Copying my comment from this same story, other thread on another instance/community:
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These actual mouth breathing morons have no idea what they are even attempting to describe.
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https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/does-the-federal-reserve-own-or-hold-gold.htm
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate_(United_States)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
Simon Gruber wishes he had this much gold.
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.
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?
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. 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.
If you want to reward your high profile friends so they can call out on with tangible arrests 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Make America Great Depression Again
nah, they’re just bringing back the roaring 20s!
It’s about at this point where I stop being snarky and stare in fascination
I had a hard time putting my reaction into words… thank you.
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 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.
Make sure to tell a magat how much you hate them today for bringing this fucking bullshit upon us
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
To be honest you can run the bitcoin only with paper and dedication. The algorithm could have existed 2000 years ago
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.
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.
Trunku hady 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?
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.
Dumb dumb dumb dumb
