The U.S. Treasury still values its gold reserves at $42.22 per ounce on the books, even though gold trades around $3,000 today. That 7,000% gap represents a trillion-dollar unrealized profit the government could theoretically use to buy Bitcoin.
Let me take you back to August 15th, 1971, with President Richard Nixon walking into a press conference and announcing that the United States will no longer convert— listen— foreign-held dollars into gold. That moment is called the Nixon Shock. You've probably heard of it before, and it pretty much ended the Bretton Woods system. It ended what we call the gold standard, okay? All dollars actually used to be tied to gold itself to retain value, okay? This is important. And for the first time in modern history, the value of the dollar was backed by nothing but the faith and confidence of the United States. And that was 55 years ago. 2 years later, in 1973, The Treasury Department officially fixed the price of gold certificates in the federal accounting books at $42.22 per ounce. That's the price that they pretty much locked in ever since. The actual market price of gold today is like $3,000 per ounce. You've probably seen those guys on like, uh, the Diamond District always selling their watches for gold. It's— gold's very expensive and actually recently gone up a lot, right? So if they locked in the price at $42.22 and it's worth $3,000, you need to sit on what I'm saying. The official accounting price of gold is $42, and that's $3,000— that's profit. The gap is actually over 7,000%. And this matters because you need to, like, you need to understand Bitcoin can actually be used Right, they use the profit to purchase Bitcoin in this scenario. So obviously the big profit means big liquidity for crypto.
