Oddbean

90 years ago the president of the US made it illegal to hold more than $100 in gold. Everything above that had to be turned in to the gov @ $20/oz. They repealed order 6102 a few decades later and now gold is over $2,000/oz. The easiest gold to confiscate immediately was the gold held at the banks. Thousands of family's generational wealth was taken and traded for melting fiat dollars. The bitcoin ETFs are that easy pile to confiscate this time... And maybe in exchange, they give you a fair market value worth of CBDCs. I believe it's our duty to help those families prepare because there will be no warning. This is a US example of what has happened to literally every fiat currency. A small group of people counterfeit the currency until it's time to do something drastic and block the exits. #bitcoin

The risk of this happening should not be underestimated. If it does, it will be hard to say what’s worse: that lots of people will have their corn stolen, or that a few crooks will end up controlling so much corn and doing God knows what with it.

Look, if you hold your money in very few things gold, bitcoin, cocaine, the powers that be are very busy, example: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-property-confiscation-bill-41c5855535c66749d8b9283c7dd48ee4 but here should be the real example America seized Russian Gold and huge Boats. Bitcoin is the only thing you can take with you if you die.

The theory of Bitcoin ETFs providing a larger blast radius for an executive order 6102 on Bitcoin is becoming more compelling. What better way to accelerate the subversion of Bitcoin in our society?

Wait a sec. This makes little sense to me. - Bitcoin doesn’t care who owns it. - People are allowed to use their property however they like, including opting out of janky, cumbersome, accident and hack-prone, highly-taxed custody solutions for ETFs behind tax advantaged wrappers. - Few of the first19.5 million of mined bitcoins are in ETFs. What is the eventual ceiling for # of Bitcoins in ETFs? Probably not that high. - Bitcoin is global. If the US Feds stole and parked Americans’ Bitcoin, prices everywhere else would skyrocket, including in enemy countries. How is that advancing US interests? - If the US Feds sold Americans’ seized Bitcoin abroad, it puts them in foreign countries’ hands, some of them enemies. - Bitcoin is now protected by Wall Street’s armies of lawyers and lobbyists who would fight such a seizure of property almost the way through SCOTUS. - How does stealing Joe and Jane Sixpack’s retirement funds, including their target date retirement mutual funds, earn politicians votes? It does quite the opposite.

I agree with most of what you've said but question a few of your assumptions. Why would taking Coinbases BTC make prices skyrocket? What makes you say they'd sell it? Fort Knox is still loaded with 6102 gold. Why didn't Wall Street or the supreme Court stop FDR in '33? The gold theft wasn't branded as theft. Everyone got $20 an oz for it.

Thanks for the discussion. My imperfect understanding is, FDR seized the gold because the dollar was backed by it at the time, yet citizens were attempting to trade in their dollars for gold during the Great Depression. The govt could not keep up and tried to outlaw private ownership of gold. That kind of prohibition didn’t work and, eventually, the govt recanted.

It looks to me like the same thing is going on. As the dollar keeps dropping, more will trade their Dollars for Bitcoin and may try and outlaw private ownership. I wouldn't stay they recanted but 40 years later, Ford repealed it

As for taking the institutions’ Bitcoin, it might have the same effect as the estimated 4 million lost or frozen Bitcoin today. It means that fewer coins are available to trade, as if the 21 million is effectively even far MORE scarce. The sudden increase in scarcity would be a supply shock in the rest of the world.

The US? If they stole and then HODLed, the supply shock would, logically, skyrocket globally, probably recking many even weaker currencies. That would not be a popular move at all and there would be pressure to sell to pay debts and meet spending without raising taxes. One can imagine campaigns based on the idea. This is entirely speculation of course. The global political economy is a wildly diverse and unpredictable system. But I don’t default to “The Feds are going to steal all the corn and that’s the end of it.” Everything in this inflationary world is good for Bitcoin.