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The U.S. Government Has $5B in Bitcoin
- arcticbull 3y agoAt one point in ~2017 the Bulgarian equivalent to the FBI was the single largest holder after Satoshi, from when they busted a money laundering operation. [1] [1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/12/07/the-bulgarian-government-is-sitting-on-3-billion-in-bitcoin/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/12/07/the-bulgarian-go...
- gt565k 3y agoHeh, the Bulgarian government is so corrupt that they are all probably fighting and trying to find a way to launder the previously seized BTC used in money laundering.
- arcticbull 3y agoNo doubt, I couldn't find any data on its eventual disposition other than 'we dont have it anymore.'
- sebstefan 3y agoBorislav lost the key many such cases
- sofixa 3y agoAccording to a bivol.bg (reliable investigative news), the bitcoins were sold at a private auction with the help of Deloitte and the (real) FBI in December 2017, bringing 6 billion BGN (~3 billion EUR). Apparently at a cabinet meeting the money was earmarked for procuring new fighter aircraft (the current ones are obsolete and very poorly maintained). There was an acquisition of F-16s in 2022 for $1.3 billion, which still leaves 1.5 billion EUR from the seized money. https://bivol.bg/bg-bitcoin-deal.html https://bivol.bg/bg-bitcoin-deal.html
- arcticbull 3y agoThank you so much! Nice to have closure haha.
- belval 3y agoIt's wild to think in a way they bought fighter jets with bitcoins.
- nerpderp82 3y agoThat they bought fighter jets with crime, that bought bitcoins. I wonder what the money loops of corruption look like?
- jgilias 3y agoMan, should’ve waited a bit. They’d get a lot more bang for buck so to say.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago…on the books.
- automatic6131 3y agoRemember the wheeze that governments were going to use Bitcoin as the world's reserve currency? That was a good laugh.
- paxys 3y agoWho actually believed that outside of /r/bitcoin?
- paulddraper 3y agoI mean, if you believed that you would be very long on btc
- anon1199022 3y agoYou know, you people in comments, here were saying Bitcoin was scam years ago. Price made like 50x or more since then. So now that finance take it seriously, you come up with this? Thanks for reminding me this place has no important information.
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y agoIt's been fun watching the goalposts move over the years. 2011 - it's a scam, nobody uses it 2013 - it's a scam, only criminals use it 2015 - it's a scam, no companies accept it 2017 - it's a scam, only small companies accept it 2019 - it's a scam, no countries officially recognize it 2021 - it's a scam, only small countries officially recognize it 2023 - it's a scam, it's not the world reserve currency
- bugglebeetle 3y ago2023 - its what intelligence services use to monitor and steer criminal activities
- anon1199022 3y ago2009 - CIA invented Bitcoin. With that logic.
- jonahbenton 3y agoPlus Satoshi's stake held by the NSA lol.
- lawlessone 3y agoIf it's who a lot of people think he was. That stake is locked down until someone figures out how to revive cryopreserved people and cure ALS.
- londons_explore 3y agoOr someone figures out that his computers random number generator just wasn't very good...
- canoebuilder 3y agoIsn’t there some sequence of communication or something between Hal and Satoshi that makes it seem fairly implausible they were the same person? I’m not particularly up to speed here, is there some substantial evidence that seems to indicate that in fact they were one and the same?
- lawlessone 3y agoThere's no actual proof he is really. it's just circumstantial. And there is i think a message from Satoshi after Hal passed.
- smeej 3y agoAnd even that's assuming whatever the storage medium was for the keys survives that long. If you were going to store a series of words for up to centuries without being able to check the backup, and without being able to make any changes to protect it, what would you use?
- digging 3y agoA couple centuries isn't a terribly long time to preserve something if it's kept in an enclosure in a dry environment. It could be wood. I'm certain it wouldn't be, though.
- frank_bb 3y ago[dead]
- santiagobasulto 3y agohttps://archive.ph/K9Ib1 https://archive.ph/K9Ib1
- wslh 3y agoDaily trading of Bitcoin is now at ~24B. 5B can move the market but not destroy it.
- artursapek 3y agoThat's only the volume on retail exchanges. Plenty of BTC also moves around every day in OTC transactions. The US govt won't be selling this on Coinbase, lol
- paulpauper 3y agoactually it is going to coinbase https://thedefiant.io/us-gov-moves-1b-seized-btc https://thedefiant.io/us-gov-moves-1b-seized-btc
- artursapek 3y agoTouche, but I really doubt that most of their 6B, if they do sell it, would be sold on a retail platform like that.
- scotty79 3y agoWhy not?
