Bitcoin Forum

What if the government of a country is irresponsible and issues a large amount of currency to buy Bitcoin?
No matter what the reason is, inflation is already very serious now. If some unscrupulous governments print a lot of money in order to repay debts and fight inflation, of course it will not be one time. Credit money no longer has credit.
When a chain of interests is formed between big countries, behind the crazy printing of money is the harvesting of countries that are not rich. What would it look like if it were all exchanged for Bitcoin?

I don't see this as being irresponsible. El Salvador has added bitcoins to their balance sheet for a couple of years now and other countries doing so would only make Bitcoin more popular among their citizens and grow adoption.

Irresponsible money printing is one of the major reasons for the current inflation, printing more money to solve the problem would only make it worse and further weaken the currency being printed.

That's probably their step to curb high inflation and to right against the currency devaluation. Which country you are referring to? El-Salvador?


Money printing is not a solution to repay debts. That leads to hyper inflation like Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Rather adding bitcoin as a reserve currency, may help that country to repay their debt during next bull cycle. Probably that's another reason the government is adding bitcoins in their reserve.

They can't just inflate and inflate their currency to buy bitcoin because that would slowly but surely kill their currency through hyperinflation; effectively screwing up their people and killing the government's reputation at the same time.

But regardless, this is why bitcoin exists — because some government's are indeed irresponsible.

Why would buying Bitcoin be a irresponsible thing for a government to do? Buying a decent financial asset isn't the same as wasting the money for nothing.
I don't think that it would be possible to buy BTC by using the national currency of some underdeveloped country. Bitcoin is mostly being bought by using stable fiat currencies like US dollar, euro, British pound, etc. Such government would have to print money in order to buy a stable fiat currency first, which will eventually devalue the national currency and cause hyperinflation.
There's nothing wrong with buying Bitcoin in itself, the only wrong thing is printing money out of thin air, in order to buy Bitcoin.

There are a couple of problems that they will face. For starters printing money, regardless of where it is spent, will eventually cause inflation so there is no benefit in buying bitcoin when the currency is dumping hard against it and the country's economy is crashing down.
Secondly, bitcoin price would start rising fast if someone starts buying large amounts and it will then cause a chain effect where others seeing the rise would start panic buying shooting the price down. So before they know it they have to print even more money to buy the same amount of coins they planned because the price will have gone to the moon.
Finally, not all bitcoins are for sale. Only a fraction of it is available on exchanges to be sold if someone is making huge purchases and cashing them out, the supply shortage on exchanges would be an even bigger force to push the price to the moon.

In short price would be multi million dollar per coin before they could even fill their coffers.

I wouldn't necessarily put this one up as a good example. I have some sympathy for Bukele, but so far, the decision to purchase bitcoins at an average price of around $31k was not a good decision. He would get praise if bitcoin shot up, so, on the same token, he should be to blame if the bitcoin price takes an adverse direction.

There's a big difference between having the balls to take risks with your own funds and wealth and risking someone elses' funds (aka taxpayers' money) pretty much without any responsibility in case of loss.

I could not read to thaw end of hoodie post. When I am chanced I would do so, and yes my country governments is irresponsible and the way they have been able to handle things that concerns crypto-Currency has really been appalling.

But also if with their hate on Crypto-Currency they haven’t been able to achieve anything.
+Crypto-Currency remains decentralized so they can’t do much
+ users in my country are fast shifting to saving in crypto-currency, making them have lesser hold.
+ crypto-currency related businesses are springing up even with all their threats.

You mentioned and implied that a government is irresponsible if it issues a large amount of its currency to buy bitcoin. I don’t think that could be classified as being irresponsible. People, corporations put their funds into different investments that they feel would bring in profits either in the short or long run.
Inflation is rising slowly and if a government prints more money in order to service its international debts and “fight inflation”, then they’re being highly irresponsible. Printing more money to service debts would only create more problems for the country and definitely increase the inflation rate that they say they want to fight to reduce.

I don't believe the case of El Salvador is valid to the point OP is trying to make. I believe OP is talking about a government led by crooks who would ruin the national economy in order to get Bitcoin for their own selfish purposes. That is what I understood

As far as I know, El Salvador uses USD (American dollars) as official currency within her territory, so realistically El Salvador cannot print more FIAT., for obvious reasons.

Quite weird for a government to do that. Governments that monopolize money are usually in favor of supporting their currency-- not one that leaves them with less favor. It'd make more sense to print that money and give them to themselves (either directly or indirectly) rather than switching to the separation of money and state, just because they can acquire bitcoins more easier than the rest in that way (and for once).

