Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has a limit of their total volume supply in the market. Like bitcoin, according to Bitcoin Supply - YCharts (https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_supply) is at current level of 19.26million total bitcoin supply.

I’m inquisitive to know if there’s any possibility that a person can’t purchase bitcoin anywhere because all the people holding the total supply of bitcoin are not willing to sell but hold them, maybe for some reasons known to them or possible pump they’re expecting before selling it.

That is unlikely to ever happen. Also, note that bitcoins are worthless if they cannot be traded since that is their only function.

This is generally how the market works.

If everyone stopped selling their bitcoins they'd go up in value because speculators would expect those people wanting a higher price.

But there's usually always someone wanting to sell and someone wanting to buy so even if neither liked the current prices, they'd place asks and bids and those orders would converge (meet) at a new price that the asset would become.

That is not possible, there are millions of people that owns bitcoin, as the price is increasing and reducing, some people are always ready to sell bitcoin and this is every second, that is why if you want to buy bitcoin now, you will be able to buy it.

Such a scenario is very unlikely. Bitcoin is a currency and should be spent like one. People even sell in the bear market at a loss, there will always be someone who wants to sell his bitcoins and someone who wants to buy, that’s why it’s a market. If hypothetically no one is willing to sell and there are buyers in the market, the high demand will increase the price of bitcoin. The problem comes when nobody wants to buy bitcoin.
 P.S @oshosondy you made a wrong quote, I think you meant to quote the OP not jackg.

For that to happen, it would have to be poorly distributed among only a handful of holders, because they'd have to agree with each other to hold and not to sell until a certain price point is reached (or not sell at all).

But if it ever gets to the point that there are only a small number of holders - that would mean that there was no demand and people, in general, decided to get rid of their bitcoins, meaning the price would rather be at very low levels. Plus, as mentioned above, if there's no active market - there's no value. And if people can't buy it, they'll shift their interest to something else.

What we will see though, are situations where demand exceeds supply forcing the price up. So you'll most likely always be able to buy 'some' bitcoins but not necessarily at the desired price.

This is unlikely happen, though there's a small chance that might be happened if there are no altcoins around.
When the supply keeps reducing the price also keeps increasing, so might people will hard to accumulate in the future and those who hold now that has a targeted profit will also sell their Bitcoin, so it's called trading and that's how the market works now, besides from Bitcoin there are too many alternatives that people might choose.

That's why Bitcoin was created for the main purpose of electronic payment system, not storing value.

Good question, but human nature tell us that at some point, there will be individual that is more willing to sell for good profit. So there could be that person going to hold for a long time until such time that they will think of selling it.

So it's the basic supply and demand, less supply, more demand means price is going to pump. But in the future, there are sellers and so obviously there will also be buyer willing to purchase regardless of what the price is.

Unlike with oil, precious metal and other commodities, it's unlikely that we'll ever see a shortage of Bitcoin, because bitcoins are not consumed, it's a currency, so it just changes hands. Sometimes it gets lost permanently, but it's not big enough to matter.

Why would the holders refuse to sell their coins when they are offered a good price?

In fact, what people are trading is a number on exchanges. They don't really trade Bitcoin or altcoins which are in exchanges' hot or cold wallets. What they see in their account balances are also number, not real Bitcoin or altcoins. They only have actual Bitcoin or altcoins after they request a withdrawal and get approved by exchange to proceed it for them.

It does not happen too often but at some points especially with pump and dump altcoins, you can see their 24hr trading volume suddenly is bigger than their total marketcap.

You can think further from your question, why do institutional investors pay their attention on Bitcoin and spend their investment funds for Bitcoin firstly when they join the cryptocurrency market?

It's because Bitcoin has biggest trading volume in cryptocurrency market that makes their entries and exits more easily than altcoins and with less impacts on price than on altcoins.

How long can one hold Bitcoin.?
The buying and selling cycle on the Exchange will continue to occur every day, you can buy Bitcoin whenever you want. The circulation of bitcoins can be reduced if one of the whales loses access or he dies, Bitcoin will continue to be stored in his wallet if other people cannot get the private key to enter there.
Bitcoin can still be bought by anyone over the last decade, it is very unlikely that someone can't buy Bitcoin. The goal of buying Bitcoins is not how long you can hold them, you will release Bitcoins when the cloud turns bright, because the goal is to profit from it.

Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies have such supply limit. There are numerous coins and tokens which have an uncapped supply and more can be created or burned at the discretion of the owners.

For a market to exist, there has to be a willingness to buy and also to sell, without this there is no trade and no value.
For there to be no Bitcoins available for sale, there has to be a high level of centralization among holders for such a consensus to be reached, that is like asking, "if bitcoin can ever be $1 again if all the holders choose to sell at that price?"

Bitcoin being exchanged for fiat or some other asset does not count as spending.

