Bitcoin Forum

So I just told my younger brother about Bitcoin yesterday and today we got to discussing in-depth about it. It's the first time he's heard of them. As you would expect he was curious and asked very thoughtful questions.

One question he asked that really intrigued me is how an entity (one with very very large amount of fiat) that wanted to destroy Bitcoin could pull it off...

He asked: Couldn't they just buy up every single Bitcoin in existence at the highest asking price?

I don't know how to answer this, but it sounds to me that may be the single biggest soft-spot for Bitcoin to me.

Chances are this has already been asked but I don't know how to find the thread so I'll just post this.

What do you guys think?

Not everyone is selling their bitcoins; if someone did buy all the bitcoins for sale at the highest prices, the value of the bitcoins of the people that didn't sell would increase a lot.

At any price?

Yep, some people are in it for the long haul, and some simply wanna spend their bitcoins on stuff instead of "cashing out". And many when seeing the sudden rise in the price will wait a bit to see it rising more.

Buying all bitcoins would require substantial funds. The current market cap is 1 300 000 000 USD, and the price of the coins would increase a lot as the buyer was emptying all available exchanges. The price would rise to very high levels, and the buyer would have to spend maybe 100 000 000 000 USD to buy all the coins that were available on the exchanges. Still, far from all coins are for sale.

you figured it out 99bitcoins

everyone pack up it's over

I'm actually a strong believer in bitcoin don't get me wrong.
And this question has poped into my head sometime in the past but I never paid attention to it at all.
But when someone that just heard of Bitcoin mentions it, it kinda makes you ponder on it a little more than when you think of it yourself.

You can't deny however that for someone who has tons of fiat to throw around, this is way easier than the 51% attack we hear so much about (yes, this is a different kind of attack - but still effective enough to do serious harm)

I think the good thing is the fact that Bitcoin being mined slowly for the next few decades is one of the best defenses we have againt this kind of attack. At least we would have time to organize a response. If at a certain time a large portion of Bitcoin holders have not incentive to sell bitcoins for any fiat (at any price), Bitcoins should escape the reach of this attacker for good.

Dude, it is not an attack, it is a buff.

At the moment there is about 40 000 bitcoin available on 'visible'  market  if they buy all of them price will sky rocket ....

Yeah, all it would do is drive the price incredibly high. It's true that if the price gets high enough pretty much everyone would sell. I can't imagine not selling them at $1million a coin...

But as long as there's even 1 Bitcoin left, the whole thing could still run. Remember, the basic unit is actually the Satoshi, which is 0.00000001 of a Bitcoin. So each bitcoin is 100-million Satoshis. If each Bitcoin is worth $1billion, then each Satoshi would be worth $10. Still manageable to run the entire economy off of 1 Bitcoin, but it becomes a hassle at that point as it would need to get divided further down. I'm sure the protocol could be adjusted to further divide it down though.

The biggest problem with that scenario is that whoever is doing the attacking is obviously anti-Bitcoin. Yet what they just did is commit a massive transfer of wealth from anti-Bitcoin individuals, to a bunch of pro-Bitcoin individuals, who now have the knowledge and the incredible wealth behind them to create Bitcoin2.0 (if each 1BTC is a Billion dollars, then literally anyone who's pro-Bitcoin is now a Billionaire). And since Bitcoin is open-source, making a Bitcoin2.0 would be trivial, and this time a hell of a lot more powerful with a bunch of Billionaires backing it.

They would have to keep going until everyone who's anti-fiat is a Billionaire. Personally, I sure hope they do that :)

So someone would throw a lot of fiat in Bitcoin, thereby raising its price to $1 million per coin, so everyone around here could sell half their stack and enjoy a life of leisure and luxury. How is that even a problem?

What someone with a lot of money could do, (and it would probably cost them dearly), is to pump and dump, over and over. They could jack the price up to sky-high amounts, and then dump all the bitcoins they bought, making the price incredibly unstable, and scaring everyone away.

Excellent reply! This actually makes a lot of sense because the last few people to stay in the game will have huge fiat reserves with which to show the attacker a taste of their own medicine. By inflating the $%&* out of the fiats by spreading it around. Etc etc.

Good one, Thanks ;)

I need to get some sleep now lol it's 5 in the morining.

