Bitcoiners retell Executive Order 6102 as the case for their kind of money. In 1933 and 1934 the US government pulled both levers a state has over money: it collected the gold, then redefined the dollar against it. Between April 1933 and January 1934 it raised gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35, and first made sure it owned the gold, so the order of the steps decided who got the 69 percent gain. The Federal Reserve's own history of the program lays them out [1]:
- Collect at the old price. Executive Order 6102, in April 1933, ordered Americans to deliver their gold coin, bullion and gold certificates by May 1, on penalty of up to a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison, and paid "an equivalent amount" of other currency: $20.67 an ounce, the dollar's legal definition since 1900 [2]. From October the government also bought gold at rising prices, pushing the dollar down.
- Take title. The Gold Reserve Act, signed January 30, 1934, vested all monetary gold in the Treasury, including the gold the Federal Reserve banks held, paid for with dollar credits while the dollar still meant $20.67.
- Redefine. The next afternoon, Proclamation 2072 cut the gold dollar to 59.06 percent of its old weight. The Treasury now bought gold at $35.
Whoever held the gold on January 31 took the gain, and by then that was the Treasury. The White House statement put "profit" in quotation marks and assigned $2 billion of it to a new Exchange Stabilization Fund, a Treasury account for trading gold and foreign currency; the rest went to the general fund [3]. Everyone who had complied, and everyone else holding dollars, now held money that bought 41 percent less gold.
Hence the two properties Bitcoiners want in money, one for each lever: nothing a state can collect, since coins are held as private keys, and nothing it can redefine, since the supply is fixed by the protocol. Economic historians credit the same move with speeding recovery: countries that left gold earlier recovered from the Depression faster [4]. Bitcoiners read it as the risk in any money a state can collect or redefine.
References
Roosevelt's Gold Program [link]
Richardson, G., Komai, A. and Gou, M., 2013. Federal Reserve History.Executive Order 6102—Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates [link]
Roosevelt, F. D., 1933.White House Statement on Proclamation 2072 [link]
Roosevelt, F. D., 1934.Exchange Rates and Economic Recovery in the 1930s [link]
Eichengreen, B. and Sachs, J., 1985. The Journal of Economic History, Vol 45(4), pp. 925–946. Cambridge University Press (CUP). DOI: 10.1017/s0022050700035178