Bitcoin Forum

Lets say a billionaire decides to buy all the Bitcoin,
or the US government in their attempt to make Bitcoin less relevant decides to buy everything available for sale.

All they need to do is buy a few millions which will be a big percentage of the total bitoin,
and with astronomical price most would have been sold and less community...

could that be the end of Bitcoin?

More likely Bill Gates would produce his own coin. The Melindacoin or Gatescoin or MSFTcoin. He's got the money to market it and make it huge. He would only want to buy all the bitcoin if he wanted to kill it. "Bill Gates hodling always!" Damn you, I want some!

Not at all, even if a single entity were to buy every single bitcoin available to date, then hold them, blocks are still going to be generated until 2140. Meaning there will at least be a steady flow of new coins coming in, even at a lower rate. The price per BTC would raise due to demand, so smaller denominations of bitcoin would be required for transactions.

It's extremely unlikely that any single or aggregate entity would attempt to buy out the bitcoin supply, even after the last satoshi was mined. It would be both unprofitable and ultimately beneficial to the bitcoin community.

What if Bill Gates buys all the Bitcoin?
People will stop talking about China.  :D

If bill gates are buying bitcoin for his 70B networth

we are gonna make bank... big time... 8)

Bill Gates would never do that. A large part of his wealth (estimated at $ 70 billion) is in fiat cash. If he adopts the Bitcoin and then if Bitcoin replaces, fiat he will lose a lot of money.

Bitcoin is super thin market , he would drive the price into the 5 figures almost instantly, creating many bitcoin millionaires overnight.

He can't as I will not sell mine to him. lol

What if the owner of Petco tries to buy all the Doggie Coins and CatCoins?  ::)

he won't be buying mine.

That would only shoot btc price up

I'd sell a good portion of mine!  Fine by me.  I'd be very rich.

The price for my last bitcoin is $1 trillion.

he ( any other ) can invest such money on mining equipements/research to mine bitcoin instead of buyin :P

I'll think about bidding on that depending on how things go.
http://www.goldonomic.com/weimar%20fire.gif

Buying will be much easier than mining. First of all, there is no reliable provider who delivers the mining rigs on time. Also it will be quite hard to beat all the mining giants who dominate the scene as of now.

I saw something last week about Big $$$ mining:
A guy recently started mining ~10% of all new BTC.
Obviously he spent a ton of money to start. I think he's in the Western USA, but I lost the link...

Then the coin name will be changed from Bitcoin to Billcoin.

true. But bill gates wont sell  mining if his team gets a good hold on making great hashing power.

he will make his coin and invest to it, promote it aroudn the world and many whales buy it
melindacoin seem nice  :P
wow paper money worthless at that time :o

Sad but true.
After WW1: The German economy was so bad that eventually Hitler was able to step up and "save" them.

i won't be selling him mine .

For instance, we assume that he begins to buy it rapidly -> prices will be rapidly rising -> creating expectation that price will rise even more -> most of market makers will change their price for a higher one -> this will lead to a rise in price even more rapidly than Gates buying them -> there are different scenarios could be taken into account from this point:

1. As already mentioned by others, some people might not sell their coins -> shortage of supply and increase in demand leads to a higher price in short run -> later the "Gates" hype will go down and prices will begin to go down making to panic those guys who didn't sell (opportunity profit goes down) with Bill panicking even more as he is now a great looser, making him sell in loss, therefore driving price down even more rapidly than it went up.

2. Imagine that everyone has its price, and as someone suggested someone will sell their coins for $1 trillion (ceteris paribus, meaning we do not consider hyperinflation of usd), therefore Bill will not be able to buy all coins, and eventually it will lead to the same situation as later in #1 scenario.

3. We imagine scenario #2, but Bill has enough money, therefore he buys/gets every bitcoin(he even hacks those wallets, which passwords was forgotten, and even recovers crashed hard-drives with bitcoins, etc). From here there are possible other scenarios:
    a.) He holds them to produce shortage in supply and increase in demand to make money, as he thinks, but market realises that the prices Bill was buying for actually are not fair -> therefore prices go down, Bill 'loser" sells at loss.
    b.) the same scenario as in 3a, but we imagine that bitcoin community came up with some magical usage of bitcoin, so that it creates unreal demand for bitcoins, price continues to rise -> At some price-levels Bill will begin to cash out, everyone thinks that Bill knew this before, and everyone thinks that he is a smart-ass, W.Buffet is little girl in comparison with Bill.

