What if all the stores in the world stopped accepting U.S. Dollars all at the same time? 

Even if everyone around the world stopped mining Bitcoin at the same time, which is impossible under any normal circumstances, the major problem would be waiting for the difficulty to adjust.  Other than that, it wouldn't be a problem at all.  We could all just go back to mining on laptops.

The price shot up from speculation

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.

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.

Actually it's the miners that determine the minimum price.  Bitcoin could never trade for just a few dollars with the difficulty at its current level.

The price shot up from speculation, and miners brought it back down, but miners also keep it above a certain level.  In the end the real value of a bitcoin is the amount of electricity it takes to mine a bitcoin.  If anybody could mine a bitcoin for $5, then nobody would pay $200.  But they can't, so they do.

When it costs $1000 in electricity to mine 1BTC, the price will be over $1000. 

I always use my bitcoin as soon as I buy it, usually to buy altcoins.  My plan is to sell the altcoins for more BTC, and then when I have enough BTC I'll put it in a cold wallet.

Ok, since you asked.

I'll come back after some time has passed and see if anyone is still making money with this coin.

Of course, your answer will be "Plenty of people made money", and you'll be referring to the people at the top of the pyramid who made money from all the people below them.  

I guess you're saying it's a Ponzi scheme rather than a pyramid, but it can be described either way depending on which definitions you're using. 

Because of the hyperinflation built-in to the coin, it is designed to become more and more worthless.  The people who get in at the top make the most money, since they can start dumping their stake rewards while the price is relatively high.  The people they sell to are the next level down, who can sell their stake rewards for less than the top level, but still at a profit.  The second level is selling to the third level of people, and it will be much less likely for them to make any money because everybody in crypto who wanted to buy in has already bought in by that point. 

If we could get an honest answer from the person who made this coin, I'm sure he would say that he intended the coin to function that way.


 

It's the definition of a pyramid scheme.  The only way to make money is by dumping the worthless coins to more and more people, and the final bagholders will lose all their money.

Yes, getting herpes is considered lucky.  If you like painful sores on your genitals.

I'm peanut butter and jealous, because I don't have herpes

Yes I am a jealous girl.  I always wanted to have the exact same fever blister on my lip as another person, but with different colored hair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cu-P4ni1bI

You bought bitcoin for $0.01 and sold it for $0.10?

That doesn't make any sense, and you don't know what you're talking about.

If the difficulty was in the trillions, then it would cost thousands of dollars in electricity to mine 1 BTC.  No miner will spend $2000 to mine 1BTC and then sell it for $40.  If miners can't pay their electricity with BTC, then some of them will stop mining, and the remaining miners will become profitable again. 

Plus, the price could never reach $40, because if the price ever hit $100 then I would borrow every penny I could get and spend it all on bitcoin.  And so would a lot of other people.



"No one mining bitcoins" would mean that half this forum died in a disaster, and the rest of the world magically started hating money.

In your imagination, when no one is mining bitcoins, what happened to me and all my computers and all these piles of video cards?

If no one was mining bitcoins, then we could go back to mining with old laptops.  It's not like every asic farm in the world will simultaneously stop, so any downward trend would happen over time and the difficulty would slowly adjust. 

But it seems like the charts at Poloniex, Cryptsy, or Bittrex would give you most of the information you would need

Sounds like an opportunity, I'll give you first chance to register the domain

Supply and demand?  Where does the supply come from, and how much does that supply cost?  How much demand will there be to buy a coin for twice the price of mining it for yourself?

The cost of mining is the most important factor in the price of any real cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, since the beginning of Bitcoin.  That's why there are mining calculators - because electricity bills don't pay themselves.  You can ignore the cost of mining, but only for a month.  Then you won't be mining anymore, because you won't have any electricity, because you were selling for unsustainable prices which were lower than your mining costs.  Then the other people who have common sense will still have electricity, and they will continue selling for more than their mining costs, and the coin's price will still be determined by mining costs. 

There are speculative bubbles - people paid $1000 for bitcoin because it will cost more than $1000 to mine a bitcoin, in the future.  Why did the price come back down?  Because there are still plenty of people who can mine bitcoin and sell it at a profit for $200, so that's what they do.  The price is determined by mining costs.  If it cost them $1000 right now to mine 1 BTC, then the price would be over $1000 right now.

Of course there are coins that don't cost anything to produce, and those coins have no real value because they were made for free.

Because the minimum value of a proof-of-work coin is the amount of electricity it takes to mine 1 coin.  If you spend $1 to mine 1 coin, you're not going to keep mining it and sell it for less than $1.  

When the block reward is reduced, you are now spending the same amount of electricity for less coins.  If you were spending $1 worth of electricity for 1 coin, and selling it for more than $1, but now you're spending the same $1 for .75 of a coin, you will have to start selling for more than $1.50.

Of course if half the people stop mining, then you start earning twice as many coins for your electricity.  But Dogecoin is big enough that it can't lose all its miners overnight.

Merged mining can be a big problem for some coins - if you're mining Vertcoin and already selling your coins for a profit, then suddenly you are getting another coin for free, you can dump those extra coins for any price and it's 100% profit.  So it's not great for a smaller coin to merge with a bigger coin.  If both coins are roughly equal in the size of their networks, then maybe the price of both coins gets cut in half and you can pay for half your electricity with each coin.  

But if Litecoin miners are merge mining Dogecoin, then there is no danger of miners dropping out after the block reward is reduced.  They would also have to stop mining Litecoin, and they won't do that just because Dogecoin is slightly less profitable.  Therefore, difficulty will remain the same, while rewards will be reduced, which means people will have to sell Doge for a higher price to continue paying their power bill.




Unfortunately, a lot of devs have no idea what they're doing.  Satoshi had a pretty good plan, and Bitcoin's price is forced to increase by 2 separate mechanisms:  increased difficulty and decreased rewards.  Now that Dogecoin will never reduce rewards again, the only way the price will ever go up is if more miners start mining.

But if Bitcoin goes mainstream, then it will bring Litecoin and Dogecoin with it.  Bitcoin's price will continue to rise as long as people keep using it, while Dogecoin's price will be more similar to fiat currencies.  But fiat currencies also work, for a while anyway.

Is it historicalbtcaltcoinvalues.com?