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:
- 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
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!
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.
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
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.
With a bar of gold you can crush someone’s skull in and steal their food. Try do that with Bitcoin.
You can use Bitcoin miners for that
Or feast on the delicious goo that comes out
horrific Viserys noises
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.
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.
Gold coins are very filling
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 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.
Hey everybody, check out THIS metal, its all yellowy and pretty!
And it never rusts
And is malleable enough to allow for coinage.
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.
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.
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.
So. America got bought by a vulture capitalist and they are selling off assets.
“Running America like a business”
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…
Fuck bitcoin. Let’s bring back the beanie-baby as a monetary standard.
I see your beanie babies and raise you Pogs
I’ve got some old Magic: The Gathering cards.
They’re pretty hot right now ngl. I’ll take them (to play with) if you want. 😅
The USA Pokemon Card Reserve.
If we’re going to use something physical, we should use meteoric rocks that can’t be replicated on Earth.
Musk starts eyeing the old boxes full of them in his basement…
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.
Ah buddy… Ah shit. You’re smart and I value your infodump/vents. This one was pure hell. I need a lie down.
Thanks. =)
Enjoy your … entirely restful lie down… Brave Little Hitachi Wand.
lol
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…
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.
I am not even talking about a war scenario. The college near me has guest finance speakers and once in 2006 they described how a few investors were renting warehouse space and buying bullets as a hedge and ar lowers as a speculatory investment with little downside. I am assuming they must have made a killing I’m profits.
You need a sizeable amount of investment money to do it at a scale where storage costs don’t eat into your profits though.
I know an old hardware store, the kind that is about half the size of a Home Depot. That building and the lot around it has been empty for nearly a decade by now. Aside from likely being dilapidated from not having humans, it should be a pretty good building for stowing gear. Hopefully, my Euros when converted into dollars will be able to buy cheap real estate for a good cause.
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.
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’ve never been this high
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
