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)
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.
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 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.
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
So couple things:
- Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are certainly not untraceable. Public ledger means that all the transactions are publicly visible - if you can associate a wallet to a person or organization then you know where the money went, and there are businesses that specifically do that kind of research. Every single transaction ever is part of the blockchain record. Cryptocurrency is a terrible way to make a clandestine purchase.
- All currencies are made up (I know, real imfourteenandthisisdeep energy, but still technicallythetruth).
*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.
- Cryptocurrencies are still largely unregulated, and the crypto market has attracted exactly the kind of people you would expect to be most interested in unregulated financial transactions - scammers, thieves, con men, ransomware gangs, money launderers, and anyone who wants buy or sell CSAM, narcotics, weapons, DDOS-as-a-Service, and North Korea’s government funding crew. The crypto market is absolutely chock-full of criminal activity, so it’s entirely reasonable to assume that anyone who wants to participate in that market wants to participate in the crime.
- As you said, trading physical gold for digital currency is a stupid idea. It’s also uneccessary, because the FBI is already sitting on a collection of cryptocurrencies that have been confiscated through criminal investigations, including large amounts of Bitcoin. It is technically illegal right now for the US government to do anything with that, but that could be changed with a law. There’s nowhere else for that cryptocurrency to go anyway.
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
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!
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.
A purchase shortly followed by one of the biggest bitcoin and market crashes in modern times.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That, and gold actually has properties that make it useful, like not oxidizing and being a good conductor. It still has value even if it was otherwise worthless as a currency
If bitcoin was otherwise worthless as a currency, then it would still be useful for secure time stamps.
This comes across as another Trump scam.
I guarantee his family and “friends” already own a lot of BTC.
Gold works without energy. It doesnt oxidise or decay as other materials
Seriously when people say gold is worthless, what a joke. There is very little of it, as you mentioned it doesn’t oxidize, it’s the metal used in microchips. It ain’t sea shells or tulip bulbs or Bitcoin, that’s for sure.
I would agree for the case that we’re truly in end times where nobody has anything and people fight over scraps of food, that gold might be worthless.
It’s still your best bet for all other scenarios that don’t involve you hiding in a cave and eating bugs.
And even THEN, gold is a shiny, pretty metal that doesn’t oxidize like other shiny metals. So the tyrants of the apocalyptic wastelands will STILL want it for jewelry.
I think that’s the moment you don’t want to have Gold on you.
You think the end times are going to be characterized by no one having anything?
I think the end times is the short period before the end.
If it is sudden, gold does matter even less.
Did I say it was worthless? It’s worth whatever people are willing to pay for it for its industrial purposes. That’s it.
If I was starving gold would still be worthless to me, regardless of how it oxidizes.
If all society broke down and all currencies became worthless gold would still have value as it has intrinsic value due to its chemical properties. Bitcoin would be worth nothing
There are easier and cheaper means of exchange. Indigenous people all over the world had access to gold but used it for decoration and not trade.
Gold is pretty damn “cheap” to use as a currency it’s a softer metal with a lower melting point which allows it to be easily minted and then since its properties are somewhat unique it makes it harder to counterfeit without more complex technology. It is also rare enough that small bits of it can be used for currency so you don’t have to use something like the giant stone discs of yap. Some places used food for currency like rice or cocoa beans but those had too little value per unit of currency which made them annoying.
I really suggest you read Graeber’s “Debt” to get a more complete picture of how economies can work. It’s not all giant stone discs.
Plus there’s tons of ways gold can be adulterated. Devaluing gold currency is incredibly easy, as is shaving or sweating the coins to get your own gold.
With a bar of gold you can crush someone’s skull in and steal their food. Try do that with Bitcoin.
horrific Viserys noises
You can use Bitcoin miners for that
Or feast on the delicious goo that comes out
Gold coins are very filling
Relevant Homer Simpson:
Which is why they airlift bundles of cash when there’s a famine and not, you know, food.
If you had gold and you are starving, then you deserve to die.
Hey everybody, check out THIS metal, its all yellowy and pretty!
And it never rusts
And is malleable enough to allow for coinage.
Gold has value by itself, just look up it’s applications in the semiconductor industry
Outside of money, PoW blockchains are useful for secure time stamps.
Why single out PoW? PoS also documents hashes immutably over time.
Because then people would have to admit that bitcoin isn’t crypto, and PoS consumes something like 99.9% less power than PoW.
Because we’re talking about value by itself, outside of money. So HashCash for emails is useful even if there’s no money involved, but locking up a dozen Stanley Nickels doesn’t cost anything.
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
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.
Gotta give Russia the liquidity to exit its BTC positions if the war and sanctions will soon be over.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s probably a better way to put it yeah.
And as fucked as it is, it is a fact that this does hold value and is backed by it.
It’s just a pretty shit thing to be backed by ethically.
But nonetheless, there is value in bitcoin, it’s just best we don’t encourage further investment in such a thing.
So it’s backed by climate change?
Yep. It’s unethical but nonetheless makes the coin actually have tangible holdings, because it’s actually impacting the real world.
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.
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…
