Bitcoin Forum

As someone who believes that the FED controls most of the large financial elements either directly or by proxy I think it would be dead easy of them to of bought a ton of Bitcoin, a few billion is nothing to them and now have a controlling stake.

I feel like the media stories that would come out to knock Bitcoin and then the inevitable drops in price reminded me so much of the way banks control the Gold Price etc. Using certain media outlets as a foil for price manipulation.

Maybe if we thought like the enemy, one banks and the Fed we would simply buy up a large majority and then dump as we saw fit. It's almost a no brainer. Therefore they neutralise the threat of Bitcoin by systemically crashing the price so they can point to it and say see, it's volatile and unstable. It would be completely in the FEDs interest to do this as to safeguard the Dollar.

Opinions?

I think this is just another conspiracy theory. To be honest I don't think the FEDs think of bitcoin as a threat, at least not for now.
If they wanted to kill bitcoin they would be able to crash the value by other means quite more easily. It's not that easy to buy hundreds of thousands bitcoins at the same time...

Probably possible, but I doubt it's actually happening. It's very rare for the establishment to foresee things changing until it's too late.

doesn't the US government own already one of the biggest wallets?

http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-says-its-seized-20-million-in-bitcoins-from-ross-ulbricht-alleged-owner-of-silk-road/

Rest assured that btc will not die before fbi and some other moguls cash out

Owning BTC =/= controlling it.

Control is what FED has been doing with US dollar via quantitative easing (printing currency).

Now even if they have lots of BTC the only thing FED can actually do is sell it. Once FED does that that's it. They will need to buy more to dump the price again. See the difference here? If we stay councious of this situation FED will lose money buy selling and trying to dump it.

Short answer.  No.

Longer answer. No, not yet anyway. Controlling bitcoins does not necessarily equate to controlling Bitcoin (in particular) or cryptocurrencies (in general); but nor does that mean that owning bitcoins doesn't provide some degree of influence in the realm.

Well, yes and no.  No, to the degree that the Fed is just another social construct, and there cannot be any real consensus among the human beings that make up the Fed; and yes, that some of those same people have more institutional influence than others and that some subset of those influential persons think in terms of 'threats' to their institution.  Among those influential persons, Bitcoin & derivitives are regarded as a systemic threat, they just don't really know (or can agree upon) how to respond.

Bitcoin doesn't need the Fed in order to appear volatile LOL! It's doing fine with that on its own.

Seriously, though, Bitcoin's volatility is becoming less over time. That's likely due to the size of market growing. Quite simply larger markets tend to absorb shock better and be less volatile. If any outside interest intentionally bought up bitcoins driving the price higher, then sold those coins to try crashing the market, if successful it would likely generate renewed news cycles about Bitcoin, generating new and renewed interest, resulting in a larger market which leads... to more stability. Bitcoin may experience short term bumps and bruises, like volatility, MtGox imploding, etc. but the idea of Bitcoin is what can never be conveniently deleted. The genie is out of the bottle and this thing isn't going away due to non-permanent events.

This is the winning answer.
Governments all over the world probably have (confiscated, goxxed) loads of BTC already.
They will have to be very careful with it because they can sell them only once.
Maybe they will lend them out to others in the future, or do other things with it just they do with gold.

But who was BIS?

Yeah that's a positive viewpoint and hopefully true. I guess I wonder if the media onslaught against Bitcoin is orchestrated with organised price dumps to scare people away. But your right in the end they can't make Bitcoin like they do dollars. We need to stay strong through the storms...


I'm not that familiar with the technology of Etherum bit with some rumors of Goldman Sachs (a well known proxy of the FED) I get concerned when I hear words like Derivatives thrown around.  Gold is controlled by basically making the supply (paper gold) limitless through Derivatives and then controlling those Derivatives.

I sincerely hope Etherum or anyone else doesn't turn a bitcoin into another manipulated financial product.

Pretty sure that's not the case
Impossible to be 100% certain, possible that some of the newer alts are compromised though

That's terrible!

Even title is delusion. Nobody can control bitcoin

Most people at the FED don't believe in Bitcoin so don't think it is a threat, they are busy hiding the real state of the US economy

It already happened to bitcoin. Gox owned less BTC than people thought they had available and this is just the start. Bitcoin is not the answer to fractional reserve banking and the 21 million cap is only on the protocol level. As soon as an established payment processor start dealing in bitcoin in addition to Fiat, they are free to go with fractional reserve banking ant thus create the illusion of way more than 21 million bitcoins existing.
This can go on and on and because we don't want it to go on there will be an institution created to regulate this fractional reserve banking. Since the regulate it, they can create special rules for everyone and they will get special rules for the people that are part of this institution... which somehow happen to be the big banksters of today. Oh and while we're at it, lets call the institution the Federal Bitcoin Reserve.

