What prevents one large player from buying up most coins?

[InternationalBankAlliance]

Well at the rate some of these reserve banks are printing "toilet paper" money, it could just be likely that enough fiat will be available to try things like this. Only problem is, the more they print, the less

it's worth on the open market.

...and yet bitcoin is only worth half as much US toilet paper as it was at its peak. How is this possible?

[the_poet]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

[PigUsher]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

About $ 300,000,000 worth of BTC is traded every day.
ELI5 why it's impossible for a large player to snag enough coin to do what OP describes?

[mkc]

This is interesting, most people will set a limited price, and say I will buy under this price. This is realisticly what happened when w brothers enter the market. They bought every coin under 100 bucks.
Why nobody will buy all coins regardless of the price? Because that will make him the ultimate bag holder. We can always reset to another coin, especially Bitcoin has no intrinc value.

[PigUsher]

This is interesting, most people will set a limited price, and say I will buy under this price. This is realisticly what happened when w brothers enter the market. They bought every coin under 100 bucks.
Why nobody will buy all coins regardless of the price? Because that will make him the ultimate bag holder. We can always reset to another coin, especially Bitcoin has no intrinc value.

1. Say you're invested in BTC, you use it as a store of value, your "wealth" is in BTC.
2. BTC becomes worthless (you're broke).
3. Where do you get the money to buy BTC V.2.0?

[lister storm]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

well i doubt that someone would invest that much money in bitcoins in a single run, also people would dump a lot of coins and start dumping in order to make a lot of money of the price drop

i think the biggest thing that prevents rich people from buying a lot of bitcoins is the fear that they will lose a lot of money if they buy their bitcoins and people start selling in order for price to drop

[BillyBobZorton]

If a larger played buys a lot of coins, it just means existing players get even more rich... so it gets even out. The more you buy the more expensive it will be to keep buying.

[DeathAngel]

Seems a stupid scenario, how realistic is it to discuss 'one large player buying up most coins'. It'd have to be a sovereign wealth Sheikh or something to afford that.

Seems dumb to even think of it as a possibility, will never happen.

[PigUsher]

Seems dumb to even think of it as a possibility, will never happen.

10 billion dollars "market cap" is a fiction, it's (bitcoin spot) * (total BTC issued to date). Of course, many of those coins became unspendable, and many are held by "I'll hodl this 4eva" zealots. The number of coins needed to move the market is ridiculously small, and what OP has described is commonly done, all the time. That's how exchange owners make money.

[European Central Bank]

i dunno how much patience the market would have for repeated monster dumps. at some point most people are gonna walk away leaving the mysterious buyer to play all by himself. it's a great way to burn your billions. can't think of any other reason to do it.

[bangro]

Its almost impossible to make a new coin and try or force big investors to don't buy a huge amount of coins,since they see potencial they will invest ,very easy to understand.

[NUFCrichard]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

About $ 300,000,000 worth of BTC is traded every day.
ELI5 why it's impossible for a large player to snag enough coin to do what OP describes?

Those coins are probably traded frequently, there will be millions of coins that never move and would be held regardless of price.

The ultimate goal of buying all the Bitcoins would be stupid anyway, if they suceeded they would end up with a worthless personal coin, which people wouldn't mine anymore!

[jonald_fyookball]

The Hunt family tried to corner the silver market in 1979-80.  It didn't end well for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

Other examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market

If someone tried to do that with Bitcoin, history would likely repeat itself.
There would be a huge bubble that would eventually burst, and life would go on.

[PigUsher]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

About $ 300,000,000 worth of BTC is traded every day.
ELI5 why it's impossible for a large player to snag enough coin to do what OP describes?

Those coins are probably traded frequently, there will be millions of coins that never move and would be held regardless of price.

Of course those coins are traded frequently.
And of course there are millions of coins that will never see daylight, because lost and/or hodlded by fanatics who'll "never cash out." That only makes the sum required to move the market smaller, not greater.

The ultimate goal of buying all the Bitcoins would be stupid anyway, if they suceeded they would end up with a worthless personal coin, which people wouldn't mine anymore!

If most of the bitcoiners are to be taken at their word, Bitcoin will make banks and governments obsolete.
So either this place is full of kids talking shit, or not stupid at all...

@jonald_fyookball: The goal is totally different. In my scenario, bankers aren't trying to get rich off bitcoin, simply to kill it, as one would kill a virus or a parasite.
If bankers wanted to get rich off BTC, they could do that too, same as exchanges are doing it now.

[takingthis4]

The price would simply skyrocket, making it practically impossible to buy most coins.

i doubt that the price would grow that much that it would be really hard to buy any of the bitcoins because if you want to push the price that much you would have to be the richest man in my opinion

i think that most of the people are buying bitcoins to make a lot of profit in the near future while people who are already rich dont need to do that, i guess thats the main problem

[extrabyte]

What stops a large player buying a huge amount of coins is that the stability of that coin is not as he wants, and seeing the recent price change every big investor should be afraid, buying the entire book would increase the price of bitcoin pretty good.

[abercrombie]

Pretty sure the exact scenario described by the Op has happened, drove BTC all the way to the $780 top, then dumped big time to $555.

The Bitfinex CIO was in Whalepool chat describing something similar. During the rally, he said there was a contingent of market forces that take advantage of the low liquidity on weekends to spike up the price. He didn't go into details, but it sounds pretty easy for a multimillionaire.  

[BillyBobZorton]

I don't think people really understand the economics behind supply and demand and game theory, its like those "what if fed just prints infinite money and buys all bitcoins?" guys.

[SolomonRising]

Manipulation happens all the time in investing.  But in this case the investor would be cutting his own throat. 

[TheButterZone]

I ask that every day nobody responds to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1354558.0