Interesting but I don’t know how this would actually work… What numbers are we talking about? The US treasury market is about 27 trillion. So even if the US. goes full on global gold vs bitcoin rug pull mode, so that the btc price 10x and becomes as valuable as total gold… the US currently still just holds about 20 billion. So 0.001% of what they would need? So numbers matter, cause the US would have to acquire (in stealth mode) the entirety of all btc in a very short amount of time. Then let prices rip at least 10x and hodl from that point on, which would mean no circulation of any btc and therefore useless

In this hypothetical, gold is going to be revalued X higher. It’s $22 Trillion now. The corporate balance sheets with the most Bitcoin on them are US companies. They exist at the pleasure of the US Gov.

Not sure what that has to do with it? Those are global companies and they are actively ditching the dollar. So they owning btc has no effect on us treasury or does it? If they piled into Japanese yen, would that mean the US treasury would be as valuable as Japan? Not really, right? Sure US gov could go full on communism and seize all their assets but that would result in tea party revolution 2.0. Genuinely asking tho, not trying to be annoying ☺️☺️☺️

Yeah sorry, my reply got sent before finishing. $22 Trillion in gold now at $3300/oz. Revaluation is going to be some multiple on that - 2X to maybe? 5X. I’ve heard 10X thrown around but I don’t know. That’s getting you to $44T-$110T market cap but remember the US has, theoretically, ~5% of the above ground supply (a bigger share of good reserves but good is fungible so that can’t easily change); that’s not enough for them to peg the dollar and be able to defend it against the whole world when you’ve just 2X-5Xed your competitors holdings in the same move and given huge incentive for miners to go and increase supply. They would have to massively print and buy first which would be too destructive to the dollar for that to even be an option. Bitcoin would have to revalue at least to gold parity and likely exceed it in the end. Now that $44T-$110T would come down as they dump gold and Bitcoin is quite inelastic - sure some people would sell at $500k or $1M or whatever but if the shift is to BTC, no-one who holds a stack is going to sell it all out for fiat regardless of the price. Why would they? They’re going to have not only a lot of monetary wealth, but also the power that comes along with it. You’d see exchanges running dry and a perpetual bid on any and all supply after the US intentions got out. So I think the corporates holding it will be the primary targets. Maybe they let the ETFs survive so the stock markets don’t implode and it gives a place for retail/insurers etc to get exposure, but the exchanges will be folded into the banks and Microstrategy could easily be nationalised. You say that would be Tea Party 2.0 - possibly, losing the global reserve would more likely result in that and that’s a far likelier outcome of the “do nothing” route. But I think the American people would end up even richer provided they could still get exposure. Other countries who have zero corn and don’t get it will likely persecute existing HODLers trying to get a stack for themselves so the US could also become a safe haven bringing more in. Basically if they want to repeg the dollar, gold is a failure scenario. You just enrich your competitors in a market you can’t corner, on an asset that requires real world security to move, and where the additional supply is largely in others hands. Bitcoin is the only feasible path. It avoids the movement issues, coming from the lower base it’s much easier to get a sizeable stake, and you’ve got levers of the State to do things (like nationalisation) that your competitors don’t (who is Russia going to seize coins from?).

Got all of that. But again nationalizing those companies isn’t as simple as just buying out saylor with printed fiat against his will, but all shareholders, which are international investors. Would they be offered fiat which than pegged to those stolen btc would be basically the same as the company shares, so nobody gets hurt? I think most of your points are just rendering the general assumption of this to actually happen within 12month stealth mode to nearly zero. There are still too many players trading with the us so that incentivizes the us to print and dump this onto those countries. This will result in international way of playing hot potato. Sure china and Russia are already on their way out which started over 10y ago. The mentioned process will eventually happen but I can’t see it as something happening within a year, is basically my point.

