I'm a Central Bank trying to keep Bitcoin from being adopted

[mindtomatter]

My comments in RED

Every part is unfeasible.  First of all Central bank from where?
For simplicity, lets assume it's the Fed, which issues the world reserve currency.
The FED??? The Federal Reserver? ok, allow me to laugh very loudly... Do you really think the Fed will spend time and resources in knocking down a 1 billion dollar market? Dude Wall Street moves 3 trillion dollars a day!!! get real, bitcoin is a drop in the ocean! UNFEASIBLE! right there, and we should stop this silly argument and call it a day, however, for the sake of argument, I'll keep reading below.

Seems pretty obvious to me that Bitcoin didn't start as a 1 billion dollar market when it was worth $.00001 USD/btc, and it won't stay a 1 billion dollar market when it's worth, as you say, 10,000 per coin.  The bigger bitcoin gets, the greater the likelihood that it surpasses the US dollar for transactional (daily life) use.   This is because Bitcoin has a number of advantages which are not shared by paper currencies such as the US Dollar which I (the fed) am charged with sheparding.   So while it's a drop in the sea now, I (the fed) didn't stay in charge of the world reserve currency by not looking out for what's coming, but you're right about one thing.    I  would laugh long and hard when talking in public about Bitcoin because I wouldn't want anyone to know what a serious threat I viewed it as.  My concern would be the thing that legitimized all the claims its proponants make, which I deny.

Second, not all the bitcoins are for sale and if they bit a huge amount of bitcoin the price will skyrocket exponentially, and I'm talking near the hundreds of thousand per btc. offer and demand.
But the entirety of the bitcoin market is 1 BILLION USD  - Every month I print and  purchase 65 BILLION USD worth of Mortgage Backed Securities at face value - These are financial instruments that cannot be sold on the open market because they're really worth a fraction of the value the FED pays for them at, so clearly the amount isn't the issue.
I'm not sure what are you saying here... you can buy mortgage securities fine, you can buy horse shit for all we care, but you won't be able to buy bitcoin... especially when they sky rocket... who will sell you? me? sure, I'll sell the bank half of my bitcoins for 30,000,000 dollars... perfect BTC isn't my problem anymore I'm rich wich was my ultimate goal and everyone's goal in here... fine, the bank won, they knocked down the bitcoin system at the price of making every bitcoin holder a multi millionaire... sure that sounds feasible...


I think I'll find enough buyers willing to take less than 10,000USD per coin while I buy up 10% of the market.  I didn't say I'd do it all at once, in fact I've said several times I would take a relatively long period of time - 6-18 months where the market can become accustomed to the continual melt-up in value provided by having a consistent large buyer who is insensitive to the price.    And I'm happy you're rich!  After all, that makes the people who didn't invest in bitcoin hate you that much more for becoming wealthy in the currency that made them poor.

Let's assume you're right - In order to buy 10% of the bitcoins on the market the price goes up to $100,000 or even $100,000,000 per coin -  That actually accomplishes my purpose BETTER because it means newbies will feel like they MUST buy into bitcoin because it's clearly going up in value and will never come down.  "I wish I had bought it at $1000 per coin, so I better buy when it's $10,000 per coin so I don't miss out when it becomes $100,000 per coin.    
Again only a few noobs will lose money, the majority of the people (since the bank is buying) will be making profits left to right... Again, you don't seem to understand the power of offer and demand..

I absolutely do!  We agree on this!  Many  people will become wealthy as prices rise, that's VITAL for making sure everyone in the world with the means,  bothers to get into bitcoin - because the price is only going up, so you'd be insane not to!  

When I turn from largest buyer to the guy who dumps 10% of the coins in existence on the open market all at once, and then walks away - all those used-to-be-wealthy people like you will be throwing themselves out of windows because they didn't sell when it was 10% below the peak!  The rally had been going on for months or years, they thought it would continue at least another few weeks!      

Sorry joe, it wouldn't be just a few people - It would be nearly everyone.   You might have been a smart one and sold before the peak, but how many normal people did that before the 2008 crash?   Not many, and retail investing still hasn't recovered 5 years later.

