USA lost $16 billion because they sold their Bitcoin stash prematurely, says David Sacks
Last Updated on 10 March 2025 by CryptoTips.eu
David Sacks, the Trump administration’s so-called “crypto czar,” claims that the United States lost some $16 billion by selling its Bitcoins too early under the previous administration, aka Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. That’s easy to claim in hindsight, of course, but given what happened to Germany, he could be right.
Germany
Last summer, the German government of Olaf Scholz came under fire from crypto fans worldwide because they sold so many Bitcoins. As many young Germans are fans of crypto and Scholz desperately needed their votes at that time, the German government decided to respond to the criticism. Their explanation was the following: in January 2024, the German police arrested the people behind the illegal movie website Movie2k.to.
Suppose you can’t or don’t want to pay for a streaming service, you used to be able to go to some illegal website in Germany and watch movies there. That apparently yielded quite a bit of money because Germany seized $3 billion worth of Bitcoins when it closed that website. The German government waited until the second half of 2024 to sell those Bitcoins, or until the maximum legally allowed period according to their legislation. That meant that the Germans sold their Bitcoins for an average price of $60,000. A pretty stupid move you might think if you look at the price of Bitcoin now. They should just have changed their legislation of course.
United States
Meanwhile, the United States is still the country with the largest Bitcoin ‘stash’ among the world’s countries, but according to David Sacks, that ‘stash’ should have been much larger. He claims that the Biden administration’s sale of part of its Bitcoin reserve in 2022 and 2023, when Bitcoin was trading at a price of $35,000, was simply a wrong decision.
“At one point in time, we had about 400,000 bitcoin on the federal balance sheet. We sold roughly half of that for something like $360 million total,” Sacks said. “If we had held all of that, just that the portion we sold would be worth over $17 billion.”
“So we made this mistake of prematurely selling bitcoin when we should have held it,” Sacks added. “We don’t want to make that mistake with regard to the rest of it.”
