budget neutral
What the actual fuck. If you trade good for bitcoin, you no longer have the gold. Budget neutral my ass.
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 croniesCopying 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.
I didn’t know lemmy had so many brain broken crytpo losers
Blocking monero.town was a great decision.
LOL.
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.
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 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.
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…
A purchase shortly followed by one of the biggest bitcoin and market crashes in modern times.
So. America got bought by a vulture capitalist and they are selling off assets.
“Running America like a business”
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’ve never been this high
Fuck bitcoin. Let’s bring back the beanie-baby as a monetary standard.
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.
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. 😅
Musk starts eyeing the old boxes full of them in his basement…
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.
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.
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.
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
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try to kill it so it can’t disrupt
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do nothing and be disrupted
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dip you toes in, so if disruption happens you aren’t blindsided and can hopefully wade through it
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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.
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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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
This comes across as another Trump scam.
I guarantee his family and “friends” already own a lot of BTC.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 you had gold and you are starving, then you deserve to die.
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.
Hey everybody, check out THIS metal, its all yellowy and pretty!
And it never rusts
And is malleable enough to allow for coinage.
