Bitcoiners know that custody is everything;
- not your keys, not your coins
- possession is nine-tenths of the law
...it's also gold's major problem as money in the 21st century. It's physical; the shit's gotta move and/or be trustedly custodied.
Tett has a nice anecdote about asking to see the gold. FUCK OFF, the Fed officials said (OK, I'm paraphrasing).
A decade ago, I asked officials at the New York Federal Reserve if I could peek at their gold reserves. They refused point blank.
The reason? Fed officials have long taken pride in having the world’s biggest gold vault, dug 80ft down into Manhattan’s bedrock. But they prefer to keep it discreet, partly because many of the vault’s 507,000 bars belong to countries such as Germany and Italy. Silence was literally golden.
But now!
Now Italian and German leaders are musing about repatriating a bunch: Trump is bad, conditions unstable yada-yada.
Hence why those Manhattan gold vaults matter: if such crises do ever materialise, it is easy to imagine a scenario in which American leaders (at best) will insist on using that bullion as collateral for dollar swaps or (at worst) as a tool for political coercion.
Interesting times. Should have just bitcoin-ed, bro...
archive: https://archive.md/MeGPd