- Jay -

And such situation is impossible to happen since you can't control everyone decision, similar like how government create a lot laws in order to make their citizens doesn't do anything that will harm themselves or the country, but every month there's always a citizen broke the laws.

Everyday Bitcoin's circulation supply will increase because there's always a miner who mine Bitcoin, actually it's make more sense will the miners stop to contribute on the network when all of Bitcoin already been mined? this because the fees will be very high since the miners are make money from holders who create transactions, not from mining anymore.

We still still have some crypto that doesn't have a total supply the owner can choose to add more of the coin/token into circulation at any time he wishes to. For example, Ethereum has no fixed supply.


I don't think it's possible for someone to keep hodling Bitcoin forever at a point some issue will definitely force the hodlers to sell off his/her coin even if the price keeps increasing exponentially you will still see those that are going to sell their for one reason or another; some night sell due to the fact that they are scared that the price might drop so out of FOMO they'll sell off their coin.

And again we still have some decent exchange that are still going to be operational if a time like this ever comes so you will be able to buy from an exchange directly though the exchange might decide to alter the price since no one is willing to sell theirs.

Totally unlikely for literally 100% of holders to not have a sell offer knowing the high number of holders BTC have, that you might as well call it impossible. There's always a price to something that people will be willing to sell at.

It is worth knowing that a lot of altcoins actually have unlimited supplies specially the big ones with huge premines such as ETH and XRP.

At the end of the day bitcoin is a currency and it will remain liquid. That means it will be traded on exchanges even if it had a fixed price (like after reaching mass adoption) and it will be used for payments like any other currency. In other words there will always be a lot of different ways to acquire bitcoin.

There's no limit to buying or selling your bitcoin most of the time this only limits the exchange you are using because some of them don't have a KYC like the binance I know only around  0.06 BTC for daily withdrawal unlike in the verified you can buy and sell your assets around 100 BTC also currently we are cutting the supply of the bitcoin for the upcoming halving we are looking forward with it sooner or later better to accumulate as long as possible.

It's very clear that such moments are rare in recent years, because there's no way it can happen and as it doesn't look like a reversal in the economy in Cryptocurrency, for sure it will destroy its growth, but it's rare and even that's not possible for everyone, because needs in life and adding assets is also far more important than holding them and surely it will be profitable for the holder if sales and purchases are carried out.

we can judge that the more Bitcoin people are looking for, but when the supply in the traded market is very limited, of course, it will have an impact on increasing the price of Bitcoin.
but will it work so well when Bitcoin is not traded and what is this asset held by so many people?
I guess what makes Bitcoin have a growing value is also that there are traders who are constantly growing interested in the market.

Thank you all for your replies, I have indeed know more about how bitcoin functions in that aspect now.


So literally, this is what actually increase or decrease the price of bitcoin. The demand of purchase of it in the market with the availability of holders wanting to sell?

Many are holding and doesn't have plans of selling it but it's not going to cover the whole supply that we've got in bitcoin's economy.

Yes, it all applies the law of supply and demand. Thus, we're seeing the price of bitcoin now up and that's because there's a buying demand.

There's always people that want to sell it at any price and not just us individuals but also exchanges.

Correct and the more participants there are in the market the less likely it is that such a withhold will ever take place.
It could happen at a small exchange with 100 people but it won't happen when there's 100 exchanges with 500+ active traders on each of them.

Of course with the limited number of bitcoins there can be a supply squeeze once governments come in trying to buy. For a country spending a billion dollars on bitcoin is nothing because they can print their money. They have infinite supply while the supply of bitcoin is finite.

Such squeeze will not last forever though. Once people see what's happening they will stop selling to push the price to ridiculous levels like 1 million per coin and then again start selling once they're 100x in profit. In that case the buyer will either have to accept offer or fold like in poker.

That sounds really horrible but no country will do that with their economy only to control bitcoin. With that limited supply of bitcoin government can try to gain control over bitcoin and make it manipulated, but no one would dare to do that.
Although bitcoin is peer to peer, so the government also can not take control of everyone's coins.

There are governments known for printing each other's money on agreement and some known for printing currency of other nations without their control or say (it's been a fairly common war tactic in the past).

Most central banks try to control inflation, if you get a country whose inflation goes negative or below target (like the UK/EU do a lot of the time) then there's a chance bitcoin's price could pump if they step in and do something like offering low interest loans, to buy back their own bonds or to buy shares in companies in that county (thus allowing those places to have a greater amount of free cash they can use to invest in assets).


If it did happen with a lot of people I wonder who would actually be in control of that situation. A troll anywhere could probably cause the price to crumble and force a lot of people to sell really low (there's obviously almost no chance of this happening but it's probably another reason why it wouldn't - a situation where everyone tries to manipulate the market might light to a situation where all the exchangers are just manipulated into selling lower).