The United States’ national debt has passed $30 trillion — and even all the Bitcoin (BTC) in the world would hardly touch it.
According to the latest official statistics, U.S. national debt is at levels never seen before, passing the psychological $30-trillion barrier for the first time this week.
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Bitcoin is worth less than 3% of U.S. national debt
After two years of liquidity injections fuelled by issuing even more debt, the Federal Reserve is attempting to rein in what has become a practically incomprehensibly large debt burden.
$30 trillion — $30,000,000,000 — is a number so vast that it makes even the entire cryptocurrency market cap look like a drop in the ocean.
Looking at Bitcoin specifically, with a market capitalization of $731 billion, it is 2.43% of the national debt tally.
As such, even if the U.S. were to purchase all the BTC in circulation, it would still only pay off that tiny fraction of its debt.
The sheer size of the total did not go unnoticed by Bitcoin proponents, who discussed the topic in earnest on social media.
“As the debt spiral grows, the purchasing power of the Dollar will continue to be sacrificed for political interests and Wall Street bailouts,” on-chain analyst Dylan LeClair summarized.
“Bitcoin fixes this.”
Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, meanwhile, highlighted the self-created demand for U.S. debt, even as the dollar hemorrhages value.
“Genius design of the international dollar system over the decades (1944, 1973, etc) to prolong market interest and need for US debt even as it gets clearly discredited,” he wrote.
The Fed balance sheet, meanwhile, now stands at $8.86 trillion, a new all-time high of its own.
$40 trillion in three years?
In a rare point of agreement, gold bug Peter Schiff, meanwhile, delivered a grim forecast for the overall debt trend.
Related: Inflationary winds from around the world spell a sea change for Bitcoin
Despite the Fed’s alleged commitments to reducing the balance sheet, Schiff believes that the $40-trillion mark for total debt will have arrived by 2025.
His son, Spencer Schiff, popular for his pro-Bitcoin stance, noted that the journey from $20 trillion to $30 trillion had taken less than five years.
Cointelegraph has reported extensively on the benefits of Bitcoin’s hard supply cap and fixed issuance, both of which ensure that it stays “hard” money — and possibly the “hardest” money ever created.
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