Thought about this it will become infinitely harder to buy the next bit coin, so it just pushes the price up and up and up, you can throw as much money as you want in and its all ok.

No, because not every single Bitcoin is made yet. In 2140 the last bitcoin will be made.

Look up Supply and Demand.

Speaking for myself, I'll always hold the private key which controls the value of 1 BTC even if the price goes to $1x10^9.  That because I will have sold others as the run-up occurred and won't need the money.  I imagine there are quite a few other geeks like me who have secret keys controlling value.

Of course they can! I sell 1 bitcoin for 10 tons of gold. Oh look, i have another bitcoin, i sell this one for 100 tons of gold plus 1 ton of diamonds. But wait, i have another bitcoin here. I sell this one for a base on the moon and on mars.  :D Did i say that i have another bitcoin?

You now: You after the giant entity offers you 1,000$/BTC:

Only 1000$? Nah  :)

Well, 1,000,000$ would make me look stupid and irrealistic. :)

How about just starting a new coin? Or jumping ship to, say, bytecoin.

Replace bitcoin with gold.

How about a proper rebuttal, rather than name-calling? Of course we can always resort to handy little LOL-MEMES TROLL-MEMES when tough questions arise right? ;)

I'd say not.  I have 1 BTC that I will never sell.  So... that's 1 BTC they couldn't buy.

Crisis averted.  ;)

That's pretty much what me and my borther concluded would be the end result this actually happened, but then again we're back to square one. Except this time, as BigJohn stated, the pro-Bitcoiners would be billionaires who can use their new-found wealth to fund Bitcoin2/Bytecoin and maybe make its adoption rate a lot faster, etc.

Out of my 5 bitcoin I will only maybe sell 4 and keep 1 and will only consider selling it if my 1btc is worth over $1000 and only if Bitcoin2.0 was up and running  ;)

No Bitcoin2.0 no sale at any price  8)

Do you know that you can divide Bitcoins? Even if someone would by 99.99% Bitcoins the whole global trade could be done with that 00.01%. Althought the whole scenario is as plausible as asking what if somebody buys all the food from the world or something like that...

^^ The best way to put it

It's impossible to buy every bitcoin.

Yes, assuming the attacker wouldn't buy and sell them 10 second intervals we can carry on with one bitcoin or even .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000001 bitcoin for the entire universe.

The whole scenario is as plausible as someone buying all the dollars out of market faster than Bernanke and the boys can print more. I am pretty sure that you don't worry about that scenario very much, and that's for a good reason: It is impossible. Same with Bitcoins.

So if I bought up all the coins it would cost me many millions of dollars. Once only I have them they are worth nothing. Why would I do that?

Because you have more money than you can ever use or want and your motivations are to destroy Bitcoin for one reason or another.

But what motive could I possibly have? I would not be rich if I wasted my money so easily. Besides, as I bought up the coins the price would rise creating even more demand and encouraging more hording. It would be spectacularly expensive to even buy 10% of the market.
Rich people look for opportunities to make money not spend money.

Theoretically, you could buy as many as possible, and then sell them as low as you can, crashing the market.  For instance, if you were to buy a million coins, and just set up thousands of selling orders for $1 that would crash the market, leaving people with a lot of doubt over their stability, which is enough to scare the big boys away.

It doesn't matter if geeks are still using them, its normal society that they want to scare off!

I think how can u think no one thought of that before.

what a misleading headline of yours

Is not this exactly what is happening lately?
 

We're talking riches beyond your wildest dreams my friend ;)

You don't need to buy all bitcoins to screw up the system. You just need to have more btc than anybody else. Then you can take control over major bitcoin services, manipulate exchange rates and do a lot of other bad things, making profit out of this. And if somebody forks bitcoin-2.0 (there are a bunch of them already out there), just spend some of btc-1.0 to get as much btc-2.0 as possible, while they are cheap, and screw up bitcoin-2.0 for profit too.

But this is exactly what you want to do to fuck up the community. You buy a lot, while bitcoins are cheap -> btc rate sky rockets -> you make profit, and others suck because they can not buy cheap btc anymore.

They would also have to grab the entire BTC network to ensure no new coins fell into the "wrong" hands.

