• @tal@lemmy.today
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    313 months ago

    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.

    • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      83 months ago

      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.

    • Billiam
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      153 months ago

      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?

  • @njm1314@lemmy.world
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    203 months ago

    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.

    • @turmacar@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      43 months ago

      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.

    • @orcrist@lemm.ee
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      23 months ago

      It is a joke and it is funny and it would also have serious consequences. This is a classic example of the lulz. Politics can be so dark and twisted real, and if you want to stay involved in it for decades, you have to appreciate the lulz and then still keep going.

      Let’s compare it to, for example, the fact that Donald Trump has control over the US military and nuclear weapons. That’s shocking. He’s a complete moron and he’s kind of evil to boot. Many of his good buddies are evil racist pieces of s***, too. So that’s the starting point. That’s where most of us are already at. Does this current idea make things worse? Of course it does. But things were already bad. That’s why we’re not panicking anymore than we were yesterday or last month.

  • circuitfarmer
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    3 months 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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    93 months 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.

  • @werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    13 months ago

    Or chicklets if they don’t have change. But you watch out, if you come back home with chicklets your mom and dad are gonna be pissed. So best to chew them before getting home.

  • @CobraChicken3000@lemmy.ca
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    523 months ago

    Well there it is. For anyone who believed that they were simply going to create a reserve to store already existing cryptocurrencies - that were confiscated by the federal agencies - and not spend federal dollars to bolster or hype up cryptocurrencies that are connected to the people in the administration, y’all are idiots.

    • @pulsewidth@lemmy.world
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      33 months ago

      I mean even that original plan would be fairly stupid. Law enforcement agencies seem to operate just fine with the current reserve of forfeited cryptocoins - I didn’t read anywhere of the FBI/CIA/etc crying out for a central bank style ‘strategic reserve’ managed by the FRB to add more layers of bureaucracy.

      The only place I can find in news cycles saying it’s a great idea is a think tank entitled the Bitcoin Policy Institute who put out a report in late 2024 entitled “The case for Bitcoin as a reserve asset”. Plus all the usual crypto bros begging for it to pump their positions. Gosh, I wonder if these parties may be biased.