Exactly 90 years ago, the US government confiscated all gold from its citizens.

In that time gold was the de facto currency of the US. There were dollar bills already, but these were 100% backed by gold, i.e. sound money.

Executive order 6102 signed by Roosevelt forbade "the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States". People had less than a month to exchange all of their gold coins and such to the Federal Reserve, which isn't federal and doesn't have any reserves. There was a 10k USD fine (around 220k-ish today) and the possibility of spending 10 years in prison. The excuse for that was that people were not spending enough gold-backed money and were therefore contributing to the Great Depression.

Source: Wikipedia

The true reason behind it, though, was very simple: the Federal Reserve had almost reached its limit on how much paper money they could print. Since everything was backed by gold, they could only print according to the amount of gold in the banks' vaults. A year later, another bill/decree/order was issued to devalue the USD when compared to gold, making the printers go brrrrr even more. Since then, it has been a shitshow, and the US dollar lost more than 95% of its value since the creation of the Federal Reserve:

https://preview.redd.it/alevv5ua42sa1.png?1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=6edb924262740ac6adff971ccf253c1049b59dee

The total amount of gold confiscated due to Executive Order 6102 in 1933 was 2,665 metric tonnes of gold. Today, the equivalent price would be over $100 billion in fiat Federal Reserve Notes using the recent spot gold price of $1,900.

The story of money has its ups and down, but we all know that since we left the gold standard and since the Federal Reserve came into existence, peoples' money was increasingly debased and devalued. Whenever I get these historical data/facts, I'm always thankful for Bitcoin. This is the first time in modern history that we have something they can't control or print. Even though they're looking for regulations and such, Bitcoin can't be stopped now, as these days are long gone. They can't confiscate it; there's no sly, roundabout way of printing more of it and, in terms of inflation-hedge and trust, I'm definitely a Bitcoin maxi. I'm not saying other projects aren't promising nor am I saying that nice tech can't exist in other chains, though, but I do sleep sounder having most of my portfolio on BTC.

The key message here is: As some internet sayings go, they can only control us because we use their currency, and the same people that are $30T in debt are giving you a credit score. Stack sats.