Bitcoin Forum

title says it all - you know, with the US Government "printing" $89b every month, they could buy every bitcoin on the market and quietly kill it off like Standard Oil did with the LA Tramway say ...

They already got a grubstake from SR ...

I hope they try  ;)

After that the community could band together and spend a few billions for the development of another currency  :P

Also, this wold end up in a nice wealth transfer from the US to other countrys  ;D

The first BTC they buy will be at current market price, the last one however might be a bit more expensive  ;)

Somebody mentioned this before on bitcointalk.
1) They just push prices to $1000 making everyone rich and we all just go on to LTC and wait for it to happen again.

2) No one in the government will agree to wasting billions of dollars to destroy a cryptocoin that isn't harming anyone.

It's because it's not harming innocents that the totalitarians want it destroyed.

I posted a similar question a few weeks back. The quick answer is it's not worth it for them.

Well, the price would be $10000 by then, I would be happy to sell it to them :)

It would be cheaper to buy billions worth of hardware and do a 51%+ attack. Then just use the purchased hardware to do the same thing to the most likely cryptocurrency to become the new bitcoin. Rinse and repeat.

If they tried buying all the BTC and scrapping it, miners would just keep mining and create some more, only with a ton less supply and a fan-fucking-tastic pricetag. All it'd do is make everybody and their stepsister's great aunt mine as fast as possible. Not to mention making all the early adopters really rich. Also, there'd likely be people who wouldn't  sell, or people who forgot, and coins that just got thrown away that nobody will ever know who owns.

All this talk of moving to an altcoin is weird and random. There is a reason why Bitcoin is produced over time and its not just to reward miners. Its because it makes logical sense for a number of reasons, this being one of them.

If you want to take down BTC, you're going to have to try and 51% it. Otherwise, its infallible.

Should be easy for them to 51%, first they need to shut down those ASIC producing company and confiscate all their machines. Then use their machines to produce lots of ASIC and bam!!!

That would seem very desperate and would only weaken the dollar even more.

That would certainly be a lot easier than trying to mothball BTC, although I suspect their plans would get leaked about 15 times, and their plans stalled by various court proceedings. If you knew that in 2 years from now the US Gov was going to try to 51  percent attack Bitcoin, wouldn't you spend some of your coins on miners to try and back it up? I suspect almost half the world, even those that haven't even heard of Bitcoin until that point, would try to protect Bitcoin at that moment. Especially since people like Anonymous would, if something like that were actually leaked, try to hijack other people's/companies/groups computers to help Bitcoin out a bit.

I don't believe it is worth their time at the moment.

If things go really bad they always have option of alt coin and mandating it's use.

Gain the majority of regular folks by taxes, benefits, large institutions etc. and you are done...

It would be great for the Bitcoin price if the US Gov bought more of it an mothballed it. Bring it on!

If they buy it ALL then I would LOL at their ignorance. EVERYTHING that runs with BTC would fall, but all of the holders (who must've been 'forced' to sell, theoretically) would make their $ from selling.... unless we are looking at "The Great BTC Confiscation of 2014". I would be amazed if someone could develop a code to 'confiscate' the majority of BTC.

Thoughts?

Why would everything running with BTC fall? They'd just end up with a lot less BTC, but with BTC worth a whole lot more. Think of something along the lines of a reverse-split. Why is that bad?

Good plan, but ASIC producing companies are china based, out of US Govt reach

They obviously can't buy it all, they can only buy what people put up for sale.

I am theorizing that they would control 99%+ of the BTC in existance. This would inevitably leave 118,540.75 BTC in the economy.

Since today:



This would leave very little room for BTC to continue existing as it does now.

Utter nonsense. How would they buy 99% of the BTC when only a small percentage is on exchanges?

If there was the slighted hint that the US gov were going to start buying up all the BTC the price would go though the roof to such a point they the US gov would run out of money to buy it, so what would they buy it with, worthless $USD that people don't want?

How would the buy the 9mill BTC that haven't been mined yet.

Get real.

They can keep confiscating Bitcoin.  They will get a few coins that way. ;)  Or they could pay government employees to mine them too.  Maybe I should not give them any ideas.

Confiscating, lol, most Bitcoin wallets are not in the US. I am sure the ASIC vendors would like government clients. The diff rate may not.


I thought this thread was a serious discussion for a moment, but it's seems to have attracted people that don't understand bitcoin at all.

Don't have an asinine look at it all. It is all theoretical from my point of view. YES, THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF COINS TRAPPED IN DORMANT WALLETS RANGING FROM 2009-PRESENT. The comment simply suggests something that can be thought, can be produced. If people can code well enough to hack literally anything given enough time, there isn't much stopping a Government with a money printing machine at their finger tips. If you want to be closed minded feel free. I think someone could produce a private key brute forcer and meticulously hunt down every wallet and rape all of their BTC. Yes, offline wallets, I get it. You have so many arguments you want to rebuttal, but I could care less with your piss poor sportsmanship.

They just need microsoft and apple's help to inject something as in update. Then bye bye wallet.

This issue has been discussed here many time, you would need a quantum computer to crack Bitcoin, as explained here: http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6021/bitcoin-is-not-quantum-safe-and-how-we-can-fix/

The devs can simply release an update with a different encryption, more coins whatever is agreed upon by the Bitocoin community.

US Government money printing machines are irrelevant. As I said most BTC wallets are not in the US, do you think the Chinese really care about getting more increasingly worthless USD? If you want the worlds BTC you have to be prepared to trade something of value for it, not fiat. Try gold perhaps, even better trade goods and services for BTC.

I'm willing to bet the vast majority of all coins in existence are either held in paper wallets, offline machines, or machines using open source software for an OS / virtual OS.

Erk, you're correct in your sense. I was referring that the endless supply of $ would finance the quantum computer and the government controlled hackers. I thought this would be obvious from the theoretical situation.

Oh I'm aware of that but they would use some other means other than throwing away a billion dollars. They just can't sell it like the war on drugs.

I was kidding.  I guess it wasn't funny.  Sorry.  But the government supposedly already has a nice amount of confiscated coin.  Granted they probably cannot do anything with them.