Nationalising Microstrategy would be that easy. Ok, Trump is having issues with activist courts and the US system is a bit more robust than other systems, but Microstrategy (and others) as an entity exists at the pleasure of the US Gov. The frameworks they operate within are all controlled by the US Gov. The tax system. The regulated stock markets. The regulated banks. The payment rails. The custody agents. The corporate entity structure. All of this can and will be weaponised. You’ve got to remember the stakes here - losing Dollar hegemony doesn’t just result in a recession or even a depression, it destroys the US as we know it. It would destroy enormous amounts of wealth. Foment secessions. It would lead to huge political unrest which would definitely move beyond politics into violence. Mass unemployment. Mass chaos. Shit will spark up globally without Team Murica having their eye on everyone which means all the wealthy people are not going to be able to avoid things regardless. And so you have to be realistic about how much muscle those in power would be willing to flex to avoid that worst case scenario. Stealing strategic assets via nationalisation is pretty tame compared to the alternative. I said earlier I think the odds of it happening in 12-18 months are low, but it’s either in this timeframe, or we get something to kick the can and this happens in the next ~decade because the path is already set. Bessent might feel it’s now or never. Trump’s tariff policy leads me to believe they do think that, they either strike now proactively or the US will be too weak to make something this big stick in a few years. And all the stablecoin focus is also a big hint - the only reason for stablecoins to exist is to provide flows for Bitcoin. That the US can print a shitload of treasuries, regulate stablecoin issuers on what they must hold (Tether will get approvals but they’re going to have to hold longer duration), and push the inflation into Bitcoin rather than general prices is a nice bonus but really that’s setting up liquidity for Bitcoin to grow much larger too which they’ll eventually need. So yeah maybe it is 10 years and it’s all off the cuff reactions to systems imploding at that point, that’s entirely plausible and more likely for Governments to be reactionary like that. But if you see gold revalued soon, and loudly, expect it to be a fakeout with Bitcoin coming over the top because they can’t win at gold.

The US government exists at the pleasure of the armed citizens.

I would agree if there was any organised minority capable of enforcing the idea, but there’s not, and so until there is, this isn’t true - the US Government exists and enforces it’s will at its pleasure.

Sorry you think they have that power in your life.

Agreed 👌 thank you for your time ☺️

This process of the controllers capturing UTxOs within their organizations was an inevitable consequence of Bitcoin succeeding. We can observe it & call it out but we can't stop it. Bitcoin is at its core, permissionless. It's a system available for anyone to enter or exit at any time. We can't stop malevolent people from acquiring it or benign people from selling it. At some point it becomes exceedingly hard to capture more UTxOs through non violent means. The remaining bitcoiners simply to do sell many more sats. This is when it gets really risky to be the sole controller of UTxOs. I don't know how far away we are from this point. Bitcoin's price needs to ascend dramatically before they reach that conclusion. There's also a lot of interesting incentives that arise from getting there that make outcomes quite uncertain & unpredictable. What never disappears is the ability to buy your steak & eggs from another human with bitcoin (even if 19M coins eventually get removed from circulation). My hope is that in this process of bitcoin's monetization & attempted capture, individual bitcoiners become resilient producers. That instead of trying to convince more farmers & producers to accept bitcoin, we just start producing the goods ourselves. I think that this is also inevitable & is already happening, it's the degree to which it occurs locally, that is uncertain. Fighting the capture of UTxOs is ineffective because there is no centralised coordination among Bitcoiners. We can create decentralised custody & lending solutions but the centralised solutions will always be more convenient & easy. I will be focusing my time, attention & purchasing power on food production & building resilience. It is the fire that's been quietly burning within me my whole life, my purpose. Bitcoin isn't the biggest threat to the controllers & as individuals they personally benefit from its empowering properties. At the end of the day, an organisation/country can't sign a transaction or control a UTxO, it requires individual humans. I have faith in individual humans acting in their own self interest & discovering/remembering their own innate power. It seems like we have the odds attacked against us but enslaving humanity has never succeeded at scale, for long. Nature abhors imbalance.

I think it misleading to think of the United States as an entity in the power game that's being played. I much prefer Simon Dixon's FIC, MIC & TIC. Companies & countries are concepts, they don't actually exist outside of our minds. Sure, they command real people & resources but they're psuedo entities that we've created & permitted to exist in our realm. I suspect this was done to hide the strings moving the puppets & allow puppets to be replaced as needed. I don't disagree with what you're saying I just think it's more useful to talk about the controlling interests at play. The US is not a participant, it's a geographical region & a population but not a sovereign entity. China & possibly Russia are different.

