Bitcoin Forum

Can the Government destroy the Bitcoin by hoarding them?

Why would they spend all that money just to destroy it? This makes no sense.

which government?

hoarding would cause the price to go up..

Let 'em. It will make our coins more valuable.

The worst they can do probably is cause BTC prices to temporarily become more volatile (by hoarding an extreme amount of coins, and releasing them all at once after prices settle - an extreme case). "Destroying" BTC (by destroying the wallet containing the hoarded coins for example) won't affect much in the long-run, as BTC is meant to be infinitely divisible - any remaining coins in circulation will take their place.
The only true way to destory Bitcoin as a whole would be to either hoard ALL 21 million coins (thereby completely removing it from circulation), or obtain and maintain >50% of the total network's hashing power. As ASICs are still rare, and with the current network speed of ~60 TH/s along with the increasing price of BTC, either option would be extremely costly endeavours, and realistically, I just don't see this happening.

Let's imagine I just bought every BTC out there... what is the value of 1 BTC if I own all of them???

The price will not GO UP if one person were to hoard them and not USE them. They would become useless.

I think if they wanted to destroy it they could do it easier by making some massive propaganda about how bad these anonymous currencys are and how they are used by terrorists and are a threat to children, then pass a law to forbid them or destroy the concept in another way whilst many people will have been brainwashed into disapproval of not just btc but any other alternate cryptocurrencie existant or to be created.

*puts tin foil hat on*

That's pretty hard to imagine, because.... well, it'll never happen.
I own a bunch of coins and there's no way you could buy them all, not for all the money on this planet.
If the price is so high (due to you trying to buy them all) that you have to pay me millions of $ for half of my coins, why would I sell the other half?

Feel free to try.  :D

hahahaha i wear it doble layer, cosmic rays are strong lately..

No but seriously, it makes sense, it wouldn't be the first time the media is used for a purpose, is it?

One person cannot own every bitcoin. So long as The People own 5% of bitcoins it is divisible enough to trade with. 

It is not the same thing if one person own 95% of gold and The People had to trade in tiny specks of gold dust that
are easy to lose.
 

OMG... I was stating an example to debunk what DogStar said about if people hoarded all the BTC the price would go up.

The same goes for if everyone hoarded 1 BTC and no one spent them... then the price would go down. Because the BTC would have no intrinsic or perceived value if no one used them for anything.

Yes government spend tax-payer USD/Energy to buy bitcoin and for what exactly??? LOL Remember Bitcoin requires a permanent feed of USD/Energy, this feed never stops and only must grow if Bitcoin's usage grows.... Who's gonna pay to keep BItcoin alive???? YOU?? ME???

BITCOIN TO DA MOONNNNNN

It would be better for them to hoard gold, not enough BTC to go around.

Someone rich could buy all the bitcoins, then sell them. And keep doing it to keep prices unstable. Not sure what benefit it would bring exactly but its possible.

Man, if the Government really does try to buy out all of them, people will just start dividing their coins down smaller and smaller and putting up smaller and smaller amounts on MTGOX for larger and larger amounts.

Their is always gonna be that one last person that decides that he's gotta hold that last satoshi. Or probably a good thousand people that decide that they've gotta hold what they think is that last satoshi. For the good of civilization and all that jazz, you know.

Destroying the wallet would just end up causing the price to skyrocket. If the feds really wanted to mess around, they'd buy assloads of BTC, then sell them all at the same time. THAT would erode confidence. However, the fed by definition moves slow. By the time that happens, probably an even bigger-ass corporation would have decided that BTC is too sweet to let the government screw it over, and will start providing liquidity.

You seem to think that if someone (or some government) extremely rich would just put down X amount of money, they can suddenly buy all bit coins. Well, no. No matter how much X is. Quite some coins out there are simply not for sale.

I for example own a bunch of bit coins, and at least half of them I'm just NOT gonna sell any time soon. Same for lassdas above, and many other people.

Compare with gold: if someone puts enough money on the table, could they buy ALL the gold in the world? No, plenty of people got gold stored in their houses or in their wives' jewelry or whatever and they will simply not sell that in the forseeable future.

then you should be the last man standing and see what the bid is.

Governments cant destroy bitcoin.

1.) They dont have the hardware to gain it themselves (supercomputers my ass).
2.) Since BTC Raised over 110 yesterday, they cant afford to buy them in mass anymore.
3.) People wont sell BTC cheap anymore, its raising and raising.
4.) Even if finance authorities want to control BTC, they could never get a hold of transactions at all.
5.) The amout of Bitcoins is limited, therefore you cant melt it with any fiat money system (no inflation/interests).

And even "if" the Bitcoin system was in danger, it would take a week, maybe 2 weeks - and those dangers would be fixed.
If necessary - within a new BC system - thats the way to go, no one shall be able to stop it.

governments destroy by regulating.   like the poker sites.....

Bitcoin will destroy itself

Bitcoin requires permanent feed of Energy
USD does not

Ok it won't destroy itself but it can't grow more than there are people willing to feed it with increasingly higher USD/Energy forever

what?

Well destroy might be exaggerated but what I'm saying is that Bitcoin requires an permanent stream of ingoing USD/Energy to keep it alive and well, USD's don't need that at all (gold neither for that matter)

Like mentioned elsewhere on this forum, Energy is the 'anti-value' of bitcoin

PS: this doesn't mean the BTC price in USD can't go up from here

Thanks!



If you mean energy to mine a bitcoin if it rises it would just rise the price of btc again. Not make it impossible to mine and shut it down.

I can come up with three money-is-no-object scale attacks that would significantly reduce the value of Bitcoins.

Overt:

• Raids and account freezes on two or three major exchanges.
  

Covert:

• Spin up massive amounts of mining hardware (well in excess of the current mining capacity of the network) and push the Difficulty out to where transactions won't be processed in a timely manner.
  
• Spin up massive amounts of mining hardware (well in excess of the current mining capacity of the network) and load the blockchain with junk transactions.
  

There are also some inexpensive attacks:

• Denial of service attacks against Bitcoin nodes that distribute transactions and the blockchain.
  
• FUD operations.
  
• Attacks (guys with guns) on two or three major exchanges.
  
• Get a backdoor committed to the official bitcoind client.
  

Less 'public' bitcoins = Higher scarcity = Higher Demand = Higher Price

 ;D

Buy all the coins? I'm sick of this moronic argument over and over again.

How are they going to buy all the coins when most of them are hoarded in offline cold storage wallets, by anonymous people alot of which will probably never be sold at any price?

Maybe the US government should buy all the gold in the world and then hoard it so it becomes worthless.. yea good luck with that too.

Probably the worst argument in the history of the internet and thats saying something.

if the government would start hoarding, the value of the dollar would go down in relation to the bitcoin, so they would fuck themselves over.