Let's conduct a thought experiment.
Written by: Liu Jiaolian
Overnight, BTC's pullback pierced the 5-day moving average at 96.8k, briefly dropping below 96k before rebounding, and this morning it returned to the 5-day moving average at 97.4k. It seems like a carefully designed hunting operation aimed at liquidating the long leverage positioned below 96k.
Today, let's talk about the United States' plan to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR).
In fact, the idea of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin was first proposed by little Kennedy during his speech at the Bitcoin2024 conference in July this year. In the article on July 27, 2024, titled "Bitcoin Will Enter the Era of National Reserves", Jiaolian recorded that little Kennedy said if he were elected president, he would sign an executive order for the U.S. Treasury to purchase 550 BTC daily until accumulating a reserve of 4 million BTC, thereby establishing a dominant position that other countries cannot usurp.
The next day, Trump attended the conference and expressed similar views. For specifics, you can refer to Jiaolian's article on July 28, 2024, titled "Trump: Bitcoin Will Surpass Gold, the U.S. Must Retain 100% as a National Strategic Reserve".
Later, Trump was indeed elected. Due to his supportive stance on the development of the crypto industry, the market began to price this in. The price of BTC soared from around 70k on election day to nearly 100k in just about 20 days.
Many who couldn't understand began to speculate, saying that BTC was created by Americans to harvest from others, and that the U.S. establishing a BTC strategic reserve was a continuation of financial warfare, and so on. These bloggers really don't study properly. Jiaolian doubts whether they have read the Bitcoin open-source code in its entirety or seriously learned and understood how the Bitcoin system works, or if they are just relying on hearsay, combined with their own imaginations, to fabricate a bunch of seemingly plausible statements, using a tone of intimidation to provoke their fans' emotions and secondary dissemination, thus harvesting a wave of traffic. After all, they don't really care about what BTC is—they don't hold any positions—but they do have an interest in using emotional language to depict a horrifying story, stimulating the audience's amygdala to perceive fear and threat, prompting them to share, which generates traffic revenue for them.
If they understood a little bit of computer technology, they would know that Bitcoin's code is open-source. Anyone can download and review every line of code. Satoshi Nakamoto could not possibly hide any backdoors. The eyes of the public are sharp. Anyone can make any modifications to the code. The difficult part is, why would others use the code you modified? If you cannot convince the thousands of computer nodes scattered around the world to use your code, then what you modified is meaningless. This is called public consensus.
The public consensus of Bitcoin is entirely based on the principle of voluntariness.
Rousseau and Hobbes believed that entities like the state are established through voluntary contracts among people. In fact, this is not the case. From a materialist historical perspective, the state is an evolutionary product of violence imposed from above. Is there anyone who is born with a contract signed with the state? No. Every infant passively or forcibly accepts the established construction of the state. There is no individual will, no selection process, and even no options.
Voluntarily accepting BTC is akin to a person being reborn. This time, it transcends state construction, representing an internationalist global human consensus, a consensus established voluntarily.
No one is forced to step through the door of BTC. No one can force anyone. I cannot force. You cannot force. The U.S. cannot force.
Even a powerful entity like the U.S. can hardly change the code rules to plunder other BTC holders, for example, by granting itself the power to issue BTC. First, it must have the ability to compel thousands of nodes worldwide to accept its modified new code. Moreover, it must also have the ability to make hundreds of millions of holders around the world accept its tampered new BTC.
Therefore, even the U.S. government must adhere to the constraint of the total supply of BTC being capped at 21 million. If it wants to establish a national strategic reserve, it can only honestly purchase the BTC it wants to reserve from the market, from others, at a fair and reasonable price.
If the U.S. government unilaterally modifies the code and issues more BTC, then the vast majority of people worldwide who oppose this issuance can unite to run a version of BTC without excess issuance based on Satoshi's original code, refusing to run or acknowledge the tampered excess BTC, leaving the U.S. government with no recourse.
Some say that the U.S. establishing a BTC national strategic reserve to repay its national debt sounds like a fantasy, too far-fetched. They may not have understood history. Even more outlandish and "unreliable" ideas have been proposed before.
During the U.S. debt ceiling crisis in 2011, someone suggested that the U.S. Treasury could mint a platinum coin with a face value of 1 trillion dollars to pay off part of the high national debt, thus creating new borrowing space to continue borrowing and spending.
Well, it’s not bad; that’s actually a "genius" idea!
Legally, according to Title 31, Section 5112 of the U.S. Code, the U.S. Treasury has the authority to mint platinum coins, and there is no limit on their face value. This law was originally designed for commemorative coin programs but does not restrict the maximum face value of platinum coins. This "loophole" in the law makes the above idea a theoretical possibility to bypass the debt ceiling.
