Bitcoin Forum

He pumped in a massive 100,000 bitcion in  bidwalls, temporarily ruining out dreams of a cheap and spendable bitcoin.

He seems to never want to give up.

This all happened in les than a half hour.

Before manipulator

Bid 1.8 25212.31
Bid 1.85 1949.45
Bid 1.9 12422.69
Bid 1.95 2773.57
Bid 2 2898.88
Ask 2.05 132.04
Ask 2.1 702.56
Ask 2.15 796.28
Ask 2.2 3334.99
Ask 2.25 3727.33
Ask 2.3 8284.11
Ask 2.35 2841.4
Ask 2.4 3593.7


After manipulator

Bid   1.8   28766.27
Bid   1.85   1934.13
Bid   1.9   5399.11
Bid   1.95   2691.57
Bid   2   33528.57
Bid   2.05   17787.54
Bid   2.1   20412.92
Bid   2.15   15180.71
Bid   2.2   5397.41
Bid   2.25   2176.57
Ask   2.3   7402.8
Ask   2.35   2774.25
Ask   2.4   3674.36

Oh boo hoo you arent going to crash bitcoin today. Too f**kin bad!

Well, you may win today, but I got time on my side, you don't. You better pray that your manipulator buddy keeps paying the price to hold bitcoin above $2.00.

Crash? CRASH?

You know what's really happening? There's a lot of people that are fed up and tired of the speculative bullshit, and they want Bitcoin to stop being a fucking ponzi scheme (that you promote, apparently) and would *really* like to see it in daily use. Guess what? You're a dick. The manipulator is a misguided libertarian douche who's sole sense of self worth is the fiat price of a bitcoin. He probably read half of Atlas Shrugged, and rewrote the money speech to apply to Bitcoin.

Yeah, it's so great that Bitcoin is being defended at $2.. Mmhm..

Funny thing is, his efforts to stem the falling price make bitcoin less attractive as an alternative currency. He longs for the days of June / July when people would actually listen to his foul smelling bullshit.

Anyways, good luck trading! Watch those walls keep crashing down. We'll find a rational price.. eventually.

$2-$3 is a rational price. $30 is not.

Coincidentally I own less than 10BTC myself because I only mine and have only started doing so recently. So for those of you calling me a deuche or whatever you want go fuck yourself! $2-$3 is a much more rational price because if the price of mining drops so low that it becomes uneconomical for most GPU miners than it can be hijacked.

Go fuck yourself indeed.

I agree with you 100% Jonahan. I honestly look forward to a bitcoin that I can actually use and spend, without worrying about price fluctuations etc. When we were finally crashing down into the $1.00 range today I was actually thinking of how cool it would be to buy bitcoins and use them for online gambling, etc. However, I don't want to even go near it when it is in a constant decline and being held up by a sole person trying to protect his bitcoin fortunes.

Bitcoin will probably be stable around $1.00 or close to parity with the dollar. I sure that the developers had the dollar in mind when they created it and set the number of bitcoins.

How is $1 BTC better than $2 BTC or $20,000 BTC?

Far off dude.  :(

Its irrelevant and the point I have been making. A bitcoin is worth what it is worth and that has yet to have been determined. Some people seem to want to drive the price down (aka the manipulator(s)) as far as it can go so they can get as much as they can. Does anyone actually think he pulls out his big bidwalls for any other reason than to drop the price?

YOu have it all wrong, the manipualtor was likely the reason it shot up to $30. I have been watching him very closely for months. He only pulls out bidwalls after they are sold into. Most are fake to offer buying support. It seems like people with large bitcoin holdings like to use the manipulators bidwalls to sell out their bitcoins because you can dump them into a 10K bidwall and not drop the price any.
He must know this, and knows that if he holds his bidwalls up there then they are just wasted away. That is why he usually sets a bidwall, and then smaller bidwalls above it.

He does not want the price to drop at all.

It is obvious that bittenbob has sunk money into mining and is emotionally compromised. I have seen this behavior many months after the drop from $30.

Anyway, we are slowly chewing away at the manipulators bidwalls, he won't hold for long.

Bid 1.85 1935.68
Bid 1.9 5324.66
Bid 1.95 2703.77
Bid 2 34059.95
Bid 2.05 18246.76
Bid 2.1 20562.15
Bid 2.15 15213.57
Bid 2.2 3408.67  Ask 2.25 1604.83
Ask 2.3 6707.44
Ask 2.35 2838.93

Didn't make the connection that the same "manipulator" can be both parties.  Most of the time only a token amount of Bitcoins are sold into the bidwall.  What does get traded is all the suckers who feel "safe" by the bidwall and put orders 1 penny out in front.