The higher the price goes, the more attractive it is to those not holding any and the more likely they'll buy at the inflated price.   Then when I'm done accumulating, all the suckers are in the market, and I want to make sure they're never in it again I sell all at once and DO NOT rebuy.  With the largest buyer turning into the largest seller, demand collapses and as the price plummets all the newbies decide to take the loss rather than risk losing EVERYTHING, so they all turn into sellers to.
In order to SELL, people will have to be willing to BUY. Let's say again you bought 5,000,000 coins and the price is now near the $500,000 per BTC... and you start selling.... the price will start to go down and down it's not like you can sell all 5,000,000 coins at the same price... don't you know how an exchange works? Sure you might be able to sell a few at 500,000 and then it will drastically go down to 0.003 and you're stuck with 4,000,000 coins still because nobody will buy you for less than 0.00001 so you just lost an insane amount of money but that's ok, because you're the FED.... again UNFEASIBLE

It's called an bidless market, and it's very much a real thing.   Lacking buyers, the orders just sit there until they've been cleared from the system by a purchaser matching on the other side.

During a collapse, there is no-one who wants to be on the other side.  This is the reason there are elaborate circuit breakers and stops in modern markets, to prevent the value of that asset from going to near zero.

I can assure you that by the time they buy say 1,000,000 BTC the price would se so high that everyone here would be a millionaire with 8 digits!
your assumption is ok, I'm a bank and I have 10 billion to spare to crash this system... but you don't realize that:

See, as the central bank I don't care about you or the other people who have been invested in bitcoin all along and understand it's value proposition - I actually don't mind if you get rich off this because it exacerbates the wealth disparity in the currency, which makes people not like early adopters.    The only thing I really care about is making sure I HURT newbie bitcoin users so badly that they never even want to hear the word Bitcoin again, and every time someone says it they cringe, responding "it's a scam - Don't lose money like I did"
 Why would you care about hurting a bunch of people and I say a bunch..?? it'll be a minority... you'll lose a shit load of money and a lot of people will be holding that money... IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE AND IT WON'T HAPPEN
It will be most of the people with the ability to invest in bitcoin by the time I crash the market.   The people who have been in for a long time will be better off than others, some of them might not panic out, but they're still losing ALL the value that I put into the system, so even the winners will feel poorer.  When I sell everything, I withdraw all that money from the bitcoin ecosystem and it becomes a smaller place because of it.  

 I have to hurt people because that's the only way I can be sure they'll understand and remember my lesson: That bitcoin is dangerous, it's not safe for them to invest in, and dollars were good enough for their grandparents and should be good enough for them.

To a certain extent, monetary flows are a zero-sum game - If more transactions happen through Bitcoin, it means less happen through dollars.   That's a simplified explanation, but it scales to each local currency relative to local bitcoin adoption.   What doesn't make sense about that?


sorry, I just got tired of reading nonsense after nonsense, this is a pointless argument. a central bank works thinking cost/benefit and profits doesn't matter if it's privately owned or public. If it's public it has certain responsibilities from the social aspect. Your argument is weak and a bank will never do this, just to "hurt" some newbies in a crypto-currency that is 4 years old and it represents a fraction of the world economy.
You should change the title right now and put "Looks like I didn't know what I was talking about" and get this over with.

Calling it nonsense doesn't change that it's your arguments lacking coherency.    As I've repeatedly said, it's about keeping the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency, which is at risk if everyone decides bitcoin is better and uses that instead.  As a responsible protector of my currency, how can I let it lose dominant status?  Answer: I can't, so I take what action is required to protect my charge even if this results in collateral damage.  Do you watch the news?

And I guess he couldn't come up with anything else so he stopped responding at this point

[FreddyFender]

For a tomatter with a mind he never learned about red/green text. Bad tomatter!

[cbeast]

Actually, there may be a very easy way for a central bank to destroy Bitcoin. Just back their money 100% with precious metals.

[deathcode]

My comments in RED

Every part is unfeasible.  First of all Central bank from where?
For simplicity, lets assume it's the Fed, which issues the world reserve currency.
The FED??? The Federal Reserver? ok, allow me to laugh very loudly... Do you really think the Fed will spend time and resources in knocking down a 1 billion dollar market? Dude Wall Street moves 3 trillion dollars a day!!! get real, bitcoin is a drop in the ocean! UNFEASIBLE! right there, and we should stop this silly argument and call it a day, however, for the sake of argument, I'll keep reading below.

Seems pretty obvious to me that Bitcoin didn't start as a 1 billion dollar market when it was worth $.00001 USD/btc, and it won't stay a 1 billion dollar market when it's worth, as you say, 10,000 per coin.  The bigger bitcoin gets, the greater the likelihood that it surpasses the US dollar for transactional (daily life) use.   This is because Bitcoin has a number of advantages which are not shared by paper currencies such as the US Dollar which I (the fed) am charged with sheparding.   So while it's a drop in the sea now, I (the fed) didn't stay in charge of the world reserve currency by not looking out for what's coming, but you're right about one thing.    I  would laugh long and hard when talking in public about Bitcoin because I wouldn't want anyone to know what a serious threat I viewed it as.  My concern would be the thing that legitimized all the claims its proponants make, which I deny.