Financially, so-called assets, debts, and values are merely numbers on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. Financially, it only needs to maintain that total assets equal total liabilities. As for the value of total assets, that is entirely artificially determined.
For example, Jiaolian once analyzed the Federal Reserve's balance sheet in the article on December 10, 2023, titled "The 'Truth' of the Federal Reserve". Regarding the asset item of gold, Jiaolian conducted detailed calculations in the article on November 14, 2023, titled "How Much Gold Does the U.S. Actually Hold?". After calculations, we found that the Federal Reserve's on-balance sheet gold reserves amount to 261 million troy ounces, or 8133 tons. However, the Federal Reserve does not calculate the value of this gold at market price but uses the value recorded in 31 USC § 5116-5117, which is 42.2222 per troy ounce for bookkeeping.
If this gold were calculated at the current gold price of about 2700 dollars, its total value would reach approximately 700 billion dollars.
Dear readers may wonder why the Federal Reserve artificially suppresses the value of gold through accounting methods. This is a long and distant discussion. Looking back at the related articles written by Jiaolian, I believe all readers can arrive at their own conclusions.
Jiaolian cited the example of the artificially priced gold on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet merely to illustrate that recording a platinum coin with a face value of 1 trillion dollars on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is entirely capable of being accounted for as an increase of 1 trillion dollars in assets.
This could eliminate the 1 trillion dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, which are also on the asset side of the balance sheet.
Currently, the scale of U.S. national debt has just exceeded 36 trillion dollars. With a little effort, creating 36 such platinum coins with a face value of 1 trillion dollars each could completely offset all U.S. debt!
Legal (U.S. Code). Compliant (accounting standards).
But is it reasonable? Clearly, it is not reasonable.
The value of accounting currency, such as the current dollar, does not lie in that piece of paper or that number, but entirely depends on what assets are behind it in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and whether those assets can support the currency's value.
From the establishment of the Bretton Woods system until the Nixon shock in 1971, the world recognized the dollar, which was anchored to gold behind it.
Since 1971 until now, the world recognizes the dollar, which is backed by U.S. debt. Recognizing U.S. debt essentially means recognizing the national strength of the United States.
If we were to replace 36 trillion dollars of U.S. debt with 36 platinum coins with a face value of 1 trillion dollars each, would the world automatically recognize the value of these 36 coins? If the world cannot recognize the value of these 36 coins, then the value of the dollar would collapse, and the dollar would become worthless.
Therefore, it is evident that the idea of artificially designating the face value of platinum coins is not feasible.
However, what if we changed the platinum coins to BTC, which has global consensus, is algorithmically generated, and is spontaneously priced by the market? Suddenly, this seemingly far-fetched idea becomes somewhat operational.
Let's conduct a thought experiment.
Assume that the U.S. Treasury first borrows some debt to redeem gold that is undervalued by 50 times. Since it is undervalued by 50 times, it would only cost about 14 billion U.S. dollars. Then, it could be quickly exchanged in the market for BTC at 50 times the market price. Assuming that over-the-counter bulk trading does not affect market prices, BTC is calculated at 100,000 U.S. dollars. Therefore, this gold, valued at 700 billion U.S. dollars, could be exchanged for approximately 7 million BTC.
As BTC continues to be hoarded, the marginal price is increasing, and the price of these 7 million BTC is also rising. When BTC increases by 50 times, from 100,000 U.S. dollars to 5 million U.S. dollars, the market value of the 7 million BTC redeemed by the Treasury would grow to 35 trillion U.S. dollars. This is almost equal to the current scale of U.S. debt.
By placing 7 million BTC, with a market value of 35 trillion U.S. dollars, on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, it could correspondingly eliminate 35 trillion U.S. dollars of national debt while keeping the balance sheet balanced.
Since the value of BTC as an asset is globally recognized and its price is determined by the market, the U.S. dollars corresponding to these BTC assets on the liability side would also receive support from global consensus.
Asset prices are marginally priced. For example, if your community has 10,000 houses, and usually only 1-2 houses are sold, if their transaction price is 10 million each, then the total market value of all the houses in the community as assets would be 10,000 multiplied by 10 million, equaling 100 billion. This does not mean that there is actually 100 billion U.S. dollars available to buy all the houses; it is just that the pricing is based on the occasional transactions of those 1-2 houses. This is called marginal pricing.
As long as the Federal Reserve holds these BTC without selling, keeping the circulating BTC in the market relatively scarce, the price of marginally transacted BTC is likely to be maintained at a relatively high level. As long as this marginal price can be sustained, the total market value of the BTC assets on the Federal Reserve's balance sheet can be calculated by multiplying the hoarded quantity by the marginal price.
This is the hypothetical model of replacing gold reserves with BTC, completing the transition of the dollar's anchor from U.S. debt to BTC.
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