So
1) put up bidwall
2) wait for suckers to but buy orders in front of the safe wall
3) pull out bidwall and sell into the suckers
4) wait until price collapses another 20 to 30 cents.
5) see step #1.

An effective method he is using to unload hundreds of thousands of coins.

I see your point, but I do not see this working, mainly because I see so much of his bidwalls getting sold into and wiped out. He has bought so many bitcoins like this, and usually when his bidwalls all get sold into, the price never rises back up to that level again. I see in theory how what you describe can work, but i just do not see it happening.

Try reading before you post. I have not sunk one red cent into mining. I built myself a gaming computer for BF3, MW3 and other games alike. I would like to see bitcoin succeed because I think fiat currencies are a load of bull. Anyone who has watched Zeitgeist would. The only thing I do agree with you is that the manipulator will very soon pull his bidwalls out and the price will fall again.

Go on, panic sell now.

There will be a better shorting opportunity ahead.

The goal isn't to get the price to rise.  Look at how much orders build up in front the build wall, they are all wiped out giving the seller a nice exit point.  A tiny portion of the bidwall gets sold into and then he moves it. 

Sell a lot of coins > bidwall.   Buy some of them back @ bidwall, then drop bidwall.  Prices goes down but not as much as an unsupported freefall that would happen is someone just tried to unload 300K coins.

The bidwall is the "security" than makes the bulls come out and play so the very same person can wipe them out and then move the wall.  The only funny/sad part is how many times he can do it and each time the suckers put the buys right in front of the wall.

Someone is making a nice large exit from BTC, doing it rapidly and getting a decent price (given the amount he/she is trying to unload).

TL/DR:
the manipulator can't find enough suckers/patsies to keep the price stable but they are soaking up his sell-off and giving him a better exit point.

To be useful as a currency, BTC needs to be up closer to $100/BTC if it has any sort of volatility.  The reason is that it needs to be obtained shortly before it is needed and gotten rid of quickly after the transaction.  Either that, or pay someone like Bitcoinica a lot to hedge.  When the price is low as it is right now, attempting to acquire or dump BTC for one silly little transaction moves the markets noticeably.  If volatility increased to the point where this was not the case (at the current prices), then most of the value of the whole system would be sucked up by the exchanges over a fairly short period of time.

Currently Bitcoin is being used mainly as the only thing it is good for.  An entertaining novelty and study.  All my opinion, of course.

You do realize that volatility is % not nominal move right.  If BTC was $100 today instead of $0.20 daily moves you would be seeing $15 daily moves.

Think about it for a second a BTC is perfectly divisible so the nominal value is utterly irrelevant.  Say the block reward had been 1 BTC not 50.  Today there would be 1/50th as many coins in circulation and price would be 50x as high.  We would have the same voltility and on the larger nominal value would result in larger nominal moves.

The reverse is also true.  Say the block reward was 5000 BTC.  We would be looking at $0.02 BTC price and although in nominal terms the daily move would be a fraction of a cent volatility would still be the same.

Exactly. People wanting coins for 1$ don't see the point that small market == higher volatility and easy to play with whole economy, like we're watching those days. With 100$/coin it would be much harder to be "a manipulator" for single entity, because such entity needs tens or hundreds millions of dollars.

I honestly have to wonder if these people are trying to drive the value down so they can cash in on their shorts or buy a lot of coins at a lower value. Interestingly enough I just saw somone take a 1000BTC bite out of the 2.20 bidwall so we will see how much longer he has it there.

Yes.   I don't care why it is volatile.  The fact that it is makes it so that a person who is not interested in speculating needs to hold BTC only as long as they need to to perform a transaction.  e.g., a few minutes to a few hours.

So happens that a higher price would likely lead to less volatility since the bar would be higher for those who are able to move markets around, but that is beside the point.


I said nothing about changing the reward structure.  I like it fine where it is personally.  The economy is simply not big enough to warrant the kinds of values we need to see in order to have a stable currency.  Sad day.  We'll either get there or we won't.  If we do, I suspect that it will have more to do with a failure in other systems than success in this one.

