This is quite literally fucking with the money at its most fundamental level.
This is how you speed run destroying the USD as the world reserve currency.
...
tldr;
This isn't only stupid in the sense of 'sell gold to buy bitcoin' is a dubious investment strategy, it is particularly stupid in that if the actual pursued strategy is 'force the Fed to sell its gold certificates'...
(to who? its not legal for any private entity to 'purchase' them at the market rate for gold, nor is it legal for said hypothetical purchaser, not even the Fed, to actually redeem them for physical gold, nor is it even legal for the Fed to sell them even of its own accord!)
... then that method blows up the entire concept of a legally defined, semi-independent Federal Reserve, and that then blows up the entire basis of the US monetary system.
Ah, so they are coming for the federal reserve as a whole. Makes sense actually, Trump wants that money.
... Its possibly actually more concerning than the idea that the giant orange man baby has access to the nukes and that Elon fired all the people in charge of... you know, maintaining and guarding the nukes.
You can cause almost as much damage across the country and entire world by giving an idiot the keys to the USD money printer, and its a lot easier for an idiot to do that damage via monetary debasement than it is for them go DEFCON 'time to kill everyone everywhere spectacularly' with the nukes.
MAGA doesn’t hear you. MAGA don’t care.
You don't have to tell me, I know.
Thats why I'm ... vent-splaining? on lemmy.
I haven't talked to my MAGA father in almost 3 years now. He fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and ... is just delusional, just insane.
I spent literal years, years going through every single nonsense belief he had, showing him its actual origin, explaining in detail, tracing the entire evolution of the story from proximal exposure to root source.... that its always either entirely baseless speculation, often based on no actual evidence, or a wildly spun out of context story that leaves out 90% of the important details and context, just focusing on a highly misleading cherry picked narrative.
It doesn't matter. He picks up insane nonsense and instantly believes it 10x faster than I can debunk it, he lies and says he's not reading some non credible news source for a month and then comes at me with a story he only could have gotten from that news source, when you actually corner him in an argument he laughs and instsntly switches back to some other insane nonsense I already debunked months ago but he forgot about that.
Talking to a MAGA person is worse than talking to a wall, its talking to a zombie who is only decaying in the brain, a cult member thats in denial they're in a cult.
So. America got bought by a vulture capitalist and they are selling off assets.
"Running America like a business"
BWAHAHAHAHAHA Genius. Step 1: Buy Shitcoin with actual gold (the most stable wealth storage)
Step 2: Bitcoin price rises
Step 3: Sell all your bitcoin, rugpull the entire thing
Result: You have now robbed Fort Knox. Legally.
Dumbest. Fucking. Idea. Ever
Well no its actually a perfect method of looting the treasury and handing all the country's future wealth to the billionaires now, making them trillionaires, and all in a way thats essentially impossible to track...
Just when you think the clown car is full, that there is no way they will get another clown in there, clown world manages to cram another in.
Again.
Fuck bitcoin. Let's bring back the beanie-baby as a monetary standard.
Now ladies and gentlemen I will astound you with demonstration of my mighty mystical methods. Right before your very eyes I will make this gold disappear. Not just to your eyes, not just to thin air, but such that it will only be a logical concept of worth. One, two, three...............
So... I'm guessing the plebs get the cryptocurrencies. Which are backed by stablecoins... which are backed by tech grifters saying "I can cover it bro, trust me".
Meanwhile the elites will take all that worthless gold and dispose of it for us.
Bitcoin is backed by the price of coal.
For all intents and purposes, bitcoin is effectively minted coal.
Bitcoin doesn't relate to coal that's still unburnt. It's more a certificate confirming a quantum of environmental destruction.
So it’s backed by climate change?
yes but remember it artifically inflates so the amount of coal its worth is always going higher. You need way more coal to make one down than you did ten years ago.
Mr. Art of the deal-do is robbing you blind. No matter how this ends, he and felon will have stashed piles of you cash
Cash is the worst asset. They have piles but they don't have cash
The only real question is whether he is doing this to enrich himself, or because Putin told him to do it.
A purchase shortly followed by one of the biggest bitcoin and market crashes in modern times.
Well there it is. For anyone who believed that they were simply going to create a reserve to store already existing cryptocurrencies - that were confiscated by the federal agencies - and not spend federal dollars to bolster or hype up cryptocurrencies that are connected to the people in the administration, y'all are idiots.
I mean even that original plan would be fairly stupid. Law enforcement agencies seem to operate just fine with the current reserve of forfeited cryptocoins - I didn't read anywhere of the FBI/CIA/etc crying out for a central bank style 'strategic reserve' managed by the FRB to add more layers of bureaucracy.
The only place I can find in news cycles saying it's a great idea is a think tank entitled the Bitcoin Policy Institute who put out a report in late 2024 entitled "The case for Bitcoin as a reserve asset". Plus all the usual crypto bros begging for it to pump their positions. Gosh, I wonder if these parties may be biased.
