Bitcoin Forum

I know it's impractical and can't be done within probably even a day nor a week, but what would happen if someone very rich would like to spend ~1 billion on bitcoins and buy it all?

At first glance looks like it would be the end. Thinking a bit more it suggests that the later bitcoins would be so expensive that even he couldn't afford it, but he would have so much that could make a huge profit out of it.

If there's someone more literate than me in economics, I'd love a detailed and argumented response.

I think someone with $billion + would be smart enough to realize that they would either go broke in the process. Current market cap is around $1.4billion. By the time evil Bill Gates finished buying the last bitcoin, he would have spent some $100billion+.

It is simply not possible to buy it all even with an infinite amount of money.  The simple reason is that not all bitcoins are for sale.  Currently, the only ones that can be purchased are on the exchanges.  If someone spent a large amount of money on the exchange, the exchange rate would rise and this would probably lead to other coins being available on the exchange, but it would never lead to all the coins being available on the exchange. 

I love these questions. ...

Well, I'm pretty curious myself..

What if Bill decides to buy all 'reasonable' sell offers on the large exchanges, continuously, until all his money is spent?

What would this do to the BTC price? How much would it end up at when bill has spent all of his ~60 billion usd? How much bitcoins would Bill then have?

It's impossible, obviously, to exactly predict these numbers... but can someone smart make some educated guesses? I'm very curious :)

If you look at mtgoxlive.com you can make an estimate,  however,  that's a dynamic picture of bids and asks. The higher the price goes, the more to the right everything will go.

If he bought most of the coins in existence, the remaining ones would be priced extraordinarily high just because those people know he is willing to pay top dollar for them.

It would certainly raise the price.  ;D

More people would decide to sell their hoard of BTC as the price rises. 

There would be less BTC to spread around to new people that want BTC.  So BTC will start being sold in smaller increments. 

I am all for it. Anyone know a billionaire looking to invest?  ;)

You can't buy them all. They won't all exist until a hundred years in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVp-zIONsrs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVp-zIONsrs)



if someone started to buy up all the btc in the world, if they did it fast enough, could create their own bubble, a huge increase in price followed by an equally huge crash, and then months if not years of stabilization.

if they did it slow, they would gradually increase the price, which could in theory bring in more vendors wishing to sell their products for this new and lucrative commodity/currency. however, most likely the bitcoin economy would not be able to support that kind of growth, and you would get another collapse.

i think ideally, if you wanted a billionaire to voluntarily buy enough btc to make most current holders rich, it would have to be incredibly slow, or wait until there is much much much more liquidity.

If someone incredibly wealthy decided "I want all (or most) of this new digital commodity", three things would happen:

- The price would rocket up in a massive bubble. 

- I would sell all of my bitcoins for evil nasty fiat currency and pay off my house, set up my family for life.  No need to work again.  Travel the world.

- No one would want to buy the hoarded bitcoins, because the greatest fool had just bought all of them.  It's trivial to set up another bitcoin chain for those that want to transfer value outside of the banking system, and the billionaire would find no one to buy bitcoins from him or her.

Then everyone who picked a high price to "sell", will get a lot, while everyone who has prices listed for a low price, will get a lot less.

Everyone still holding shares, (Unlisted on any selling market), will be subject to the price-fix of that person who purchased them.

Everyone who is listed as wanting to buy for less than that price set now, will simply raise the "willing to buy" or "bid" price, higher to match the charts super-high new value, as the purchase of coins is made.

EG, to buy 1 BTC, it costs you about $120... but to buy 1000 BTC, it may cost you $160 per BTC. (Because not everyone is listed with an ASK price of $120, just the last person who sold one, was at $120 per BTC.)

Now, to buy 1,000,000 BTC, would cost you $350 per BTC, because the majority has listed a price above that value. SO the chart will show the new price of about $500, since the AVERAGE of that whole purchase was $350, but the HIGHEST price paid for one of those coins was $500, which was neutralized by a purchase of $120...

Thus, the FALSE value will be listed as $500, while the actual "purchased value" was only $300. And the market will sharply fall back down to $300, at-least, but realistically return back to $120, if that is what the true value is, for the remaining majority.