Eventually there will be lots of payment systems in place all dealing in Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself won't even be used anymore except for big deals between banks /mega corps / governments.
Because of that it just comes natural to remove bitcoin from those systems. People are told it is way better because banks won't go broke because of not having enough BTC to cover their liabilities anymore so the customers don't lose their money in the bank.
There are promises of insuring everyones money in the banks with this change so noone can ever lose it again because of his bank going broke. People like it. They love it because it seems so much saver. They didn't really use the Bitcoin protocol anyway - why would they? There were shiny and easy to use systems in place that allowed them to pay with bitcoin just as fine and this isn't gonna change.

Eventually we end up like now. A Monopoly controlling the money supply and therefore controlling the government and the people. The only difference is that by them the world has grown to be one big state. Bitcoin and the internet amde this happen even faster than one would have thought.
Theres now only one world government and only once government to control for the bankers - those same bankers that talked people into making the same mistake again by promising them to insure their BTC deposits with removing the BTC backing to prevent bank from going bust. What they didn't tell? They are gonna monopolize not only money, but they are gonna monopolize the ownership of the human race - again!

There is a simple solution to prevent that outcome: Companies just have to Show, that they really have the bitcoins and that is what the blockchain is for.
Some Exchanges are already implementing this.

Sure it is and we want that to happen. But when bitcoin goes more and more mainstream the masses might not care as long as they can buy their payTV subscription with that non-backed BTC. I fear that people may get manipulated into not caring about services proving they actually have the BTC.
If paypal implemented BTC today, they wouldn't prove they had the BTC they show their customers in their accounts and nobody would care if they had proven it or not. People would just jump on it because paypal is what they are used to and that way they don't have to actually get into bitcoin at all. It's just a new currency on paypal they can use.
Why would they even think about paypal proving they have what they say they have? Paypal never did that and still people feel a sense of protection when buying things with paypal because it's marketed that way.

Sure proving you have the coins is good, but as it turns out the majority of people won't even think about asking for it - it's just not how things work today!
Bitcoin is not the solution to all these problems. It's a good step in the right direction but it will never be enough without proper education of people who do not even know how the currency they work with every day is created, manipulated and inflated in order to make them obey and not think about what most financial companies actually do.

I so wish you were right but it's not the way it works. People need to know what actually happens instead of getting fed false information about whats going on in the world.. =/

Answer to question : No

Why are people thinking that governments control bitcoin, they don't want, and don't need to do so. They already know that eventually it will not survive.

And you know this by how?  Are you take advice from your magic 8 ball again?  Crystall ball out of order again?

The percentage of people that currently are using bitcoin is very very small, if you ask people on the streets will you ever use bitcoin, or do you want to know more about it, answer is NO.
Why? Because they do not trust it, stories such as Mtgox bitcoin theft, hackers, etc, are also not helping.

But I can be wrong ofcourse, for me the only reason I and many others support bitcoin is to make money :) If there was no money to be made with crypto, I and many people wouldn't be here.

The one thing we Bitcoiners have on our side is time.  Bitcoin is only a toddler or tyke, only 5 years old.

Plenty of wiggle room for growth, adoption, maturation of this technology.

If you think Bitcoin is the "Internet of Money", do your part, help it grow, spread the word, back Bitcoin businesses.

If you think Bitcoin is a speculative bubble, wait for the next price hike, cash out and get out before the burst.

I hope NO

but they will try

petrodollars are doing down...so they are looking something for sure

So if I own a lot of bitcoin, who do I get to control?  :D

My answer is no. Specially not for now. I don't think FED wants to control or kill bitcoin. If they really wanted to kill bitcoin they can do it by crashing the value by other means.

Cool, your in it to make more "money".
I'm in it to make more Bitcoin!  8)

Very brave to be bullish on FIAT looking at the long term trend line of crypto.
I'm sure some people said the same about combustion engines when the world was running on steam.

*if* they are able to kill bitcoin, they won't do it soon because it would rush a lot of people into gold.
And we all know about the US gold holdings... and the german repatriation.
I doubt they want to kill it. They are probably in it already big time.
If you want to play *safe*, go long BTC as long as they hold the 150k btc they took from silk road.
Don't listen to them, look at their actions.

