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.
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.
Would it surprise you if the Russian state turned out to be Satoshi and holding on to all those early mined blocks?
It would very much surprise me if Satoshi turned out to be Russian (is that what you’re asking?). His whitepaper proposal is written in very fluent English, as are his other communications on SourceForge etc, also Russians are not known for their technological entrepreneurial aspirations - at least not for the last ~40 years.
To be honest I would not be surprised if whoever Satoshi is has died, rather than craftily holding onto the early minted blocks. Only time will tell if they ever get transacted.
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.
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
I didn’t know lemmy had so many brain broken crytpo losers
Blocking monero.town was a great decision.
So. America got bought by a vulture capitalist and they are selling off assets.
“Running America like a business”
Make America Great Depression Again
nah, they’re just bringing back the roaring 20s!
Sounds like a good way to lose money.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Don’t worry, if you can’t afford a computer to manage your crypto, your employer can manage it for you (for a fee)
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.
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.
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.
I know very little about crypto other than the theory behind it. What does XMR do differently?
Shhhh… Let them.
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
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
Agreed. Its also a direct competitor with every countries sovereign currency… So why would help it?
- Pump
- Dump
When there’s a disruptive force, you have a few options
-
try to kill it so it can’t disrupt
-
do nothing and be disrupted
-
dip you toes in, so if disruption happens you aren’t blindsided and can hopefully wade through it
-
take a chance and swim in it so you can be on the leading edge of that disruption.
They’ve kinda tried option 1 but failed.
Option 2 could lead to long term consequences
Option 3 leaves them prepared but not overly exposed
Option 4 would be pretty risky
So really, option 3 is probably the best bet given option 1 hasn’t been working.
It’s bitcoin, the only thing it’s disrupting is the pyramid scheme space. It’s too volatile, too expensive(transaction fees), and too slow to be a useful currency. There is no reason for the government to buy in to a speculation bubble.
-
Why should they have any?
Why does any government invest time or money into new and evolving things. To stay up to date, be ready for change, and see how that new change can be of benefit.
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?
You can be sure this is about enriching himself and his broligarchs.
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.
This line in the article made it sound like it already exists:
“This move, according to Hines, could be a budget-neutral way to increase the country’s Bitcoin reserves.”
Apparently, it does, as an act of E.O. that whole line concerns me - that they’ll use the budget to buy bitcoin while laying off workers and cutting social security.
From the article, sounds like they would only be using money made from the sale of the gold they already have. Basically, not spending any extra money, and in the end, just converting some gold to bitcoin. I’m not sure how the sale of gold certificates work.
They already have some digital currency that was acquired mostly by civil forfeiture.
Some real emperor’s new clothes shit right here. At this point we should just put a slot machine on the flag
I’ve never been this high