It is the opposite if you sell... The more you sell-out, the more the chart drops to a false price. Causing it to swing back up slowly, as new listings begin to roll-in to that false-price level.

Since there is no way just to "buy all the Bitcoin" all at once, this would occur during the attempt to buy it all up, probably discouraging the billionaire from continuing on a course of action that would increasingly obviously be extremely foolish.

That is why you NEVER pay attention to a "few rare sales", which is what determines what you see on any chart like this. You pay attention to a "rolling average", and a "low-price graph", which shows you the real average potential.

To get YOUR potential in any market, you have to constantly get quotes for X-volume, and make your own charts.

Eg, if you have to sell in chunks of 10,000BTC, you need charts that show you the price for those who are buying chunks of 10,000BTC. (Or a rolling chart that has 10,000BTC in the rolling avg.)

Those charts do NOT look like the 1BTC charts we see here. Actually, these charts are more like 0.01BTC value charts. Which is why they look so jumpy.

There is also no separation of "Buy" and "sell"... they are both being used to display the same chart. If you overlay the buy chart over the sell chart, you see a "spread" or "Gap", and less jumping up and down as the chart tries to draw... buy, buy, buy, sell, buy, sell, sell, sell, buy....

This is sort-of what is going to happen with all the ASIC's coming out...

They are going to earn all of our coins (taking the percentage of coins we earn by reducing the power we are mining with as a percentage), and TRY to cash them all in, as fast as possible. LOL, all exchanges already set limits in place to stop them from destroying the value of the market too fast... Because without a flowing market, the exchanges don't make money.

This will drive the PRICE CHART down, which will COST THOSE CASHING IN, a major loss. EG, They will cash-in all the low prices, which will make them get lower and lower and lower... eventually causing them to have to cash-in more, to get the same money, which they are easily mining from us, and they will take that loss, because they can afford it.

Until they can't afford it, or are unwilling to keep selling them for half-price. Thus, they will have to hold-on to them, until the market rises again, and then cash out again...

It will become a long drawn-out process. The smart ones will only cash-out in a steady and small stream. Letting the listings get listed higher, which takes time. Thus, all these coins they have, will take them 20 years to cash-in, to get this high price. Not one month, like they are estimating.

By then, we will all have moved on, because it will be only a few dozen people mining, and they will not have anyone willing to pay them the high prices for the easy coins they stole from us. (Us who have worked hard to get the coins we have now, and will be pushed out by ASICs in the next few months.)

We take our value and coins with us... to scrypt coins, that they can not mine. Thus, to get our money, they have to use BTC to buy alt-coins, then cash-out... again, at that point, we will not want BTC, so it won't matter. The price for BTC will continue to drop, while alt-coins continue to rise.

Best thing to do is cash-out now, while the coins still have value, and the ASIC miners have not had a chance to take all those high bids from the charts before you get to them.

But what keeps it stabilized after the crash? If they had huge sums of money, they could rise the price again almost immediately. The current USD amount of the entire bitcoin money supply is roughly the same as the amount of fresh money pouring out of a spigot into the FED's balance sheet every 10 hours (rough guess).

Like this could happen instead maybe:
Buy, buy, buy until they have a whole shitbox full of bitcoins, like way more than enough to move the market in a big way. It gets to the point to where the price is huge and everybody is giddy and nervous like you say, a bubble. Then they spout FUD and place huge sell orders at low asks, not with all their coins, but just enough to make the bubble pop. Then they immediately start all over again at the bottom, but they start out with more bitcoins than last time. If they did this repeatedly, people would get all annoyed and lose faith, and they could maybe get the vast majority of bitcoins.

someone buying $1B of btc would double the current price back to $260 or so and it would probably run a little higher than that

so... lets find a billionaire to do that

people like to say bitcoin is a friction less economy.  But it's not.  a billionaire buying and selling still has to pay transaction fees and day traders who trade correctly are really going to make them pay dearly to move the price. eventually they run out of money or give up. additionally,  if they were successful at destroying bitcoin then everyone moves to another cryptocurrency and we stay over until the billionaire runs out of money or gives up.  It's only a matter of time before bad actors lose and the free market wins.