Second, not all the bitcoins are for sale and if they bit a huge amount of bitcoin the price will skyrocket exponentially, and I'm talking near the hundreds of thousand per btc. offer and demand.
But the entirety of the bitcoin market is 1 BILLION USD  - Every month I print and  purchase 65 BILLION USD worth of Mortgage Backed Securities at face value - These are financial instruments that cannot be sold on the open market because they're really worth a fraction of the value the FED pays for them at, so clearly the amount isn't the issue.
I'm not sure what are you saying here... you can buy mortgage securities fine, you can buy horse shit for all we care, but you won't be able to buy bitcoin... especially when they sky rocket... who will sell you? me? sure, I'll sell the bank half of my bitcoins for 30,000,000 dollars... perfect BTC isn't my problem anymore I'm rich wich was my ultimate goal and everyone's goal in here... fine, the bank won, they knocked down the bitcoin system at the price of making every bitcoin holder a multi millionaire... sure that sounds feasible...


I think I'll find enough buyers willing to take less than 10,000USD per coin while I buy up 10% of the market.  I didn't say I'd do it all at once, in fact I've said several times I would take a relatively long period of time - 6-18 months where the market can become accustomed to the continual melt-up in value provided by having a consistent large buyer who is insensitive to the price.    And I'm happy you're rich!  After all, that makes the people who didn't invest in bitcoin hate you that much more for becoming wealthy in the currency that made them poor.

Let's assume you're right - In order to buy 10% of the bitcoins on the market the price goes up to $100,000 or even $100,000,000 per coin -  That actually accomplishes my purpose BETTER because it means newbies will feel like they MUST buy into bitcoin because it's clearly going up in value and will never come down.  "I wish I had bought it at $1000 per coin, so I better buy when it's $10,000 per coin so I don't miss out when it becomes $100,000 per coin.    
Again only a few noobs will lose money, the majority of the people (since the bank is buying) will be making profits left to right... Again, you don't seem to understand the power of offer and demand.. 

I absolutely do!  We agree on this!  Many  people will become wealthy as prices rise, that's VITAL for making sure everyone in the world with the means,  bothers to get into bitcoin - because the price is only going up, so you'd be insane not to!   

When I turn from largest buyer to the guy who dumps 10% of the coins in existence on the open market all at once, and then walks away - all those used-to-be-wealthy people like you will be throwing themselves out of windows because they didn't sell when it was 10% below the peak!  The rally had been going on for months or years, they thought it would continue at least another few weeks!       

Sorry joe, it wouldn't be just a few people - It would be nearly everyone.   You might have been a smart one and sold before the peak, but how many normal people did that before the 2008 crash?   Not many, and retail investing still hasn't recovered 5 years later.

The higher the price goes, the more attractive it is to those not holding any and the more likely they'll buy at the inflated price.   Then when I'm done accumulating, all the suckers are in the market, and I want to make sure they're never in it again I sell all at once and DO NOT rebuy.  With the largest buyer turning into the largest seller, demand collapses and as the price plummets all the newbies decide to take the loss rather than risk losing EVERYTHING, so they all turn into sellers to.
In order to SELL, people will have to be willing to BUY. Let's say again you bought 5,000,000 coins and the price is now near the $500,000 per BTC... and you start selling.... the price will start to go down and down it's not like you can sell all 5,000,000 coins at the same price... don't you know how an exchange works? Sure you might be able to sell a few at 500,000 and then it will drastically go down to 0.003 and you're stuck with 4,000,000 coins still because nobody will buy you for less than 0.00001 so you just lost an insane amount of money but that's ok, because you're the FED.... again UNFEASIBLE

It's called an bidless market, and it's very much a real thing.   Lacking buyers, the orders just sit there until they've been cleared from the system by a purchaser matching on the other side.

During a collapse, there is no-one who wants to be on the other side.  This is the reason there are elaborate circuit breakers and stops in modern markets, to prevent the value of that asset from going to near zero.

