• SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      How much money do you have? At the current state of affairs the best possible investment is to buy pallets of ammo and crates full of AR lowers.

      • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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        6 days ago

        Many times more than $500, but far below $100,000. In any case, I am thinking that if WW3 starts up, I can buy war bonds from the places that oppose Dogey America. Probably fiscally safer and more effective than buying ammo as an individual, since states can do better bulk purchases and negotiations with that money. Hopefully my neck of the woods would disobey Trump orders to outlaw the purchase of foreign war bonds.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          I am not even talking about a war scenario. The college near me has guest finance speakers and once in 2006 they described how a few investors were renting warehouse space and buying bullets as a hedge and ar lowers as a speculatory investment with little downside. I am assuming they must have made a killing I’m profits.

          You need a sizeable amount of investment money to do it at a scale where storage costs don’t eat into your profits though.

          • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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            6 days ago

            I know an old hardware store, the kind that is about half the size of a Home Depot. That building and the lot around it has been empty for nearly a decade by now. Aside from likely being dilapidated from not having humans, it should be a pretty good building for stowing gear. Hopefully, my Euros when converted into dollars will be able to buy cheap real estate for a good cause.

      • qwertilliopasd@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        touches nose Why risk your money on gold or silver when you can invest in brass? Pretty good odds on another spicy summer in America.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      With each day that passes, I am becoming more convinced that shifting 99% of my money into Euros is the right call.

      Yeah, until fElon “enters the chat” on the EU situation just like he has in the U.S.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      Ah, so they are coming for the federal reserve as a whole. Makes sense actually, Trump wants that money.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        … 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.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        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.

  • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    So they want to trade something that is almost always worth a lot for something that is sometimes worth a theoretical shitload or less than a loaf of bread, depending on the day?

    Brilliant, very good. Nothing stupid will come of this I’m sure. /s

  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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    6 days ago

    Just when you think the clown car is full, that there is no way they will get another clown in there, clown world manages to cram another in.

    Again.

  • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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    7 days ago

    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 cronies

    • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      Ah 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.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 days ago

    budget neutral

    What the actual fuck. If you trade gold for bitcoin, you no longer have the gold. Budget neutral my ass.

  • Pondis@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I know this is old news, but how good would it be if they pissed a whole bunch of gold away on BitCoin and everyone dumped, tanking the price, and losing the US trillions of dollars.

    I mean good from a theoretical way, it would be absolutely devastating for the state of the world.

  • Fair Fairy@thelemmy.club
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    7 days ago

    The correct thing to do is ban all the digital coins.

    All they used for is tax avoidance. While raising electric bills

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 days ago

      Decent digital currency wouldnt use much electricity and would stop hyperinflation occuring in countries experiencing extreme issues. Being that taxes are standardly on income and sales, where is it you are saying they are dodging taxes? (Bitcoin isn’t a good digital currency, but neither should a decent one be run by the country)

        • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          Ethereum is probably the most well-known of the ‘proof-of-stake’ cryptocurrencies, which don’t require massive resources in order to generate/validate transactions. It made the switch back in 2022 I think?

  • sfu@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    The US has a bitcoin reserve? First I’ve heard of it. Whatever, but using gold to buy it makes no sense.

    • Redditsux@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 days ago

      They don’t. It’s being floated. Trump said he’s going to create a reserve. Not an official act yet.

      • sfu@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        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.”

        • Redditsux@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 days ago

          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.

          • sfu@lemm.ee
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            7 days ago

            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.