It would be hard just to get a million or two.

You only need 16M on gox to rise the price to $260 right now  ;)

This has bee discussed before.

1) you go bankrupt as did the Hunt brothers - in there attempt to monopolise silver. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt

2) an amazing feature of Bitcoin not often discussed is if you have them all they become worthless.

So in conclusion even if you think you have the means you don't, and if you were successful you have gained nothing.

Price would be driven up too fast, impossible to buy a large % of all bitcoins in my opinion. Most people never want to go back to fiat.

i would think bitcoins value would drop like a rock.... as the bitcoin economy would fail, thus ending the demand for bitcoin.. a possbale replacment might pop up.

unless there was something vary importaint you could only get with bitcoins.. causing the price to be high as people would be willing to pay almost anything for it.

thats what i suspect

Price would first skyrocket, bringing out coins from cold wallets. Then as the rich guy had basically all BTC, everybody else would loose interest and switch to another crypto.

There has to be a distribution of BTC's for them to have any use and value.

agreed

Yep, it's really this simple. And most likely you don't even need all of them to do that. If you get like 75% of them, it means lots of people would've sold all they had and what Malawi said happens.

wouldn't it be possible to detect if one entity was buying them all? If it looked as if that were happening people would stop selling altogether.

What's the difference between one persion buying 75% of all the btc, and 75% of all btc being lost or destroyed?

Never underestimate the power of greed.

Someone's buying a lot -> prices go up -> people will sell their pants off.

A lot or not much. Depends on the scenarios.

well at least if someone buys it its proably more easy to get it back out in the system

If someone bought 75% of all btc, if the utility of btc still exceeded that of other cryptocurrencies, then the remaining resources used to acquire btc would then be divvied up among the remaining coins, wouldnt it?

why would a theoretically infinitely divisible currency be less valuable, less useful, if you had to use satoshis rather than millis, or millis rather than full btc's?  (assuming the majority holder wasnt intentionally destabilizing the currency)

i think this question is practically the same as 'what if 75% of all btc were destroyed?'

you would move the decimal and get on with your day

Many people won't let go of their coins for less than $10,000 each. If the price is rising 100% per month, they may even increase this threshold to $100,000 or $500,000. Thus, the new market cap becomes $5 trillion instead of $1 billion.

It's not the same, an owner of 75% might chenge his mind and sell it all at once. Lost coins cannot be sold.

If one guy tries to buy 100 billion USD worth of bitcoin, the following happens:

1. The exchange price will shot up quickly until he exhausted all his USD, if he is lucky enough, he might get about 10% of all the coins, and one coin might worth 1 million + USD
2. The bitcoin economy will boom and generate many billionares in the mean time
3. Bitcoin get worldwide acceptance and become the de facto world currency reserve

Considering that FED is printing 85 billion USD per month, 100 billion USD is really nothing for those money printers, it's just a matter of their interest, and I believe they will be interested in it sooner or later

The only way to acquire a large amount of bitcoin without sending the price to moon is quietly buy it during a long time period, like twins did last year, but now when price has settled at this level, even if someone want to buy 1% of coin, the exchange price will at least double

They didn't go bankrupt "because they tried to monopolise silver", they went bankrupt because COMEX changed the rules of the game.

You don't buy *all* the bitcoin, you would just buy enough of it.

You are the US govt. You have infinite money. You buy anything below market price, and put it back up for sale at some percentage higher. The market will trened higher, and you will gradually accumulate bitcoin all of which was bougth for less then the market price.

The more you own the more scarce a commodity it becomes and this is what will support the price. You do it throughout the inflationary period of bitcoin. At which point bitcoin has replaced dollar, you as the govt own most of it, all the while you have also been cornering the block chain by ramping up govt controlled cpu power. You then set your miners to ignore zero fee / low fee, thus effectively enforcing a minimum price for transactions that have any need to go through quickly. Now you are taxing the world. Welcome to The New New Order!

Why does anyone think that this is not already happening?