Printing money can lead to devaluation of the currency and potentially harm the economy in the long run. It's important to note that governments have various tools at their disposal to address economic challenges, and it is not necessarily likely that they would choose to purchase Bitcoin as a solution.
But it is possible that the demand for Bitcoin could increase if governments were to engage in large-scale currency printing, as many investors may see Bitcoin as a potential safe asset (which it is) in times of economic fall.

BTC is capable of solving many problems and the governments are yet to consider that fact as legit.

All governments are irresponsible so this would be nothing new. But this is simply a hypothetical question that I'm not really sure has any answer to.  If the price of bitcoin explodes then I assume everyone comes out happy. In any legitimately governed nation does this, then it most likely would have to be voted on and approved.  Of course they could do this in the background and just not tell anyone. 

I really can't imagine this happening to a country, and what are the benefits?

Printing large amounts of money will only create new problems even if they plan to invest in bitcoin. Rising inflation could be the most likely and even they will lose value from currency.

The following is just an illustration when the government prints a lot of money without control, the value of the currency is lost and someone has to carry a cart of fiat currency to buy something. Random image from google.

https://i.imgur.com/XrFp35T.png

AFAIK, if a country is planning to print as much money as they can, there's a governing international body that has to be informed doing that so they'll be monitored. There are some legitimate reasons why it can be done but I don't think that they'll ever allocate to do it for bitcoin.
Unless that country is really a bitcoin nation like El Salvador but even them, they are not telling that they've got plans like this because I think it may not be impossible but highly unlikely.

I think inflation in any country is caused by extreme corruption of the government of that country.  Inflation runs rampant especially when the reserves are depleted during a period of corruption, printing more and more money. So it's not fair to blame Bitcoin adoption only. But if they invest more than what can theh afford, I think they could have financial problems.

Isn't it a good idea? It means governments are killing their own native fiat currencies in order to adopt bitcoin. Then we would have less fiat currencies and more bitcoin usage as currency. Citizens in despair, would immediately exchange all their fiat for bitcoin, following the same decision of their government. A mass exchange of money to bitcoin plus the extinction of weak fiat currencies in the world.

It can look irresponsible, but not more irresponsible than printing money and expecting the economy to be fixed and prosperous following this methodology.

Lol that image though, Iran is going to be like that very soon with the recent 25% rise of inflation within 10 days, how fucked up is mulla's government, talking about irresponsibility eh?

Smart govs would steal natural resources from their people, produce electeicity and mine bitcoin, morons would take their people's money and "invest" on bitcoin, both are doing wrong by their people, one is evil and smart, one is greedy and dumb.

Hey professor, what is your opinion about the recent devaluation of Iranian rial currency? last week exchange rate was 1$= 370,000 Rials, today the exchange rate is 1$= 430,000 Rials. Do you think your doomed beloved government made the stupid move by printing money to buy bitcoin or they are just devaluing Rial in order to make up for budget shortfall?

when it comes to money printing (increasing "public debt") governments dont see it as a number that increases they see it as a % of value decreasing

lets call value the bread loaf value. where 1billion breadloaves is a value basket

in 1982 a bread basket was $1b
now its $1.8bill

this means if they had a 30 year debt to repay $1b
if they paid it off in 1982 it would have cost them 1billion bread loaves
if they pay it off in 2022 it costs them 555million bread loaves

thus they love inflation. if they can get 200% inflation in 30 years they can half how much real value needs to be paid back

When I see this picture, should I feel very happy, because I basically use mobile phones for all my living expenses now. If buying a piece of bread requires the money of a cart, I would like to know if the materials used to make banknotes are more expensive than this cart?

satire:
he is taking that 80lb of paper to a retailer to buy a 0.1lb of toilet roll

Be responsible or irresponsible, be knowledgeable, experienced and skillful to manage their inflation or not, governments always lead their countries inflation. They can not stop it and it is how governments manage their national economies.

It is possible that governments use their fiat currencies to buy Bitcoin. So far we have yet known that who is (are) Satoshi Nakamoto? The founder of Bitcoin can be a person, a government or any entity.