The Federal government has all the mtgox coins - be certain of that.

That's already my assumption.
I think they did some blackmail on Karpeles to get his coins.
They probably injected some childporn on his computer and said he probably did not want to get that fact public knowledge.

I got stuck on "ton of bitcoin".

How does one weigh a bitcoin?!?    ;D

There are two possibilities:

One is that Karpeles was part of a government honeypot all along.

The other is that he was forced to. I'm sure they could have threatened him with all kinds of things. He was already being forced into regulations in early 2012 when mtgox started requiring gov IDs for fiat withdrawals. Then they had their dwolla account frozen. These events tell me the government was already up their ass and probably knew everything about their finances. Add to that the bullshit stories about where the coins went that don't add up and the fact that Karpeles is still roaming free, and you can easily deduce that the Feds have all the mtgox transaction records and all the coins in their possession.

Of course they do

Besides that he is in Japan. He is prosecuted by Japanese law. He's nationality is French.
You US-Americans really think, you are the Center of the world ...

He never talks about Americans. He is talking about government in general.

I thought, we are talking about the FED here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FED

He can't talk about governments in General in a concrete case. So, which "government was already up their ass"? The Japanese? So, the Japanese government has the MtGox Bitcoins?

It is difficult to point to a person or a group.
I think if you point to the BIS you are very close.

you mean them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements

I haven't heard of them, yet. Might look into it.

controlled by China  ;D ;D ;D

Don't think what they will do, think what they CAN do

One possibility: Large banks accumulated large amount of bitcoins (850,000) and mass dump those coins on MTGOX when price crashed from $1200 to $300, since normal sheeples in the market only look at the price, they will get panic and dump their coins on the way down, this can essentially send coins to $1 in one night due to insufficient fiat money in the exchange, and then bitcoin is back to 2010

But MTGOX discovered these huge amount of dump and removed them from the market, saying coins were stolen. So they successfully defended the exchange rate, but they went down too. Actually they have used many different way to prevent the crash of bitcoin (heavily delay the fiat withdraw or almost make it impossible, so that bitcoin is only way to withdraw)

Even this scenario is fictional, the possibility remains, and risk get higher when price reach even higher ground. Unless there is a consensus among all bitcoiners to protect the exchange rate (like central banks intervene Forex market to protect their currency's exchange rate), this will always be a threat

And from market manipulator's point of view, during the accumulate->pump->dump process, they will accumulate more and more coins thus have more ammunition next time

Just like Soros did, these kind of attack against the exchange rate is very common among hedge funds

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=594901.0

Bitcoin will NEVER EVER be one dollar again.

There are thousands, millions, chomping at the bit to see 100 USD again.


When the price on Gox dropped there was a huge influx of wire transfers trying to nab cheap BTC.

I will throw every dime I got at a 50 dollar BTC!

Then why MTGOX exchange rate dropped below $100?

There are good reasons for such a US centric perspective.  Since at least 1945, the United States has been the political and economic guiding force of the entire English speaking world.  Which, thanks to the British, was and remains the only truly global empire to ever exist.

And don't forget, that Japan remains a US protectorate.  If you don't think that US government agencies do have an influence on the MtGox case in Japan, you're delusional.  I'm not claiming that is how the world should be, I'm saying that is how it actually is.  One of the obvious and professed motivations for Satoshi to create Bitcoin in the beginning.

Because it became fairly obvious to many users that MtGox itself was failing, and therefore the MtGox trade price wasn't real.  The other exchanges never got anywhere near $100.

Because there were no buyers because they were not able to put FIAT into gox soon enough. (or did not dare too loose all)
IF there are no buyers, price drops.
Other exchanges were fine.

Because once the thief realized he couldn't get the BTC out (Knowing none was actually there.... because he stole it all.)... He attempted to cause a panic, reflected in other markets, to lower the price so he could get more from the ones he stole and had cashed-out previously on other exchanges.

As for us... The buyers... Why pay $800-$400 when you see it is going to $100, and you can get 8x to 4x more, for the same money.

In any event, those coins that were stolen, were part of what has been keeping BTC on a steady decline. (Part of it.)...

The one thing that is becoming clear, over the historic charts, is this... BTC is becoming more stable, and they will soon turn into more of a gradual slope upward, with less erratic falls in the future. (Look at historic charts with the LOGARITHMIC scale, since this is an exponential growth coin. Linear scales are for FIAT.)