- eli 3y agoHow leveraged is that daily trading, I wonder?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deweller 3y agoMichael Saylor (MicroStrategy) has over $3B in Bitcoin
- pcdoodle 3y agoThere's no second best!
- janandonly 3y agoThe USA has 207,189 bitcoins, but other countries have some on the books as well. * China 194,000 * Ukraine 46,351 * El Salvador * Finland * Georgia (the country, not the US state) See: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/treasuries/#countries https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/treasuries/#countries
- danbruc 3y agoEl Salvador, completely forgot about that. How did the volcano powered Bitcoin farm work out? Can I still buy a sandwich at the beach with Bitcoin? And do people do so?
- garba_dlm 3y agothat can't be correct. bitcoin has too much value.
- jjk166 3y agoYou can spend less than a whole bitcoin, just like you can spend less than a whole dollar.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoI've gotten paid for services with Monero. It works perfectly. People just need to start using it.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoHeh. What's with these downvotes? Do people disagree with my concrete experience? I'm curious.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 3y agoIt's offtopic
- Phlarp 3y agoThis was always the plan. Get the criminals to concentrate the funds into a currency that's easier to confiscate. Bonus points if the NSA/CIA can steal it to fund black ops.
- paulpauper 3y agoThis why BTC keeps falling when the stock market is open, a pattern that has been persistently reliable since March 2023. A trading method that shorts BTC as soon as the stock market opens and goes long QQQ, closing both the BTC short and the QQQ long at the closing bell, would have posted a strong return despite BTC being up for the year, indicative of liquidations by a large entity to take advantage of increased liquidity when stock market is open--I would surmise the US government selling its 50k seized James Zhong Silk Road coins. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/31/us-government-sold-216m-of-seized-silk-road-bitcoin-this-month/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/31/us-government-s... It all adds up. This selling puts constant pressure on BTC during the market hours and sometimes those sudden 100-200+ pt BTC dumps. Very profitable trading method..
- jt2190 3y agoActual headline: > Why the U.S. Government Has $5 Billion in Bitcoin Answer: > … Uncle Sam’s stash of some 200,000 bitcoin was seized from cybercriminals and darknet markets. It is primarily offline in encrypted, password-protected storage devices known as hardware wallets that are controlled by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service or another agency.
- scotty79 3y agoDo they have passwords to them?
- logifail 3y agoJust for comparison, the US budget deficit will rise by approximately that amount($5 billion) per day every day for the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-u-s-debt-will-rise-by-more-than-5-billion-every-single-day-for-the-next-decade-775ed38d https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-u-s-debt-will-rise-by-... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/congressional-budget-office-paints-grim-long-term-u-s-deficit-picture-f131d86f?mod=search_headline https://www.marketwatch.com/story/congressional-budget-offic...
- qeternity 3y agoThe debt will increase by that amount, not the deficit. The deficit is $5b/day
- outside1234 3y agoIs that true even after the Trump tax cuts expire?
- paulpauper 3y agothese numbers have gotten so big they ceased to mean anything for most people as they cannot put their heads around it .
- pcdoodle 3y ago21 million is easy to understand in comparison.
- ncallaway 3y ago> ...the US budget deficit will rise by... That is not what the article says. The article says the debt will rise each day. Think of the deficit as the 1st derivative of the debt, or the rate of change. If date is increasing at a constant rate, then the deficit is staying mostly flat. So, the article is saying something like "John is running away from us, and will get 5 miles further away every hour", and you're saying "John is running away from us, and he gets 5mph faster every hour".
- jrm4 3y agoInteresting; I'm fascinated by the extent to which people HERE seem to want to stick their head in the ground on cryptocurrency. Which is to say, it's obvious that a lot of people here hate it -- which strikes me as reasonable -- but aren't willing much to think about about the fact that (like e.g. science) cryptocurrency doesn't much care whether you like it or not, it IS a thing, and it will continue to be a thing. And if it is a thing, one has to be serious about understanding what one can and cannot do about it, love or hate.
- paulpauper 3y agoA lot of us don't hate it. we think it's overrated and does not deserve all the hype it got, and a lot of ppl have lost $ chasing this hype or scammed. It is a thing and is not going away, but so what. Beanie Babies and pet rocks still exist too.
- zen928 3y ago> And if it is a thing, one has to be serious about understanding what one can and cannot do about it an understanding sharing much in common with the eye-sore casinos propped up slowly over time in towns and cities around me, especially: pity the denizens who participate, move on with my life.
