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.
Sure, why not. I could use a laugh, and the memes when this fails too are going to be juicy.
Sounds like a good way to lose money.
America has gold reserves?
Yeah, um, most countries have already traded theirs for other, more profitable investments.
Which countries are you talking about? Pretty much every country with a notable economy has gold reserves of some size.
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.
A kleptocrats dream
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.
Let’s just send the gold to North Korea and skip the middleman. /s
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 croniesAh 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.
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.
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.
I didn’t know lemmy had so many brain broken crytpo losers
Blocking monero.town was a great decision.
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 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.
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.
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.
