The U.S. government appears to be very anti crypto as of late. Everywhere you look, regulators in the Biden administration are doing what appears to be all they can to ensure bitcoin and crypto don’t have futures in America. The U.S. Government and Bitcoin… It’s Complicated! The SEC, for example, is suing or criminally charging every single digital currency company it can, while Biden is looking to initiate an Obama-era policy that will potentially shut all crypto firms out of the traditional finance fray. Thus, it seems like the U.S. government wouldn’t hold much bitcoin and it wouldn’t be keeping a private bitcoin stash somewhere… Right? Wrong. As it turns out, the U.S. government has more than billion in bitcoin secretly hocked away. It’s all illicit
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Nick Marinoff considers the following as important: Bitcoin News, Morgan Creek, News, U.S. government
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The U.S. government appears to be very anti crypto as of late. Everywhere you look, regulators in the Biden administration are doing what appears to be all they can to ensure bitcoin and crypto don’t have futures in America.
The U.S. Government and Bitcoin… It’s Complicated!
The SEC, for example, is suing or criminally charging every single digital currency company it can, while Biden is looking to initiate an Obama-era policy that will potentially shut all crypto firms out of the traditional finance fray. Thus, it seems like the U.S. government wouldn’t hold much bitcoin and it wouldn’t be keeping a private bitcoin stash somewhere… Right?
Wrong. As it turns out, the U.S. government has more than $5 billion in bitcoin secretly hocked away. It’s all illicit bitcoin that representatives have gathered following various seizures over the years, and for one reason or another, they’ve been reluctant to get rid of it or sell it. Why?
Perhaps one reason is because they know inflation (which they’re responsible for) is a major issue in the country. They know the dollar is flailing, and they want to have bitcoin as a “backup plan” of sorts because they’re worried about what the prospects of traditional finance are. In many ways, the U.S. government has likely come to see bitcoin as the “safe haven” so many others view it as.
Right now, it’s estimated the U.S. Treasury has more than 207,000 individual bitcoin units stored away somewhere. The money has been garnered over the course of several years through several events, a big one being a Justice Department seizure of more than $1 billion in BTC in 2020. A doctoral thesis written by Sachin Jaitly, a general partner at investment advisory firm Morgan Creek Capital, states the following:
By matching publicly available information through the media and blockchain, Elementus is able to map out the universe of sovereign digital wallets and maintain this map over time.
Elementus is the blockchain startup Morgan Creek is working with to track the history of the U.S.’s bitcoin collecting habits. CEO Max Galka was also quick to throw his two cents in. He commented that the company has, thus far, recorded at least 11 world governments that are holding bitcoin. He said:
All of that bitcoin is held by those government agencies, but that does not mean that that is the only bitcoin that is held by those governments, nor that other governments are not using bitcoin.
What Other Entities Hold BTC?
Jaitly concluded with:
As money supply was increasing, and as fear of inflation was increasing, bitcoin adoption on a sovereign level was also increasing, and so there was a relationship that was statistically significant.
They have also worked to gather information for North Korea, but that data has proven largely unobtainable.