The defense is slow and continuous selling from the large holders and exchange for real assets such as gold/silver/property/asic miners/means of production.
This is already happening now, and more Bitcoin enter the market from the miners.  It is a wise design with much safety built in.

It becomes very expensive to kill one of these crypto-currencies, and a new one can start.
Try putting the cat back in the bag.

I'd agree your plot is feasible, but as NewLiberty put it, the cat is out the bag.

I see Bitcoin as voluntary, you are not coerced into using it, (maybe you are if Fiat is collapsing - and that is part of your plan) 

So given the voluntary nature, why not switch to a new crypto currency and avoid the monopolistic tax, or even carry on under a different fork? (problematic for obvious reasons and not inviting an answer to the forking idea)   

Why would someone throw away their money crashing a market when they can just pay the government to shut it down?

Ok, then we'd let them buy them all and using all the money we get from that, we all switch to ppcoin which implements proof of share alongside proof of work.

What happens when some super rich buys all the land and houses in a country?
(Considering the government does not cooperate with this rich one, that means only way of buying is voluntary exchange and not for example state tolerated blackmailing, bribing authority and police, usage of force, etc.)

Bingo. Thats the last piece. I've always thought that this right here is why bitcoin will stay around. Once you have enough coins and own a lot of mining power your ready. Then you sell items exclusively for bitcoin. Lets say its the future and 1BTC equals $100,000. You sell your amazing product at a 5% discount to cash in bitcoin instead. So even after the exchange rate your customers still feel like their money is going further. They all now are forced to know how to use bitcoin and they now all have a wallet.

Say you can buy the next generation neural net virtual reality on pre-order, but only using bitcoin. The system you want is valued at $10,000. You can only pay with bitcoin. But it sells for 0.095BTC which only cost you $9,500 in cash to get. You can scale this as the price of bitcoin goes through the roof with people trying to buy to make a purchase. With each generation of product you make the price in bitcoin a little less, encouraging people to hold knowing that the value will rise due to a guaranteed demand for coins. The people holding only drive the price higher. And the pre-order sales keep driving the coins right back into your pocket. Eventually you get most of the coins and you can set the price because you are the one selling most of them. You sell them back to your customers through exchanges and they trade them right back to you for a product.

This would keep people valuing bitcoin at insanely high levels. If you had multiple products that people would do anything to pre-order your set. Think if apple only offered its next i-pad 3D and i-phone hologram (or whatever the new tech is) for customers paying with bitcoins...seriously. Once someone starts doing something like this to pump the value of bitcoin its going to the moon. But what if they did this with a bitcoin spin off that is exactly the same as bitcoin, but not our bitcoin. What would that do to the value of bitcoin? Crypto coins have some amazing potential for manipulation once people start to throw some real money behind them.

This might work... If you can achieve and maintain "amazing product" monopoly on free market. But I do not think that real monopoly is possible without state cooperation.

You won't need a monopoly at all. In fact, you usually just have to be the first to market with a cool gadget. Or be a company where people will buy your products because they have an edge. Like apple. Wait untill 3d holograms or virtual reality systems are perfected. The first to market with a good working system could take billions of dollars in pre sales alone. These will be big ticket items that everyone will want in their homes.

This has already happened.


Bitcoins are only actually worth about a penny each, but an investor came along and started buying them up slowly driving them up slowly until they were above 100 dollars.

Now he has stopped and the price has just stagnated and people are looking at each other, wondering what to do. And wondering why many of them spent $100+ on a coin that doesn't actually exist.

I think the better question is "What if someone rich sells it all (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=216386.msg2334269#msg2334269)?"

Yes, it has happened already with Avalon and ASIC miner, and both those companys are at the top of the game that I mentioned earlier. You must use bitcoins to buy millions of dollars worth of Avalon chips and ASIC miner blades/shares. They then hold to inflate the value even more.

I don't agree with you on your position that bitcoin is worth a penny and does not exist. If each bitcoin is worth even a penny then it exists. The program is what exists and it has value. I know you can't touch it but its there.  ;) Without going off into detail let me just say that bitcoin is worth more than you think in the short term. Long term? Who knows.

the ones who are saving wont sell it. . .

and i mean saving - NOT hoarding.