Simon has been reading my BRICS posts from 2023 & 2024 -

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View quoted note → >”Companies & countries are concepts, they don't actually exist outside of our minds. Sure, they command real people & resources but they're psuedo entities that we've created & permitted to exist in our realm.” Very prescient. Both very right and in some sense, very wrong. If you had a time machine and went back 160 years to any city in what we call Germany and asked a random person what they were - none would have called themselves German. They’d be Bavarians or Prussians etc. Today they’d all be Germans first, Bavarians etc second. And yet the whole Prussian identity has been erased since then; they were the leading entity in unification, the dominant force in Germany for decades, and today 98% of people would think it’s a typo of Russia. They don’t understand that they were themselves a “nation”, they were as different from the Bavarians as Aussies are from the Welsh. These were Lutherans and Calvinists with a warrior-led bureaucratic system. The Bavarians were Catholics with an 800-year monarchy, they saw Vienna and the Holy Roman Empire as the centre of civilisation, they were entirely different to the Prussians. Das Deutsche Reich melded Bavarians and Prussians into one system, one country - Germany. This wasn’t done so puppets could be put in and out of power, there’s hundreds of years of geopolitical backdrop I can’t explain here with the Holy Roman Empire and the Hanseatic League and Napoleon and and and; THAT’S why Germany came into being. That today’s leaders are might be puppets is an altogether different story and misses the whole run up of how we got here. Yes in some sense, countries are very much made up. The map doesn’t make sense to any student of history - I’ll DM you separately on this point. In some sense; they’re the realest thing humans know. They are what stands between you and the barbarians razing your city and raping your wife and daughters. They are what drags your sons into war because some inbred royals have beef and want to measure their dicks against each other. Dismissing this as Simon does isn’t correct. He’s right about many things, most even, but just seeing things purely as factions isn’t 100% right either. I won’t say he’s wrong because he doesn’t claim these are all isolated well-defined entities and his labels are kind of catch-alls, but i heard his Xitter space with Ryan Dawson re Israel and I think that particularly showed his shortcomings where his factional view not properly accounting for nation states and the power in this mythos. 55 years ago; Vietnam was 2 countries. In fact it used to be multiple, the Cham people were basically genocided and barely exist today.. Nobody denies it’s 1 country today despite the differences internally. And nobody will fuck with them now because that 1 country has like 450k active duty military and 5 million reservists even though amongst them they’re as different as Prussians and Bavarians were, but they have a nation state “faction” in Simon’s terms that unites them. The MIC and FIC can’t sell them out; that was tried in the US-Vietnam war and look what happened.. Simplifying down purely to monetarily-aligned factions isn’t quite right. It denies humans their humanity, and humans are gonna human. They’re going to align with kin, and kin of kin, and they’re going to fight for their founding myths and the continuity of their people regardless of what some stock market number says.

Yeah - it wasn't always this way & it's not this way everywhere. China appears to have maintained their sovereignty while expanding. I think many of the SE Asian countries still have some sovereignty but they're being slowly coopted by China's influence. America & Europe (the west) has been captured using their legal & political processes. Democracy has quite a few flaws in that respect. The taking heads change but the lobbyist interests are always seen to. The idea that a western country's elected representatives serve the interests of the people has become a joke. They serve the commercial interests of their donors now & politics is just theatre to help that turd sandwich go down. To use western nations in your game theory is a mistake. Their incentives are private rather than being for the public. The becomes even more apparent when you start game out conflicts. On the surface, the US is using force to remove Iran's nuclear capabilities. But they've also thrown most of the world into an energy crisis that's threatening their economies. The US seems to be the least effected by the closing of Hormuz so you might think that's the main driver behind it. With the "complex" lens on though, you see the MIC making bank on defence contracts while the Iranian leaders are being undermined domestically. The US as a nation has no rational reason to invade except this pretext of "no Iranian nukes". The MIC & ultimately the FIC benefit greatly from the fighting & the eventual rebuild. It's the FICs long term agenda in the middle east that will eventually rise to the surface. If you think of the US as a participant in your game theory, you miss the incentives of the FIC that actually controls the actions of the US. Gov. A big one I noticed was in gaming out a nation state attack on Bitcoin. You could assume their objective is to destroy Bitcoin because it undermines their money printer. The reality is that the FIC have multiple disruptions in play & command multiple participants with stakes on either side. No matter what happens they benefit because they have hedged the outcome. Socialize the losses, privatise the profit. Bitcoin then becomes a great tool for extracting & laundering value. It's no longer seen as a threat to their fiat system because they have figured out a way to use it. It shifts your thinking in predicting outcomes when you better understand the incentives & participants at play in the game.

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