I can assure you that by the time they buy say 1,000,000 BTC the price would se so high that everyone here would be a millionaire with 8 digits!
your assumption is ok, I'm a bank and I have 10 billion to spare to crash this system... but you don't realize that:

See, as the central bank I don't care about you or the other people who have been invested in bitcoin all along and understand it's value proposition - I actually don't mind if you get rich off this because it exacerbates the wealth disparity in the currency, which makes people not like early adopters.    The only thing I really care about is making sure I HURT newbie bitcoin users so badly that they never even want to hear the word Bitcoin again, and every time someone says it they cringe, responding "it's a scam - Don't lose money like I did"
 Why would you care about hurting a bunch of people and I say a bunch..?? it'll be a minority... you'll lose a shit load of money and a lot of people will be holding that money... IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE AND IT WON'T HAPPEN
It will be most of the people with the ability to invest in bitcoin by the time I crash the market.   The people who have been in for a long time will be better off than others, some of them might not panic out, but they're still losing ALL the value that I put into the system, so even the winners will feel poorer.  When I sell everything, I withdraw all that money from the bitcoin ecosystem and it becomes a smaller place because of it. 

 I have to hurt people because that's the only way I can be sure they'll understand and remember my lesson: That bitcoin is dangerous, it's not safe for them to invest in, and dollars were good enough for their grandparents and should be good enough for them.

To a certain extent, monetary flows are a zero-sum game - If more transactions happen through Bitcoin, it means less happen through dollars.   That's a simplified explanation, but it scales to each local currency relative to local bitcoin adoption.   What doesn't make sense about that?


sorry, I just got tired of reading nonsense after nonsense, this is a pointless argument. a central bank works thinking cost/benefit and profits doesn't matter if it's privately owned or public. If it's public it has certain responsibilities from the social aspect. Your argument is weak and a bank will never do this, just to "hurt" some newbies in a crypto-currency that is 4 years old and it represents a fraction of the world economy.
You should change the title right now and put "Looks like I didn't know what I was talking about" and get this over with.

Calling it nonsense doesn't change that it's your arguments lacking coherency.    As I've repeatedly said, it's about keeping the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency, which is at risk if everyone decides bitcoin is better and uses that instead.  As a responsible protector of my currency, how can I let it lose dominant status?  Answer: I can't, so I take what action is required to protect my charge even if this results in collateral damage.  Do you watch the news?

And I guess he couldn't come up with anything else so he stopped responding at this point

I just got tired or reading  your nonsense... that's all.. your argument is weak, it lacks substance, it won't happen. You print money as you stated (you the FED) and your money loses value. Go tell chinese people to sell all their US Debt and the US will go bankrupt, will they do it? of course not! they will not benefit from that either.
Again, you don't have a valid point, I'm sorry that you don't understand it. You might want to go study economics a little? I'm not being a troll, but seriously what you're proposing is unlikely if not impossible and you didn't provide a single decent explanation that has some sense.
Just ask the community here to see what they think...

[cbeast]

For a tomatter with a mind he never learned about red/green text. Bad tomatter!

Color blindness is not a laughing matter.

[mindtomatter]

Not being colorblind and not knowing anyone who has advertise their colorblindness to me, I do not think of it when post. 

Guilty as charged.

I just got tired or reading  your nonsense... that's all.. your argument is weak, it lacks substance, it won't happen. You print money as you stated (you the FED) and your money loses value. Go tell chinese people to sell all their US Debt and the US will go bankrupt, will they do it? of course not! they will not benefit from that either.
Again, you don't have a valid point, I'm sorry that you don't understand it. You might want to go study economics a little? I'm not being a troll, but seriously what you're proposing is unlikely if not impossible and you didn't provide a single decent explanation that has some sense.
Just ask the community here to see what they think...

Who do you think the largest purchaser of US debt is?    That'd be the Fed. 

The chinese didn't stop buying, but we're spending more than they're willing to lend us.

What you're saying would be true if we weren't running a 1 trillion+ yearly deficit, but we are and it looks like that won't change in the foreseeable future.  If you don't think the Fed is printing money and devaluing the currency already, you need to take a look around. 

Outside of attacking me personally and saying it could never happen, you really haven't said much here at all.

[Realpra]

Actually, there may be a very easy way for a central bank to destroy Bitcoin. Just back their money 100% with precious metals.

Indeed if all the worlds central banks actually started to do their jobs; keeping prices rock steady with no inflation or deflation and made transactions free and private and stopped seizing bank funds - the appeal of Bitcoin would lessen.

Add some exchange crack downs, attack-mining and repeated hacking attacks against all Bitcoin users and they might do very well.