4. The same scenarios as in 3 (a and b), apart from the fact that buy not Bill but the US government, here we have different approach, imagine that Gov buys not based on financial means but to destroy the whole system, they are printing enough money to buy all bitcoins and not going to sell them at all, not even under possibility of great gain, what do we have from here:
     Very big supply of USD, we are very rich and switching to litecoin ;)  -> weaker dollar, we are very happy -> GOv realises that and begins to switch its economy on bitcoins, and revealing the "TRUE AMOUNT" of USD in circulation (admiting that they were covering this information) -> litecoin rises on this information enormously  -> we are again very rich  BUT everyone else who was holding fiat money are broke -> therefore GOV and many who became rich begin to donate and air drop money, the so-called 'redistribution of wealth' takes place

If Bill gates really bought bitcoin, the price will be higher than you can guess.

Gates has to see that!

He cant buy ALL the bitcoins EVER. Because I am NOT going to sell a certain part of my holding. :)

It is obvious that great demand will increase the price , as it makes it rare.
Hence, as Bill starts buying , will find it more and more difficult to acquire the last ones.

This would skyrocket the price .

If you buy all the BTCs then the price will drop since no trade would exist ( well if one person has all ). If there is no trade there is no value....

You mean if someone buys all gold on earth, then will make it no value??

Well... one can't own all the Bitcoins by buying up the available ones from the market. Every hours or so new block are being mined. And it will be impossible to own 100% of the mining sector.

The question was " what if Bill Gates buys all the Bitcoins ", even if he owns 99.9991% of the market he is still practically owning 100% of the market ( well mined BTCs ), and assuming that he has cash to buy mined ones ( if they went for sale ), what then. It is better to have half of the market that would give you enough coins to drop the price and then buy cheap...

Not possible, the price would start to go Jupiter bound if he attempted this or anyone did.  We wouldn't even see the moon as we passed it.

Bitmain tech can deliver in 5 days from payment to the other side of the planet.  I'll never buy a pre order with a lenght longer than 20 days.

1) there are 12.636mill coins in circulation.(as of today's timestamp)
2) there are only a few hundred thousand on the "sell order wall" at any one time
3) these sell orders are not all priced below $1000

if gates did TRY, he would only net about 100k coins. but by doing so he would be eating up orders that are priced all the way upto many thousands of dollars.

meaning the other 12.5million+ coins that individuals have, which are not on sell orders would instantly be valued at several thousand dollars each.

it is impossible to own ALL bitcoins, as some smart people are hoarding coins and will refuse to sell no matter what happens right now.

even if these hoarders decided to sell. they would still keep a small token amount purely for the day a billionaire spikes the price to over $100k a coin. buy eating all those sell orderlines.

But what about the already existing Hash Power? Even if Bill Gates can get as much Hash power as everyone else combined, that means that he has only 50% of the mining market share.

yep and in less then 2 weeks other people will buy more miners, meaning he will need to buy more miners to catch up again. and thus you now see the cat and mouse game of mining.

That's impossible. There will always be a lot of people who want sell. Or he should give an very big amount for it.

So even theoretically, it is impossible to own all the Bitcoins. Practically, it is impossible even to collect 50% of the currently circulating coins. Even a 10% hoarding will result in prices upward $5K.

Few people with that much money are going to just throw it away.
Obviously, slowly collecting more BTC when the market falls is much more effective.

Yes, but who is spending so much when an investment continuously crashing?

Overlooking the finer point that if any entity or government *could* theoretically buy all existing bitcoin with the goal of making it worthless and irrelevant, and were they to theoretically succeed, then at the end of the day, they would've just wasted huge sums of money in the process...their fiat is gone in exchange for btc which is also no longer worth anything. Lose/lose/

Only a dumbass would do that.


So, I figure the US government will be making plans any day now to do just exactly that  ::)

What you describe of cat and mouse is a game.  How can anyone beat the godfather of the solutions to cooperative and non cooperative games, satoshi, john nash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium 

THE UNEXPLOITABLE MAN.

The people who win long term; They buy low and sell high.  :)

No one can buy all the bitcoin in the world. Much like no one can buy all the gold or silver in the world.

why not call it 666 coin

Why buy when he can create his own coin ?   ;D

Yes. Nice point. Or he can launch one in collaboration with the bankers and WU / Ebay / Paypal. Looking at his past and the amount of praise he showers for the bankers, I assume that option is much more viable.

Bitcoin would change.

Bitcoin = Gatescoin.

And would then be worthless.

My $.02.

;)