Previously, the United States government paid little attention to crypto and Bitcoin. In retrospect, if the administrations had little faith in Bitcoin, the current government would be talking about 17 billion gains from BTC. David Sacks brought this to light.
According to David Sacks’s research, the federal government sold 195,091.75 Bitcoin for proceeds of $366,493,104. This figure shows that there is a big difference between the money made from past sales and what it could be worth today, $17,598,200,000.
The gap, which is about $17,231,706,896, shows how much the US missed out on by selling Bitcoin when its price was low, especially in the beginning.
The price per Bitcoin has changed a lot. For example, early sales in 2014 and 2015 brought prices as low as $270 per Bitcoin, while later sales in 2021 and 2023 brought prices over $20,000 per Bitcoin. During Trump’s first term, BTC sales were still happening, meaning he, too, didn’t believe in Bitcoin as much as he does today.
Governments that have been selling off Bitcoin
When it comes to selling BTC, Germany is up there with the US. The German government has been selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin, especially last year. In July, Germany sold 50,000 BTC seized from the defunct piracy site Movie2K for $2.88 billion. This sale was executed at an average price of $57,600 per bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s price surged significantly, with Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election victory adding significant momentum. This caused the coin to reach new all-time highs of up to $109,000. If the government sold Bitcoin at a high of $100,000, it would have raked in about $5 billion. With the amount it received, that means it lost approximately $2 billion.
This shows governments’ carelessness with digital currency. However, some governments have completely adopted BTC. For instance, El Salvador currently has about 6,088 Bitcoin in its reserves, which are estimated at $558m.
In addition, Bhutan mines and owns about 11,000 BTC, valued at $1.1bn. CAR also adopted BTC as a legal tender, but it’s unclear how much the country has in its reserves.
Current government holdings of BTC
Despite the sell-offs, analysis shows that the United States still has about 200,000 BTC. This is more than any other country in the world and is worth about $16.7 billion.
Next in the order of economy is China. China has banned crypto trades because the government has had trouble keeping them under control. The Chinese government is making its own digital currency, which the National Bank of China will back.
China has about 194,000 Bitcoins, which are worth about $16.2 billion. These BTC were taken from Ponzi scam companies. According to Binance, the UK government has about 61 BTC that it took from foreign money laundering networks, which is about $5 million.
Ukraine holds about 1,200 BTC that people have donated, which is worth about $100 million. However, because Russia is still at war with Ukraine, it has not been able to do much. Finland can also speak as others are speaking about BTC. The country has about 890 BTC. This is worth about $74 million that was taken away during probes into drug trafficking.
Finally, India has about 450 BTC worth $37 million, which was taken during investigations into crypto fraud. One thing is common with all governments. They have acquired BTC through scam cases, not because they invested.Â
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