As for manipulation I would buy 100 billion $ of BTC and then just sell slowly "forever" in such a way that anyone who held Bitcoins would always loose money over time for years and years. I would make a few millionaires sure but from then on drive most away.


However their system is fundamentally broken, they rely on printing money to line their pockets and keep their friends happy. It's a card house of excess and decadence waiting to fall.

It's a system of plunder with corporations paying politicians for parts of the pie. Well such a pie quickly shrinks and Bitcoin is the spark.

[mindtomatter]

Actually, there may be a very easy way for a central bank to destroy Bitcoin. Just back their money 100% with precious metals.

Indeed if all the worlds central banks actually started to do their jobs; keeping prices rock steady with no inflation or deflation and made transactions free and private and stopped seizing bank funds - the appeal of Bitcoin would lessen.

Add some exchange crack downs, attack-mining and repeated hacking attacks against all Bitcoin users and they might do very well.

As for manipulation I would buy 100 billion $ of BTC and then just sell slowly "forever" in such a way that anyone who held Bitcoins would always loose money over time for years and years. I would make a few millionaires sure but from then on drive most away.


However their system is fundamentally broken, they rely on printing money to line their pockets and keep their friends happy. It's a card house of excess and decadence waiting to fall.

It's a system of plunder with corporations paying politicians for parts of the pie. Well such a pie quickly shrinks and Bitcoin is the spark.

The goal isn't to destroy bitcoin - If you do that, another fork will pop up that fixes whatever caused/allowed Bitcoin to be forced out of existence.   

The goal is to discredit bitcoin, to prove it's unsafe and therefore should be left to people who are not you, the average user of  money.   

Can't start a new bitcoin fork that fixes most of the world hating cryptocurrency

[cbeast]

Actually, there may be a very easy way for a central bank to destroy Bitcoin. Just back their money 100% with precious metals.

Indeed if all the worlds central banks actually started to do their jobs; keeping prices rock steady with no inflation or deflation and made transactions free and private and stopped seizing bank funds - the appeal of Bitcoin would lessen.

Add some exchange crack downs, attack-mining and repeated hacking attacks against all Bitcoin users and they might do very well.

As for manipulation I would buy 100 billion $ of BTC and then just sell slowly "forever" in such a way that anyone who held Bitcoins would always loose money over time for years and years. I would make a few millionaires sure but from then on drive most away.


However their system is fundamentally broken, they rely on printing money to line their pockets and keep their friends happy. It's a card house of excess and decadence waiting to fall.

It's a system of plunder with corporations paying politicians for parts of the pie. Well such a pie quickly shrinks and Bitcoin is the spark.

Agreed. Bitcoin is the only way to reform the system without loud noises and weeping mothers.

[johnyj]

Manipulate the market is difficult, the best a central bank can do is simply deploy $100 million worth of ASIC mining farm, which is more than 10 times network total hashing power, and hide them. They will select a time when BTC is suffering from an internal problem and start all those hashing power in one night and make a 90% attack, make millions of transactions invalid and cause huge loss for merchants

But what is the purpose? If bitcoin is so great then why not join the game? It is just another star performence asset in their portfolio. Their debt based money issuering have huge sustainability problem and bitcoin is their only hope to bring the sustainablility back. Unlike housing, the demand for bitcoin can be endless, and supply is always limited, its price will never stop rising, means economy finally have a growth area which can last forever

Imagine in not so far future, almost 20% of people are working with bitcoin related business, this dramatically reduced the jobless rate, and those who still work get higher and higher salary due to labor shortage, then FED have to tighten to prevent price inflation, and that action have almost no effect for bitcoin, by that time, bitcoin value could still be driven up by physical goods/services

[Spaceman_Spiff]

So you win a battle, but you are losing the war...   
I still think the bubbles are normal price discovery though.

Why can't I just keep doing this forever, preventing most of the people in the WORLD from viewing bitcoin as anything other than a highly technical instrument of speculation that is unsafe for the average person?

If it were an actual strategy, it is already a losing strategy.  Bitcoin is gaining a lot of adoption.  Granted, it is still very small, but it used to be a lot smaller...

PS: Apologies if I repeated someones argument, this thread was tl;dr for me.

[mindtomatter]

So you win a battle, but you are losing the war...   
I still think the bubbles are normal price discovery though.

Why can't I just keep doing this forever, preventing most of the people in the WORLD from viewing bitcoin as anything other than a highly technical instrument of speculation that is unsafe for the average person?

If it were an actual strategy, it is already a losing strategy.  Bitcoin is gaining a lot of adoption.  Granted, it is still very small, but it used to be a lot smaller...