I see an economic fallacy brewing here (not just in that quote but in the forums generally)... there seems to be a notion that a lower price equals a less volatile price, and thus a lower price means Bitcoin is more easily used in commerce.  This is a fallacy and in fact quite the opposite is true.

The lower the price of Bitcoin, the more easily it will swing when $X come in search of it, or when $X attempt to exit it. Consider if the price fell to $0.01/btc.  By myself, with $10,000, I could buy almost 1/7th of the entire supply of Bitcoin. Of course, acquiring 1/7th of the supply would shoot the price up quite a bit. My $10,000 would seriously hamper all y'all's commerce.

Consider the alternative case, if Bitcoins were trading at $1,000 each. My $10,000 purchase then only buys me ten coins and will make no dent in the market price. Even $100,000 could move in and out of the market without much trouble.

The point is this: you can make the argument that btc isn't worth $2 each and should be lower, fine. But you cannot make the argument that it ought to be lower so that it can more easily be used in commerce due to volatility issues. Volatility, when short and medium term noise is removed, will be inversely proportional to the Bitcoin price in percentage terms.

And again, a $1,000/btc price is exactly as easy to use in commerce as a $1/btc price due to the full divisibility of these things. If you're not using Bitcoins in commerce now, it will not be any "easier" if the price is halved... it will in fact be more problematic and more volatile. And buying one $1 coin is no more difficult than buying two $0.50 coins, or half a $2 coin. Don't let notation distract you!

Anyone disagree?

I disagree. Do I win a prize?

The velocity of exchange and parity between the supply and demand is what keeps a currency stable. The volatility has everything to do with speculative bubbles, and nothing to do with common use of bitcoins as a method of exchange. Store of value != Method of exchange.

Increased use comes from a psychologically familiar value, in this case $1. At $1, the supply and demand sides of the equation are far more likely to find equilibrium, and we have more than enough coins to allow for it. Ultimately, even $1 doesn't stand up if the velocity of, and its use as a method of exchange, don't catch on.

+1

Wholeheartadly agree. It's refreshing to read some rational thoughts around these parts.

he mixed up "volatility" with "heavy price decline" ;)

No prize =) but you had a good response. I agree with it partly...

But, when you say that volatility has everything to do with speculative bubbles, that is not correct. Speculative bubbles are typically the result of volatile markets, not the cause of them. Speculation works both ways, and speculators tend to reduce volatility because it enables future pricing estimates to become known in the present.

As evidence that volatility doesn't "have everything to do with speculative bubbles," consider a Bitcoin world with 1,000 participants and a certain equilibrium at a price of perhaps $0.10 per coin.  No speculation going on. No speculative bubbles. Now... suddenly an outsider decides he likes Bitcoins and buys in big time (not for speculation on future prices, but simply because he likes them). If the price of coins is low, it would be very difficult for this new entrant not to spike the price and increase volatility. In this scenario, simple increase in demand has increased volatility, and the same would happen if someone "cashed out."

A lower priced coin means that $X entering or leaving has a larger effect than it otherwise would with a higher priced coin, if other factors, like velocity, are held constant (and velocity may indeed hold constant - it doesn't necessarily increase or decrease with a price change).

Further, I do agree that a $1=1btc price "feels" right for people and makes people comfortable. But supply and demand care little for comforts and feelings. While prices clearly tend toward familiar numbers, and 1 to 1 is the most even of all, it's only a very weak psychological influence which must contend with strong fundamental influences.

I'll suggest to you that a 1 to 1 ratio is actually a pretty silly value for Bitcoin to the dollar. If there would be 210,000,000,000,000 btc to be printed over the years, would you still say 1 to 1 makes sense? What if only 100 were ever going to be mined?  1 to 1 is still the "right" price?  It's totally arbitrary to suggest that all of the supply and demand dynamics of all the market participants would aggregate together to result in a price of 1 to 1 with the USD. If it did, it would amazingly mean that Satoshi had predicted the long term supply/demand balance and decided to create exactly the right amount of currency long term to result in a  1 to 1 with the USD. He was smart, but not that smart :)

hmm, I finally see what you mean. Makes sense. I see if you had enough money, how you could use this as a tool to sell your bitcoins at a higher price. It really is manipualtion though. It is in a way similar to what I used to do on Ebay for rare antiques. Where there was one I wanted to buy, and if I had simlar, I would list the ones I own on Ebay knowing that other people would see them and not bid as much on the one I wanted. I would then pull my antiques down before the end of auction.