I've never been this high
I didn't know lemmy had so many brain broken crytpo losers
Blocking monero.town was a great decision.
What Happened: Bo Hines, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, suggested in an interview that the U.S. could capitalize on the gains from its gold holdings to purchase more Bitcoin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Hines
Robert "Bo" Hines (born August 29, 1995) is an American former college football player from North Carolina. He played college football for the NC State Wolfpack and Yale Bulldogs. In 2022, he was the Republican nominee in North Carolina's 13th congressional district.
Call me a traditionalist, but it seems to me that if you're going to be advising the President on digital assets, it'd be nice to have an economics background.
Call me a traditionalist, but it seems to me that if you're going to be advising the President on digital assets, it'd be nice to have an economics background.
None of the rest of Trump's cabinet have any qualifications, so why should this guy?
Just to add, he is a lawyer. He did politics to law pipeline. And yeah there's typically no economic requirement to that like there would be with other political science paths.
Step 1 - Break numerous laws to sell gold.
Step 2 - Sell gold to fellow cronies for cheap.
Step 3 - Use gold money to buy bitcoin to drive the price up.
Step 4 - Sell bitcoin when price is high.
Step 6 - Bitcoin crashes.
Step 7 - Profit for Trumpy and his cronies
Ah shoot I made the same comment without realizing that was already done. I'm glad there's more people immediately understanding the robbery in progress here.
Curiously, thanks to Trump Gold has been breaking record after record on the upside since January - you see, Gold is the ultimate "oh, shit" form of wealth storage because it's its own "currency" (so if traditional currencies lose value gold just goes up in those currencies) so people flock to it in situations of high Economic uncertainty, and Economic uncertainty is the only achievement of Trump's Administration.
It's probably another pump and dump.
I don't know why so many commenters think this is just a joke or funny. They're talking about stealing the wealth of America to give to their rich friends directly through Bitcoin scams. That's what this will be. Giant government-funded pump and dump for their rich fascist friends.
It's worse because as described in the largest comment in the thread the Federal Reserve is not the US government's wallet. And there is no mechanism for them to "just sell gold".
It's yet another thing that sounds vaguely feasible only if you know absolutely nothing about any of the systems in place.
It is a joke and it is funny and it would also have serious consequences. This is a classic example of the lulz. Politics can be so dark and twisted real, and if you want to stay involved in it for decades, you have to appreciate the lulz and then still keep going.
Let's compare it to, for example, the fact that Donald Trump has control over the US military and nuclear weapons. That's shocking. He's a complete moron and he's kind of evil to boot. Many of his good buddies are evil racist pieces of s***, too. So that's the starting point. That's where most of us are already at. Does this current idea make things worse? Of course it does. But things were already bad. That's why we're not panicking anymore than we were yesterday or last month.
They’re talking about stealing the wealth of America
The wealth of America isn't in a bunch of yellow rocks piled up in a vault in Kentucky. We're dismantling the NIH. We're dismantling the NOAA. We're dismantling Medicaid and Medicare. We're dismantling the entire higher education system.
If this was a four year long bank robbery, I wouldn't give a fuck. It's the destruction of our scientific and health care communities that has me gaping in horror.
It's wealth owned by the American people right? I didn't say it was the only wealth.
LOL.
budget neutral
What the actual fuck. If you trade gold for bitcoin, you no longer have the gold. Budget neutral my ass.
But imagine you sell the gold but you keep it. Bam budget neutral.
Make America Great Depression Again
nah, they're just bringing back the roaring 20s!
I know this is old news, but how good would it be if they pissed a whole bunch of gold away on BitCoin and everyone dumped, tanking the price, and losing the US trillions of dollars.
I mean good from a theoretical way, it would be absolutely devastating for the state of the world.
they're going to buy bitcoin from russia, probably.
The North Koreans have quite a bit too.
Maybe Lil Kim is fencing it off like a crackhead with a bag full of loose PS4 games in Cash Converters.
You can be sure this is about enriching himself and his broligarchs.
The correct thing to do is ban all the digital coins.
All they used for is tax avoidance. While raising electric bills
Decent digital currency wouldnt use much electricity and would stop hyperinflation occuring in countries experiencing extreme issues. Being that taxes are standardly on income and sales, where is it you are saying they are dodging taxes? (Bitcoin isn't a good digital currency, but neither should a decent one be run by the country)
And bar people who rely on anonymous payments for their HRT or psychedelic therapy?
It’s about at this point where I stop being snarky and stare in fascination
Now my heart is doubtful. The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?
I had a hard time putting my reaction into words... thank you.
The biggest pump and dump scam of all time?
So personally, I think the government should have some, but I don't specifically think selling gold for it is the right idea.
Everyone seems to be on about how this is just about cashing out his buddies, but what I'm worried about is these dumbfucks won't know how to properly secure it or won't properly secure it and itll get easily stolen, or they'll outright steal it themselves.
Like they just used signal to talk about bombing Yemen and included a journalist on it...
So while I think it's not a bad idea to have some, it's fucking terrifying that Trump is doing this and can influence it.
