this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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[–] MoreFPSmorebetter@lemmy.zip 272 points 6 days ago (6 children)

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.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 135 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 75 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 43 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 points 5 days ago

Don't worry, if you can't afford a computer to manage your crypto, your employer can manage it for you (for a fee)

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 68 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

So couple things:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 20 points 6 days ago

~~Ocean’s~~Gulf of America's Eleven

[–] datendefekt@feddit.org 25 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 18 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 11 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

Because they'll pass it through a mixer on the way to boss Putin.

[–] dan@upvote.au 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] RepleteLocum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Everyone here is forgetting xmr.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Shhhh... Let them.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Jarix@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Some of us didn't know what it was in the first place

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com -3 points 6 days ago

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

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works -4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

limited resource

Gold can be created in supernovae and then found in asteroids.

There will only be 21 million bitcoins ever.

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Who is going to fund the network security when the block reward is only 0.01 BTC?

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

The purchasing power of a block reward used to be a lot lower than that!