Bitcoin Forum

How hard would it be for Central Banks to buy 90+% of all Bitcoin now&future.

If they did this they could effectively crush the price on the exchanges, making bitcoin unprofitable to mine and secure… After a few up and down swings they would effectively corner the market financially and once enough of you's get burned, you wouldn't dare put another dollar into bitcoin..

They could effectively take control of the price, crush the network similar to oil manipulation, and if so desired then, control the rate of creation of bitcoins IE they could always sell and buy, with the narrative, it is our intention to destroy bitcoin, the network behind it if you touch bitcoin, you will lose…


Considering the lag required to get Fiat into bitcoin via Centralized exchanges they could easily manipulate the price lower by having the largest fiat balance in the market and also the largest bitcoin balance, and they could easily act as buyer and seller manipulating the price lower..

I doubt the mass market would adopt the p2p transactions or local bitcoins or anything not heavily regulated and protect leaving a void on the buy side..

Perhaps defeating the FED over time might work, but it could take 20-30-50-100+ years before they lose control and the reality seem, if they want to have possession of 99.98% of bitcoins they could. And the price being $1

It is also unlikely to think the mass market will adopt a different alt coin for the fed to wage its financial war again and cause a huge score of more losses as the fed accumulates the alt coin and then forces the price back to zero-ish.

They could never buy 90%, but they could pump and dump it.  If they wanted to waste several billion dollars just to destroy the price.

How hard would it be for people like you to stop making retarded threads like this and retarded who is satoshi threads.

It wouldn't be hard at all but also not worth the money as they would have just killed one currency and ten others could take its place.

Right now they might be able to buy 90% of the coins that are still accessible (private keys not lost). Well, maybe not 90%, but 75% or so. But then, at some point, the price will most likely skyrocket. What happens then will be interesting, Bitcoin could either become really expensive or worthless because such a big amount is being held by a single entity!

The OP is saying that they would dump all those coins, destroying the price.  And yes, they could easily destroy the price if they had that many coins.  But they couldn't get them, and they wouldn't dump them if they did.

It doesn't matter if it's the government, or the banks, or both of them working together, because Bitcoin reduces the power of both and gives more of that power back to us.







They could not.  Even if they did, they could not dump it down to $1, and they wouldn't even want to.

#1, Satoshi still has over 5% of all bitcoins, so the government cannot get more than 95% even if they got everybody else's coins.

#2, there are true believers who got in early and will never sell for any price, like the guy in The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin.  They are waiting for Bitcoin to take over the world, and then they will spend some on real goods and services.  But they will never sell for fiat, because that goes against everything they believe.  So that's another 5%, or 10%, or even more, that the government can never buy on exchanges.

#3, there are people who paid $1000 per BTC, and they're not selling right now for $230.  They're waiting for it to go back up, so they don't lose their life savings.  They will not sell to the government for $1, because they would rather keep their 20BTC instead of selling it for $20.

#4, if the price gets any lower than it is right now, there are a lot of people who will start taking out second mortgages to buy more BTC.  The government can't buy it all if other people are still buying.  So if the government did start dumping and destroying the price, people would start buying cheap and holding.  They wouldn't buy for $199 and then sell it back to the government for less.  So it would create more hoarders, and the government would have an even smaller percentage of total bitcoins available to buy.

#5, the Winklevoss Twins could end up with over $1,000,000,000 worth of bitcoins, depending on the price.  That's a billion dollars.  But they also have millions of dollars in fiat.  So, if their investment started going down the drain, the price dropped, miners stopped mining because it stopped being profitable, then the Winklevosses would spend a few million dollars to set up their own mining farms, keep the difficulty high, and protect Bitcoin.  You don't think they'd spend a million to protect a billion?

See, government officials aren't the only ones with money and power (in some countries).  That's the entire point of decentralization, and that's the reason why private money and individual freedoms are hated by totalitarians such as communists and socialists.  Money is power, so having our own money gives us power we can use to protect ourselves from governments and banks and Hitlers.  People who want to take all the money away from private citizens really just want to give all the power to a few people in the government. 

So they call rich people evil, because rich people limit the power of government.  They say it's unjust for a few hundred families to control a majority of the wealth, but they don't mention what happens when just 1 family controls all the wealth, like in North Korea.  I'll tell you what happens when you get rid of all the rich people - the government is free to murder and rape everyone, and people sacrifice their lives trying to escape and go somewhere that still has rich people.

Because it's not really about rich people, it's about personal freedom.  There can be no freedom without property rights, and that means a free system doesn't allow the government to take your money against your will, no matter if the excuse is for healthcare or saving the whales or just because you're evil for having money.  And if they can take away all the money from a rich person, then they will have no problem taking everything from you too. 

Notice that whenever someone is accused of being greedy, it's followed by a demand to take all of that person's money.  "You're greedy, I want your money so give it to me."  And it's not the government saying it, because there is no such person as "the government".  It's just a guy who has acquired the power to take people's money by force and spend it on whatever he wants.  Government leeches need us to produce the wealth so that they can take it, so they don't want to destroy Bitcoin.  They just want to control it.

And since "the government" is just some guys who want power, they like to make friends with rich non-government guys who have lots of power (assuming they don't get rid of all the rich guys).  So if the government bought up 75% of all bitcoins, they would be working with the Winklevoss twins the whole time, or big banks, and probably set up a Federal Bitcoin Bank through which they would lend Bitcoin through an off-blockchain system that would allow them to use fractional reserve banking.  That way they could own 10 million BTC and lend 100 million BTC, effectively printing as much money as they want.