LOL, it is not really the same thing, but just manipulation.  The manipulator is fooling people into thinking that there are large amounts of buyers at a certain price, so they are more likely to buy above the bid wall. He then controls the trading enviornment in a way. He then sells his coins above the bid walls. It is somwwhat similar to me posting my antiques, makes people think that all the antiques are now worth less, so I buy the ones for sale cheaper, and pull my own. I am manipulating to buy, the manipulator is trying to sell, that is the only difference. The only thing we need are suckers. I am starting to like the manipulator actually.

You nailed it. No disagreement , but 100% agreement.

People should stop whining about manipulators, etc., but rather DO SOMETHING TO ATTRACT NEW INVESTORS into bitcoins. That's the only way out of this vicious cycle.

And, I hope that the Prague conference also has this as objective and not only software development.
Because all this development will be useless if bitcoin prices fall more and stay down.
No merchant will ever want to get in with this huge volatility and manipulation risk.

i disagree. with everyone.

told it before: he mixed up "heavy price decline" with volatility.

and nobody can't deny that: the less worth Bitcoin are, the more stable there price (the less volatile) it is gona be. as often said before: when price is 0.0001 $/bitcoin me and my friends are able of buying all btc available - and yes, we are gonna do that^^

--> a price below $1 is much more "useable" cause there will be much less PRICE DECLINE risk. - and that is indeed very good for business. imagine you sell e.g. a donut today for 1BTC at marketvalue $0.5 and tomorrow it is worth $1 and so on .. basically it is: the closer to the all-time-since-bubble-low, the better for bitcoin price stability-outlook. a huge inflation fucks up both sides: businesses (who may hold some btc) and customers (who bought btc).
a slightly deflation (after all-time-after-bubble-low) will help both sides, since the customer will not be afraid anymore to buy bitcoins (the worst thing that can happen is that he sells them at the same price he bought them) and the businesses can profit even higher from recieving something, which slowly increases in value.

conclusion: get below $2 as fast as possible! (not that i think there is any other choice) let the manipulator get a lection in free market price balance and that obvious-manipulation is obvious^^

Every post you have made basically goes - WE NEED $1 BITCOINS NOW!!! I am starting to wonder if you are the manipulator with all this wishing it goes so low. The reality is that the lower it goes the easier it is to manipulate. The lower it is, the lower the dollar value of all the money invested in Bitcoins becomes and therefore becomes more volatile. The only reason someone would want bitcoin so low would be to get rid of the bitcoin currency all together.

Be careful what you wish for.

lol, me beeing the manipulator ;)

i have 40 BTC leveraged short on bitcoinica.. *SELFSERVINGBASTARDIAM* ;)

it is obvious that the manipulator did not pull the price DOWN but struggles very hard to hold him above the reals market balance (which i think would be about $1.8 at the moment). the longer he does not let bitcoin drop to its real market value, the more he damages the whole economy.

finally bitcoin will go up at some point. and i am pointing this out in various posts, yes: the faster it will reach this point, the faster it will go up again. so if you (same as me) think of a price between 1$ and lets say 5$ for 2012 - than hope that my "wish" becomes true.

btw: i doubt that the price will ever go lower than 1$. cause 1$ is such a psychological number... i for myself will never bet short on a price bellow 1$. i think the all-time-low-after-the-bubble will be like $1.0019 or something, than a huge outbreak to.. i don't know :)

In a sense we are all manipulators by speculating on the price. Those that say it needs to go down as quickly as possible are manipulating it down because Im sure at least a few people are basing their decisions on what goes on these forums. At the same time saying the price really should be higher we are manipulating it higher by adding confidence in Bitcoins. I think we have already fallen very quickly from just a week ago (~50%) and $2 might be the low you have been looking for.

The negative market sentiment is undoubtedly largely focused on The Manipulator^© and what everyone has finally realized is the idiotic last gasp of a desperate individual who's seemingly driven to white knight for a price point that nobody else needs (or wants, for that matter) to support. As it stands, the 10 Thps of block miners is vastly oversubscribed, and we need to see a real balancing, where upwards of 30-40% of miners go offline, and where difficulty drops to the 700-800k range MAX.

If you have a heart, you should feel compassion for The Manipulator^©, and understand that in his mind, he is a noble knight of old, defending your liberty and freedoms from the oppressive masons.