The price can stay high/go higher until the influx of suckers ...er, buyers persists. Then the music stops. Moreover at any time the manipulator lose its control/property of any coin he sells/profit from. Of course, if the manipulator has a money printer things could become interesting...

The problem is that if some guy manages to get 51% of all bitcoins in his hands (difficult, but possible), and bitcoin value sky rockets such that few satoshis are enough for living, that guy can buy your ass into life-time anal slavery for a tiny fraction of his assets.


Yeah, such things are really interesting. Is not the original goal of bitcoin (and other alt-money) to make such things impossible?

bitcoin needs an continious and ever increasing (if usage increases) Energy inflow that someone must pay for

Why is this discussion still going on?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all_the_existing_Bitcoins.3F

Thanks, this clears the question up.


Flawed by design. Guess, who is going to manipulate the market after all? :)

mt.gox

they have the most to lose

The OP should learn about what a corner is and how it is not as easy as one might think.

Why would that be a problem, exactly? Is it wrong to be rich? That shouldn't affect the rest of us one bit.

Also, the wealth of this person would existsonly because some people would be willing to offer goods and services for those satoshis.  Therefore talking about "anal slavery" is totally inappropriate.   A slave is someone who is forced to obey, not someone who willingly contributes to an economic exchange.

What? Getting your ass into slavery? For some individuals not a problem at all. But the majority do not like it. This is why all this bitcoin business came out, right?


No. If you get rich without making somebody a slave, it's good.


I don't know. There is a chance that it will.
 

Oh, tell me more about how Bill Gates fortune is making you a slave... Like someone on this forum once wrote: Don't fear a man with money, he can only buy things from you. Fear a man with political power, he can take things from you with coercion.

If you google for "history of humankind", you may find out that most of time people were getting into slavery pressed by financial force, not military or other brute force. This is how modern "democratic" world got into banker's slavery. Is a purpose of altcurrencies to free people from this kind of slaver, or did I miss something?

Ok guys, we may as well give it up. We have all been trying to cover up this flaw in the system so that the government does not enact this strategy.

I will be the bigger man and step forward to tell the truth. This is a huge vulnerability.

The US government and the Federal Reserve could wipe us all out by pouring tons and tons of money into Bitcoin.

I hope they do not do that, it would be so disasterous that I cannot imagine.

But we must admit this and hope that no Federal agent or someone close to the Federal Reserve reveals this to them, otherwise they may just go ahead and destroy Bitcoin by buying over and over and over.

I am just glad that no government officials are reading this now. If they were, I hope they would not go to their bosses with multi-billion dollar proposals to buy everyone's bitcoins. They would likely become heros among their peers and get laid...a LOT...once it all works.

Can you read English, dude? I wrote



A man with money has much greater chance to take political power than anybody else. 

You miss a lot.

Let's say I manage to buy ten million bitcoins.  Now, tell me: how exactly can I force you to wipe my shoes if you don't want to?  Nobody forces you to accept my bitcoins as a wage for your work!!

People could just say:  "this guy has gathered pretty much all the bitcoins.  Screw him, let's start an other chain from scratch!"

People already did what you say. There is a separate thread on this forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 Unfortunately, none of these altcoins fix any bitcoin flaws. All this work is done by smart people, and they will find good fix against all threats, I am pretty confident. But, we are not there yet.

But in a libertarian society where government is constitutionally limited it political power doesn't matter that much. So it is not money itself that can force you into a slavery.

I know they did.  Then why do you whine about a possible corner of bitcoin?

Na... Mt. Gox is Bitcoins Achilles heel! Vote here if you will still use Mt. Gox again after today's shenanigans: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166460.0

Edited my message, please reread.

Lemme guess:  you would like a currency that everybody receives equally, at regular interval and till the ends of times?

Damn commies anyway!

We need another good exchange that can compete with mtgox. So far btc-e and bitfloor are the only ones close.

No. Wrong guess.

We are coming after you, baby. MUAHAHA!!

lol!

Yep, this is a risk with anything which has a relatively small market cap.  You don't need to buy up everything in order to be able to manipulate the market. 

Essentially.

The more you pay for my first coins the less I'll be motivated to sell you the next 1% and so on. That is compounded by anyone realizing what you are trying to do. Considering that even if you can get 99% we'll have more than enough units, it's a pretty terrible 'attack'.