That's one reason why you shouldn't keep your bitcoin in exchanges.  Be your own bank, or you are forced to trust the government and the fiat banks.

Destruction of Bitcoin via tanking the price wouldn't necessarily kill Bitcoin. It could *potentially* drive up its use, as merchants may see devalued Bitcoin as far more valuable long term. They'd receive more Bitcoin for their products, and hold onto their funds long-term with the hope of a price recorrection. Such a recorrection isn't too far fetched as whenever the price drastically drops, volume will go stagnant for a while, then spike when the price stabilizes. Due to the uncontrolled inflation rate of the currency, in nature people will pay what they believe it is worth. That's the nature of decentralization.

If the value crash destroyed moral in the Bitcoin community, either a Bitcoin 2.0 will emurge, or we will all switch to one of the 20+ popular altcoins. Switching to a new currency would take time, but after one is determined to be "the next Bitcoin," it's volume would skyrocket, directly causing its value to as well.

It would be impossible, that's how hard.  Assuming first that 90%+ of all BTC was even available for exchange, the act of trying to purchase it all would drive the price up such that it would quickly become cost-prohibitive to purchase it all. 

Wash rinse repeat… I think bitcoin can be killed… perhaps they would prefer to control it, but i cannot imagine they like the no censorship/limited quantity and perhaps even its ability to take over the economy… You could hurt a lot of people before it goes mainstream and any alt coin would be discredited before it even got started.

GUYS!!!  I am trying to give the central bank the answers its need to think its hurting us… Granted it will help us if they boost the price!!! Even if they crash it again...

It's more easier to them to buy a lot of ASICs and execute a 51% attack against the network than buying 90% of all bitcoins.

Anyway, even with a 51% attack, they couldn't control the emission, because it's hardcoded on the protocol.

I highly doubt 90% of all bitcoins are even in circulation. Hell, I doubt they could purchase half of all bitcoin without putting in billions of dollars in the first place. Even then, it wouldn't completely crash the prices for eternity unless they did get 90+%

Why on earth would central banks just throw away money?
Bitcoin would still exist even if they tried.

I think so too

making it unfeasible such action.

I can imagine it would be easy to manipulate the price but I don't think it will destroy bitcoin once and for all. First of all, money printing is essentially an option for them which means that they can do whatever they want to create that paper money out of thin air. If this ever happens and somehow for certain reason they managed to grab hold of 90% of the share, they is still another 10% held by the community.

With that control in hand, they can pump as high as possible and then dump to as low as possible, just to kill off the interest and market sentiment but as long as the demand for bitcoin is there, eventually fundamental will work its way back again.

This. Also lets not forget all the lost Bitcoins and the ones which have ended to a landfill in someone old computers wallet.

too long thread : if you want buy more than 1000 BTC per hour ... btc price will be ... stratospherical ... rocketed.
so, you can't buy all BTC because, the price will be too high ... to buy.

it's this, the free (and not limited) market of BTC exchange.
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw9x61GSIE1qigzmv.gif
in less than 3 hours, 1 BTC = 1 000 000 USD without a single problem for this value.

tbh it would be no problem to buy every bitcoin as long as they can pay with fiat.

They can because they can generate an endless supply of fiat whenever they want.

Will they do that? I don't think so. Bitcoin at this point with its current market cap is in no way a threat for them.

But that might change in the future, which is why they don't like it.

they could make themselves the bitcoin bank for many users around the world, who still want a centralized thing(trust me they are many, they don't ever care about decentralization), it could be one of the possible future scenario of bitcoin

buying bitcoin people and in change offer security

i don't think they will able to buy that much bitcoins
even if they did half of that , it will skyrocket the price of bitcoin

How are they gonna do that? The exchanges dont have all the bitcoins, there are bitcoins in personal wallets and a variety of different websites like casinos, so when they start buying on exchanges they would make the price go up

Let me guess, you're new to free markets?

They could do if, if they created a new currency allegedly backed by fiat, that people then would prefer to use in stead of the real thing. The backing would over time be reduced, and the new fiat devalued with respect to bitcoins, while printing new fiat lala-coins.

With the printing, they could amass most coins. Much like they did with the gold.

The crucial point this time, is that there is no need for bitcoin-backed fiat, bitcoins are just better. Should a need for low-tech paper money arise, paper-wallets could circulate.

This like others pointed out. If they wish to drop the price, all they can do is dump the coins from the auction., But that wouldn't kill bitcoin

90% of the coins are not even in existence but buying 90% of the existing coins may be theorically possible but 90% of the bitcoins would need to be sell to them.

If the banks tried to buy that many coins all it would do would push up the price of the remaining coins that they can't get their hands onto to insane amounts. I'll be very rich if they do, so they can go right ahead but they're not going to do this as it obviously wouldn't work.

I am just curious, is there no other way that they can hard fork it or shut down the network of bitcoin ?

can you shutdown the internet network ?
can you shutdown the P2P File sharing network ?

well ... it's the idea with bitcoin.

 ;D you can't.

no, no, no, no, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Come up with a better idea.  :)

A fraction of one per cent of coins are on exchanges at any one time.

If an institution wanted a significant numbers of coins they'd have to be dealing with die hard hoarders and early adopters. An email arriving in their inbox from JP Morgan isn't likely to be very welcome.

If they carried on buying on the open markets you'd have your 100,000 dollar bitcoin in very little time at all.