Bitcoin Forum

There's an upper limit of 21 million Bitcoins. Currently that approx. 100 million USD. For big players like Goldman Sachs that's peanuts.

Should they decide one day that Bitcoins might impose a threat on them in the near future, they could buy large amounts of Bitcoins - and "destroy" them (e.g. move them to offline wallets - and "throw away the key"). So basically dry out the Bitcoin market.

Is that a valid scenario? What do you think?

Why is that a problem?
Since every single bitcoin is high divisible I can't see the problem.

Btw. This has been discussed tons of times before.

Wouldn't work:

1. They would quickly drive up the price to thousands of dollars per BTC and themselves run out of money before getting all the BTC.
2. A single satoshi left could run the world economy with a minor minor update to the client allowing more decimals.

Big players won't spend millions and millions of highly loved fiat to bring Bitcoin down. They know much other ways to do it, at least cheaper ones. e.g. lobbying a law.

Yeah, maybe, but any player with control over a large percentage of bitcoins could play havoc with the market.  Who would use bitcoins if an iphone costs 10BTC one week, and 100BTC the next?

edit: nonetheless, I'm not so worried about this attack.  As LordFrog says, it'd be an expensive way to attack bitcoin.

No. I think you have absolutely no idea how the market works. Not all bitcoins are for sale at the same price, and some are not for sale at all. If a person (or corporation or government) wants to buy a large number of bitcoins, they can only do so if they can convince a large number of people to sell, and some people will not be convinced to sell their bitcoins unless a high price is offered. For this reason, the more bitcoins someone wants to buy, the higher the price per bitcoin becomes, and they won't be able to buy all the bitcoins because some people will not be willing to sell for any price.

If someone did buy a large quantity of bitcoins, driving up the price in the process, and then sold them again, the price would just drop back down for the same reason (to convince enough people to buy, they need to offer a low price). If they destroyed their bitcoins instead of reselling them, the price would simply stay high forever. They lose all the money they put in and everyone else becomes a little bit richer. For some reason, I just don't see any bank or government doing something like this. :)

My 5 BTC that I hold on to could run the world economy with ease :) and there haven't been a total of 21 million bit coins mined so their plan would be found out long before anyone would let your scenario happen.

Agreed. Absolutely wouldn't ever happen... and wouldn't work regardless.

This wouldn't work solely because as their become less bitcoins on the market, the value of a single bitcoin will increase. The whole thing would just balance its self out and life would go on. Basically a reverse Zimbabwe :D

+1

The thing is when they approach some amount of btcs like 20 % the prices of the next btcs would increase exponentially making it simple unstable for them to buy more just to destroy this system ...