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgTzm1g10zm2g25zvzl

See, in this chart above, you can see that the end of the steady fall (Which is not abnormal, and damn near predictable as the sunrise), is ending, and will soon launch to the next high of $12,000-$6,000 USD/BTC. I have no fears buying BTC at this point, or selling things for BTC. It is not like going from $500-$6,000 or $12,000, is going to be much more gains than going from $300-$6,000 or $12,000... Heck, I could buy all the way up to $1000 USD/BTC and still feel comfortable about the next coming months. It's a win-win situation buying BTC at the moment. The hardest part is getting BTC with USD for most of us.

Need some visuals to go with that chart?

http://s18.postimg.org/dtmj7y1mx/Untitled.jpg
P.S. This is an older chart... missing the last few weeks... It is near the end of the orange low line now.. the "Bleed-out", before the pink line which is the "Incline" to the next level.

P.P.S. A bitcoin year is not 12 months... it is closer to about 8-10 months. From peak to peak.

Perhaps Fed controls some large usa based exchanges.

The center of the world has shifted to Asia and whoever doesn't know that hasn't been in Asia recently

There have been many other long lasting empires before; the US haven't been the richest for that long compared to UK or China and they won't be the richest very soon when their unfunded liabilities, budget debt, negative trade balance and heavy cost of public spending will lower dramatically the average american standard of living, it already relatively did when you compare the average american way of life in the 50's to what it is now

There are a lot of human and physical capital in the states and a spirit of freedom moral and work that can be the foundation for a return to what allowed them to become the richest country in the first place : innovation, freedom, low taxes, small government

they can't really control bitcoin anywhere near as well as they can control fiat.

In fact, they can't even control it as well as gold. Since gold is often stored in vaults and all you get is a little receipt that says you own x amount of gold that is stored at their vault. However, they could easily sell that gold to someone else, and as long as no one claims it, they'd be none the wiser.

if they'd try to do that with bitcoin, they'd most likely not come very far with their scam.

Now yes, they could buy a lot of bitcoin, but that would increase the price a lot. Now if they'd dump bitcoin afterwards, they'd just be handing out cheap coins and since they no longer have a majority because they just dumped their stash, they have also lost their control. If they want to buy t back, they'll drive the price up again, and they'lose a lot of money in the process.

Bitcoin is just nearly impossible to really control

Why would you keep your gold in their vault?
You should rethink your story because it is the same with bitcoin.
Bitcoin can be held in vaults other than your own house because it is way too portable for a robber to take it away from you.

If you choose to store your 10000btc at another place, they are more or less in control. If you don't hold it, you don't own it.
Ok, there are some work arrounds to make it more difficult, bip38 and multisig.

No. If they did it would probably be utterly fucking worthless by now. Judging by their track record.

http://www.reclaimyourlegacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Dollar-Value-decline-1913.jpg

You may be correct.

Because they were no longer buying bitcoin, they were gambling in goxcoins. Either they could cash out very cheap bitcoins or they could lose everything. We all know what happened to goxcoins.

You can store a bitcoin in a vault but you'd still be the sole owner of the private key. Or at the very least have an x-of-y key. With gold though it's not possible to have a key. And for various reasons it does make sense to 'own' gold but not store it at home.

For example the delivery of gold is expensive, and the risk of getting robbed and losing thousands worth of gold are quite high. While if you store it in a vault it is insured against theft. However the vault owners are nog stupid and they know most people will not pick up their gold for a long time, so they sell the same gold again and again. And on average each ounce of gold has ~48 owners as a result.

In other words if you own gold you better buy your own firesafe and lock it in your own home. And if you own bitcoin, make sure you have your private keys, and back them up in a secure location, or preferably multiple locations.

Can't put anything past them. Many have floated the theory that the whole Bitcoin system was started to get people used to a cashless society where every transaction can be tracked. I don't buy the theory myself though. However, they can certainly cause havoc in the markets due to all the seized BTC they have!

No government can completely control bitcoin, however they can heavily influence it. Just look at China. Even a single announcement from their bank, causes panic and price dropping a good margin. The US government is also holding the second largest amount of btc from the silk road bust I believe. If they want to directly crash the price, they can dump it into the market at any moment.

what is this fed you speak of  8)

Big banks and the government that use fiat currency to fund wars and their political agenda ;)

I sincerely hope they do.  The price will crash (temporarily) and I could scoop up a lot of btc at bargain basement prices. :)))

oooh! good stuff  :D

One word in reply to your post:

Horseshit.