In reality though, he's hurting the viability of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which is its real strength. as he apparently didn't pay attention in class, and has mistaken Bitcoin as a store of value (I can put a V8 in a Honda and go 0-60 in 4 seconds, but it's still a Honda) rather than a medium of rapid exchange.

i don't have a heart for a heartless creature - i really doubt he sees himself as noble knight, trying desperate to save bitcoin (from what? worth decline? with manipulation? lol..) out of idealistic reasons.

its just someone trying to make the most money he can, no idealism. just the same as most people who invest in bitcoin. and you should also think like that if you want to profit from bitcoins... so i have not much mercy left for him/her. he is equaly noble to everyone on this forum. even i am more idealistic then him, cause i don't deny i am SHORT at the moment on bitcoin and want it to drop. but i also think there is offcourse a lowest point, but the recent manipulation make me believe $2 is really not the lowest point - if it were, why does it need sooooo huge manipulation, to preserve it?! -> $2 is not the low point!

Mr. Manipulator, if you are noble and want to help bitcoin, let it find it's REAL balance first. then you can still buy an make your million$,or whatever.

Seriously, are you guys not thinking this through?  Bitcoin will not be stable at $1 (or any price)!  What, do you honestly think that we'll drop to $1 and then, THEN, the manipulator will spend his $200,000 without causing significant volatility?  I'm mean, seriously guys, come on.

I'm beginning to think that when some of you say that you want bitcoin to be stable what you mean is that you want its value to constantly go up.

Did anyone else see that big buy rally up to 2.25 then fall back down to 2.18?

IIRC, the bid wall vanished for some time yesterday and the price rallied 5% or so.

The walls are just in place to help sweep up whatever lint is blowing around.

My take is that we have a small integer number of market participants only, and they are playing against one another...those of us who are not putting multi-K BTC block on the table are increasingly irrelevant.  That was plain to see in the latter half of yesterday.

I also doubt very seriously that the real market participants pay any attention whatsoever to what a few yahoos (myself very much included) write on these boards.  This aspect of the data is probably not even solid enough to get a feel for what lint is blowing around.

QFT. How is what is happening BTC *not* finding it's balance? To suggest that the manipulators of the market sit back and watch and do nothing with their cash and/or BTC is naive at best, rampant stupidity at worst. It's like saying, "Hey, Microsoft -- tell all of your major share holders to never sell any of their shares so that the market can determine the real value of MSFT stock." While we're at it, will all of you people with USD stop buying or selling everything so that the market can determine the real value of USD? News flash: the manipulators (e.g. large BTC holders) are part of the market, and they will always exist. Why don't we just say instead, "Mr. Manipulator, we're jealous of the fact that you have a shload of BTC and USD to play around with on MtGox; will you please redistribute all of your wealth to the rest of us so that we can be equal?"

LOL. Good point proudhon.

Though I do think we can achieve a stable bitcoin, but ONLY when there is real commercial activity in the bitcoin economy. When people NEED to buy bitcoins to obtain goods or services, we will have real demand. So if the price falls, people will buy a LOT for their needs in the future. That is true stability and we will get there eventually.

If we want stability we all need to invest in bitcoin businesses, buy as many goods with bitcoin as we can, and use it as it was intended to be used rather than all this money being pumped into a casino game. If you don't want to use bitcoin, or don't believe that it will be accepted anywhere in the future, there is very little point in trading it. Just liquidate your holdings and give the coins to people who WILL use them properly.

If I was manipulating such a large volume of currency I would be on these boards trying to spread as much misinformation as possible to the effect that I was going to do the exact opposite of what I was really doing. This is a relatively small community and there is a lot that could be learned/anticipated by the manipulator if they paid attention to this forum.

Im still waiting for someone to create a pool to do some processing such as Folding @ Home for bitcoins. This is a real commerce and could easily be accomodated. CHOP CHOP People!

Yes, and then that order apparently disappeared. WTF? It's not showing up now, but I know I saw the price spike up to $2.25. Perhaps the manipulator is MtGox and they inadvertently queued an order, only to roll it back right after it started executing?

Update: Now it suddenly showed up again. Weird. Maybe it's just MtGoxLive not rendering properly for a short period (which would hardly be surprising).

Great post! I also think that a lot of the whining going on around here is due to to this 'jealousy'. If any of you had that level of capital, you would all be doing it too. You cannot criticize the 'manipulator' for wanting to protect his own interests. You are all doing it yourselves, albeit on a much smaller level. He is allowing us to find the bottom slowly and carefully, as opposed to the madness which would otherwise ensue if he didn't.