I don't think the government should have ANY, regardless of how the government purchased the fake assets. It's a fucking terrible idea for exactly the reason you described. The government should not be involved in such a high risk, unsecured, volatile, ridiculously easily stolen venture.
Agreed. Its also a direct competitor with every countries sovereign currency... So why would help it?
I'm not going to try and convince you on the merits of crypto, but it can be secured so it isn't "ridiculously easily stolen"
I just don't think Trump would do it.
Edit: Just to give an example - you could make it so you can't use the money without 100% of congress (house and senate) and the president authorizing it. It would be so secure, you'd probably never be able to use it ever again.
How do you think they're going to transfer the money on a more mature coin? Oops, we lost the keys.
Oh look Putin and Thiel randomly managed to find the keys to America's Bitcoins.
Hey Putin,
We'll give you some more gold to get it back, say $0.75 on the dollar so you get a finders fee?
Putin - Sounds great!
two weeks later
Shit we lost them again, Thiel seems to have them this time, maybe he'll give them back to us for $0.75 on the dollar as well!
Sure, why not. I could use a laugh, and the memes when this fails too are going to be juicy.
Donald the felon trump, doing his best to rape every single American he can.
Make sure to tell a magat how much you hate them today for bringing this fucking bullshit upon us
Gotta give Russia the liquidity to exit its BTC positions if the war and sanctions will soon be over.
This needs to be a second amendment issue now!
The US has a bitcoin reserve? First I've heard of it. Whatever, but using gold to buy it makes no sense.
They don't. It's being floated. Trump said he's going to create a reserve. Not an official act yet.
Trump has already made it clear that he's a Russian asset. The only question that remains is if he doing their bidding knowingly.
How would he go about transferring wealth to Putin & pals? He can't do business with them, because sanctions.
Russia already owns 12% of the world's crypto.
Trump can inflate their value by pulling shit like this.
Russia: profit.
There is speculation that a secondary goal here would be to weaken the US dollar as a defacto exchange currency standard worldwide if Bitcoin were to gain prominence.
That would be highly beneficial to certain "very good friends" of Trump like Putin whom would much prefer an unregulated currency that the US cannot impose controls over when presidents change.
It's not really speculation that they want to weaken the dollar and dethrone it as the world's reserve currency; it's in Project 2025. Stated goal is to transition the US back to a manufacturing-heavy economy, instead of service, tech, finance, etc. Probably won't work well, but that's what they're trying to do.
Would it surprise you if the Russian state turned out to be Satoshi and holding on to all those early mined blocks?
Let's just send the gold to North Korea and skip the middleman. /s
White house says scammers gonna scam
The One Piece is real
Sounds like a good way to lose money.
I hate that they even say this shit... Like I get this is just a blitz of information in the attempt to overwhelm us, but goddamn is it manufacturing anxiety. Wasn't it investing 101 that uncertainty is bad?
I hate that they even say this shit.
Me too. It's overwhhelming on the face of it, but now with the added bonus that they are provenly quite capable and willing to put such brainfarts into action.
Sometimes I think: "don't fall for it, the outrage is the point!" but then I think: "that just makes it easier for them to get away with it!"
I figured the owner class/military industrial complex pulling the levers would be most pissed about all of this and attempt something, but the market isn't super crazy and the only resistance is leftwing grassroots, which isn't neo-lib.
Assume this is out to deflect from the War room signal story.
No. Old news, this is.
Huh, right wing dipshits have been buying gold from hucksters for decades now. I'm assuming this sell off would devalue gold somewhat. It'll be weird seeing consequences of this if it happens.
The US don't have a lot of gold though
So then, hypothetically, if they do this and we get hit with an EMP or a huge solar flare we will literally have nothing? I know it's a little "tin foil hat" on my part, but I like to live by the rule of not putting all your eggs in one basket. I know this is an excuse for them to do a whole bunch of shady shit and destroy shit from the inside, but a random Internet stranger shouldn't have a better grasp of national security than the president. Like, if this doesn't set off red flags for you, you are either incredibly stupid or you think this will pay you out in some way. (Spoiler: it won't)
Even my 70 year old mom knows this is a stupid idea and she doesn't even know how to reset a router.
doesnt have to be an emp or solar flare. one malicious actor getting access to the wallets is all it takes and far more likely in my view
Guess i went too big for something that could fail incredibly easily.
To be honest you can run the bitcoin only with paper and dedication. The algorithm could have existed 2000 years ago
If they actually know what they're doing, then they can secure against EMP very easily.
But they won't know what they're doing.
Recently pardoned Dread Pirate Roberts will be appointed the head of the Department of Internet Currency Keeping.
He's the best at bitcoin.
Undoubtedly he'd resign or get scapegoated though, and truck will need to find and appoint a new DICK head.
The Orange Turd is such a genius.
Simon Gruber wishes he had this much gold.
Some real emperor's new clothes shit right here. At this point we should just put a slot machine on the flag