- Infinity315 3y ago[flagged]
- frankreyes 3y agoThat's almost 1% of total BTC supply
- setgree 3y agoGood, I hope they dump it suddenly and without warning. The bitcoin trading market is much thinner than it looks -- wash trading is ubiquitous [0] and BTC's price is systematically propped up by a likely fraudulent stablecoin [1]. High prices benefit the organized crime orgs that transact with it [2], but none of the putatively legitimate web3 projects rely on high valuations to work, in theory. If blockchain solves a real problem, it should do it at BTC = $100 or whatever. IMO, if the US government floods the market, it could do a lot of damage to organized crime groups, potentially lead to unbacked stablecoin's death spiral (as people attempt to redeem more cash than they actually have on hand), and perhaps lead to a healthier, less mania-prone crypto market. [0] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/wash-trading-centralised-crypto-exchanges-need-transparency-and-accountability https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/wash-trading-centralised-cryp... [1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/06/13/tether-manipulation-pushed-up-bitcoins-price-researchers-find/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/06/13/tether-manipulat... [2] https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/china-sells-fentanyl-for-cryptocurrencies/ https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/china-sells-fentanyl-f...
- paulpauper 3y agoit is already being dumped , gradually daily. hence, why btc is always weak when the stock market is open.
- wholesomepotato 3y agoYour planning to scoop up some on the cheap? Because all it would do is to benefit buyers and price would bounce back very quickly.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoBought on the cheap so that it can be dumped again once the patsies buy it and cause the price to surge and leave them holding the bags.
- setgree 3y agoI might get a graphics card if the crypto market collapses, but I wasn't planning to buy any BTC. Also, I think that if BTC falls below, say, 10K, a lot of loans are going to get called in suddenly, and we're going to see that a lot of people were swimming without trunks [0], i.e. mismanaging customer funds and assuming that the crypto market would go up indefinitely. In other words, I think the story we're learning now about Alameda is going to turn out to be a lot of people's story. But we shall see! [0] https://money.com/swimming-naked-when-the-tide-goes-out/ https://money.com/swimming-naked-when-the-tide-goes-out/
- Waterluvian 3y agoIf the government seizes $5B in cash, do they have a responsibility to invest it in bonds or something safe? And if the government seizes $5B in something perishable like pumpkins, does it have a responsibility to offload those seized items before they're worth nothing? Bitcoin doesn't exactly suffer from the problem pumpkins do, but I'm curious where that divide is between, "we've put it in the evidence locker" and "it will decay to nothing so we need to act on it, even if the legal matters have yet to be resolved."
- TuringNYC 3y ago>> If the government seizes $5B in cash, do they have a responsibility to invest it in bonds or something safe? IMHO Yes! The Government holding BTC indefinitely is equivalent to just taking it off the market and enriching all existing BTC owners by increasing scarcity.
- hooverd 3y agoThey need to seize $5M in pumpkin pie spice along with them.
- seanhunter 3y agoThis would be a good time of year to be long pumpkin pie spice I feel.
- ninkendo 3y ago> And if the government seizes $5B in something perishable like pumpkins, does it have a responsibility to offload those seized items before they're worth nothing? Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
- qingcharles 3y agoI get government cheese from the food pantries every now and again. It makes my day because cheese is usually too expensive for me to buy. I get the one in the photo at the bottom of the page. It is kinda like Velveeta, I guess. It has a very low melting point and a very mild flavor. You can make grilled cheese with it, but it tends to all spill out of the sides.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y agoThe US also holds about $500B in gold. Gold currently has a market cap about 20x that of Bitcoin. So the US has a bigger share of the world's gold than of the world's Bitcoin.
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoMeanwhile their employees and "community leaders," i.e. redditors, continue their unending campaign to demonize civilians who would dare hold bitcoin without permission.
- huy77 3y ago$5B is like soda can for a gov like the US's?
- spaintech 3y agoForm me, one of the significant criticisms of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, is their environmental impact. The process of “mining” Bitcoin requires significant computational power, leading to a large carbon footprint. Recent estimates suggest that the power consumption of the global Bitcoin network is comparable to the energy consumption of entire countries, like Finland and Norway. This has led to concerns about the sustainability of cryptocurrencies in their current form. Even with Prove of Stake, this is still a very high price to pay for a system that is slow, and mostly used as a speculative resource. I can’t seem to find the “real” value of Crypto, other than the get rich schemes we see, and how they end…
- scotty79 3y agoIts energy usage is very good because it can provide people who want to invest in renewables a source of revenue in the market where energy prices already go negative at times of peak production.
- thrill 3y agoThey should burn it.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoFWIW, that's what the Pentagon spends in less than 3 days.
- cyanydeez 3y ago0$