Well that's probably why you are not a manipulator.  Someone who gets into the position to be one probably didn't get that way by wasting their time on things such as these forums.

The real market participants are surely keenly interested in the disposition of their counterparts, but they are unlikely to glean any useful information here.

you are a wise guy. that is exactly what i mean with "stable": anything but not decreasing in worth all the time
..so "stable" could also be a price, which is slowly climbing, offcourse ;) you got my point? stable is the moment, when the market is clearly no more longterm-bear but not yet longterm bull. just stable. just no more loosing worth.

since i posted alot in similiar threads i feel beeing spoken to, partialy.
but i think some got me totally wrong: i am not questioning nor whining about the manipulator and him not beeing rational. he does what he believes serves him best, offcourse. and everybody inside here does the same, offcourse.

what i questioned was that some of you now take the price as balanced, clearly denying the obvious information that this walls can and probably will disappear as fast as they came: in about 20 seconds.

the comparison with microsoft lacks so much, i don't really know where to begin. maybe at the point, that microsoft sells stocks, not crypto currency? that there is an virtually unlimited amout of stocks they can give out? that the fucking company is made out of many people, not just one manipulator? that manipulations trough microsoft happens with the knowledge of nearly every shareholder? that there are annual meetings where the shareholder discuss if they should "manipulate"? that there is actual property behind the M$-stocks, not like bitcoin?!..

in my native language there is this slogan: not everything that is partly wrong is an comparison ;)

the thing is: trying to psychologically manipulate the price above a level of natural balance (fake walls are NO real demand! he does NOT want people to sell into them, that is the point of manipulation!) that obvious will only delay the inevitable. regardless what happens, the market will find its price. thats what i want to say.

Replace $1 with $2 and that's how I've been feeling for weeks...

Things change :)

What does difficulty have to do with anything?  That's a random comment...  btw, processing power has been in the mid 7 Thps range for a while now.  Does that mean what ever you were hoping for form a 30% drop has been accomplished?

But gewure, we don't even know where he acquired the funds in the first place. There's certainly potential for the money having come from an initial BTC investment sold for over $20 per BTC, and for all we know the same person that had huge, manipulative sell walls up in the past is the same person doing the large buy walls right now. When we had large sell walls, I'm sure others were complaining that it was manipulation by "the man" to keep the price down. The fact is, all we can really say is that we're in a volatile market, and the lower the price gets the more volatile it will become (e.g. penny stocks).

+1

This is why I have been questioning people why they think $1 BTC is a good thing. Its actually very bad because it won't take as much to manipulate the price.

If I were to be selling goods/services for BTC, I'd probably have to tack on an extra 30% right now just to make sure I can get a reasonable payment. If the price of BTC is at $1 and I run a restaurant that accepts BTC, if my food costs me $10 for a plate normally I'd charge 15 BTC. If the price is $10 per BTC, I'd be more inclined to accept 1.1 BTC for the plate, and if the price is $100 per BTC (and has held steady for months at that level) I might just do a straight 1:1 pricing.

that is not true since we are all waiting for cheap coins to buy. the cheaper they become, the more we want to buy, the more expensive they become --> it becomes less volatile the cheaper they get. don't mix it up with pennystocks (where there is always the risk of putting millions of new shares in the market, or the corporation going bancrupt at all, or pure speculation on an e.g. intelectual property not beeing good measureable in $ etc..

the fundamentals of bitcoin are different: there are only 21.000.000 max. solely this fact makes a comparison with extreme volatile pennystocks invalid.

just my thoughts..
greets

At that price, if anyone (e.g. a government) really wants to shut down BTC, all they would need to do is buy up as many coins as they can for <$21 million and never put them back into circulation. Lower prices are inherently more volatile, at least if anyone is trading.

In that case though, anyone who didn't sell to the government would hold the entirety of the supply. Since bitcoin is divisible to 8 places, even if there were only 1 million of them left, that would still be plenty to facilitate trade.

Bitcoin cannot be shut down, because it would be impossible for any single person to own 100% of the supply. Even if only 1000 bitcoins remained, it would still function as it does today; only with the decimal point in a different position.

cool, so i and my 20-BTC-to-never-be-sold will be the only ones left? cool news mate!! im getting finally rich with bitcoins without beeing an early adopter! yay! now i can leave this forum buy myself a maibach, let the poor eat my trash and be the rich capitalist bastard i have always hated loved to be!

this is by far the most ridiculous assertion I have read this week.