Two topics about inflation on Bitcointalk
Inflation and Deflation of Price and Money Supply (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140793.0)
[CHART] Bitcoin Inflation vs. Time (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=130619.0)
Bitcoin Block Reward Halving Countdown (https://bitcoinblockhalf.com/)

It doesn't work in such a simple way, indiscriminate printing of money only makes the economic situation worse. If a country could print money to buy bitcoin, it would have done it long ago with gold or other assets, they don't need to wait until now to print money to buy bitcoin as a national reserve asset. Because you can't buy gold or bitcoin directly with your country's currency, instead, you need to convert to USD or euro, or yuan to be able to buy. Look at countries with high inflation like Venezuela, the more money they print, the more their currency depreciates.

To find the answer to your question we only need to look at the past, what has happened when a country behaves in an irresponsible way and they print a lot of money to buy what they want or to pay their debts?

And the answer is clear, other countries stop accepting their currency as it is not worth the paper in which it was printed, besides even if during such circumstances there will be people willing to sell their bitcoin for useless fiat, a great deal of long term holders have been preparing themselves for that scenario, and they will do what they know how to do best, which is to hold so no country should be able to abuse their power and get away with it as easily as you think.

If the government can do that, we can say the government structure is really bad since they can bribe the auditors and the other people who have huge power in their country, it mostly will came from third world countries where the security and discipline is really bad. Although Bitcoin could be used to hedge against inflation, but I predict if those government did that, it will cause huge problem to the countries and people will lost their trust since the government is fan to play with the monetary regulation.

They don't need to bribe anyone, the government can still freely print money, but they won't because they will know what the consequences will be. You look at two countries, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, they print money out of control, and as a result, their currency is almost worthless, and the country is in a constant state of crisis.

Printing more money is no different from a double-edged sword, on the one hand helping the economy overcome the crisis, but it also increases the risk of high inflation when the amount of money circulating outside is overloaded. Running an economy isn't as simple as we think, so I never blame the government because we don't know what they're going through.

Wouldn't this be the same idea if the government just printed money for buying their own stuff? Not even necessarily limited to Bitcoin, but rather a lot of other stuff. It'll just end up killing their entire economy. With more prints the more they'd need to spend not just for buying Bitcoin but for more stuff, plus it reduces the idea that the government is incapable, leading to more and more problems down the road. In an extreme case I don't think them being overthrown would be an impossibility.

Even if your country is irresponsible, you are still a part of the country, right?
The country will think carefully before making any plans, and they will definitely consider many consequences. Bitcoin itself is a means of fighting inflation. Bitcoin is volatile, and it would be a risk that no one could understand if it were all converted to Bitcoin.

This will definitely not happen. Excessive money printing will only make inflation less and less valuable, which will make the country worse. Bitcoin will not be excessive, but will be halved every four years.

If Bitcoin started a bull run, I am sure we would see an increase in deposits to centralized exchanges from holders willing to sell at the new and higher price. It's a good thing that more and more people are withdrawing their coins from custodians, but as soon as the value reaches a target they have set in their heads, people will be back to depositing, congesting the network to take advantage of the situation and cashing out.   

I guess we understood OP differently.
The way I saw it, acting irresponsibly would be trying to destroy Bitcoin through any means possible, so as to ensure there's no threat to the dominance of fiat.
I was then replying to the part which tagged buying Bitcoin in large amount as being irresponsible (as explained above), and the way I see it, it wouldn't be the same thing and buying Bitcoin would infact make Bitcoin more popular.

It has nothing to do with buying bitcoin but in any case there are no exceptions to the rule.

Any government in anywhere in the world and in any point in the history that has printed money to save its own ass has caused inflation. Why do you think US and EU have high inflation rates these days? That's not because two other countries are fighting each other. That's because they went on a printing spree over the past 2 years and now they reap what they sow. They will have more inflation in the near future because they are printing even money now.

I don't want to go off-topic but inflation in Iran is a lot more complicated than just government printing money (although that's one of the reasons). It is a century old problem (97 years to be exact) with reasons ranging from heavy reliance of oil sales/price that causes inflation when the sale drops like the inflation ATH record in 1950's where oil sales reached absolute 0. All the way to the broken banking system that was copied from West on 1925 and was made a lot worse when they introduced "private banks" during 1990's and let them inflate "liquidity". This is all on top of the economic war that has been fought ever since 50's (ie. nationalization of the Iranian oil industry).

That's a good point, people always start selling when price rises specially after a long bear market.
In long bull runs however, I think (based on what I've observed in the past bull runs) the sell pressure decreases as the price goes higher. For example in 2017 there was a lot more sell pressure around $1000 than $2000 and as time went by and rise continued the pressure decreased to the point where it was very little above $10,000 which is why we saw a very smooth 2x rise. By that time more people were buying than selling.