Gordon Brown Redux? UK Reportedly Mulls Sale of 5B Pounds in Bitcoin

Led at the time by Gordon Brown, the U.K.’s Treasury in the period from 1999-2002 famously sold about half of the country’s gold reserves at what turned out to be a generational bottom of roughly $275 per ounce for the yellow metal.

In a bit more than two decades since, the price of gold has risen roughly 12-fold to its current $3,350 per ounce, the U.K. thus missing out on a substantial windfall.

Is the sceptered isle about to repeat that mistake?

Facing the need to come up with as much as 20 billion pounds ($27 billion) this year to narrow the government budget gap, Rachel Reeves — the country’s current Chancellor of the Exchequer — is eyeing the sale of what might be 5 billion pounds or more in seized bitcoin

, according to a weekend article in The Telegraph.

While it’s uncertain how much bitcoin the government controls, the Telegraph report noted one raid in 2018 recovered 61,000 Bitcoin from the proceeds of a Chinese Ponzi scheme. At the current price of roughly 90,000 pounds, that would be worth more than 5 billion pounds.

Differences between the Brown gold sale and the current possible bitcoin sale abound. Most importantly is the stage of the cycle. Bitcoin might go way up, way down, or remain flat from here, but — ahead 75% year-over-year and more than 1,000% over the past five years — the price is at anything but a generational bottom the way gold was at the turn of the century.