PS: Apologies if I repeated someones argument, this thread was tl;dr for me.

The game is (was) to figure out a reason why an entity like a central bank would not be able to basically control the market and intentionally cause bubbles and panics, assuming they wanted to throw something like 10 billion at the problem.

It is of course a losing strategy, because Bitcoin can't be shut down or effectively regulated without causing a fork that's even more difficult to deal with.  Really all governments have to do is stop printing money and start acting responsibly, then Bitcoin is a huge boon to them as well because of the easy commerce it enables.

But unfortunately it doesn't look like they plan to stop any time soon, so it's in their best interest to make Bitcoin look as risky as possible.   They can't just come out and say "don't buy that, buy dollars instead" because addressing the problem gives it legitimacy so better to keep the market unregulated, buy into it with the intention of being disruptive and scaring out less sophisticated users.

The end game is the fall of the dollar, but if we have serial bitcoin bubbles that always end very badly for lots of newbies, that will really hurt adoption in the medium-short term.

[itsunderstood]

Manipulate the market is difficult, the best a central bank can do is simply deploy $100 million worth of ASIC mining farm, which is more than 10 times network total hashing power, and hide them. They will select a time when BTC is suffering from an internal problem and start all those hashing power in one night and make a 90% attack, make millions of transactions invalid and cause huge loss for merchants

But what is the purpose? If bitcoin is so great then why not join the game? It is just another star performence asset in their portfolio. Their debt based money issuering have huge sustainability problem and bitcoin is their only hope to bring the sustainablility back. Unlike housing, the demand for bitcoin can be endless, and supply is always limited, its price will never stop rising, means economy finally have a growth area which can last forever

Imagine in not so far future, almost 20% of people are working with bitcoin related business, this dramatically reduced the jobless rate, and those who still work get higher and higher salary due to labor shortage, then FED have to tighten to prevent price inflation, and that action have almost no effect for bitcoin, by that time, bitcoin value could still be driven up by physical goods/services

Have read the whole thread.

This dude above has the best strategy, because the ASICs are factorially more powerful, and moreover, prisoners work for .50 cents an hour or less in Marxist countries, so an utterly phenomenal amount of hashing power will be fielded in the next 24 months.  It takes maybe 60 days to ramp up a chip factory if you throw X billions of dollars at the problem (an assumption on my part) and can get silicon, and college kids, etc.  So this is a battlefield shaping up.

OP, I agree with you in this respect:  Bitcoin is a threat to those who run the traditional money making machines: Coin mints and paper printers.  The money issuing class, cannot allow bitcoin to survive for let's say 100 years, but they have that long, to effect your plan.  Yes, I agree with your strategy, the guy arguing with you above, doesn't think long term and doesn't understand warfare.  You do.

Indeed, this is a generational war, as Rothchild himself started as a coin collector and became the richest man on Earth.  It took generational breeding his kids into royal familes, selling out to Satan on every level, but he succeeded.  This is the essence of the power which will oppose bitcoin, which effectively will end debt-as-money.

To illustrate the point simply, I can hold an FDR dime from 1963, when JFK was killed, and it's worth about 2.00 US.  But the face value is ten cents, and at the store, the FDR 1963 dime can only get me ten cents worth of product.  No cashier can give me 2.00 worth of product for it, or they will be fired.  Even if the owner allows his cashiers to accept FDR 1963 dime as 2.00 worth of goods, the Treasury lawyers can shut him down and jail him for doing so.  But, the 1965 FDR dime, is worth less than ten cents, and so the face value is what matters.  The coin itself is worth about 3 cents in moly weight melt value.

OP makes a good point in that he describes full on warfare, where money is no object, and winning is the objective.  OP describes simply, that to destroy to idea of bitcoin, at any cost, at any length of time, is a win.

when debt=money, there is no limit to the amount of money you can "make" because humans will always dig deeper into debt.  In fact if you look closely enough, a "Constitution" is a debt document, and WARFARE is what creates the debt, that causes nations to need "Constitutors" who then form a "Constitution"  ...Notice that the IMF could not en-debt Egypt until some men would stand up to pay the debt.  That is the legal definition of a Constitutor, "One who agrees to pay the debt of another, and this is always the primary obligation" - Bouvier's Law Dictionary.

So OP is thinking tactically correct.  However, OP, I would say that plain old guns and poison and particularly public shame (associating bitcoin with pictures of naked kids or meth/heroin) via the HDTV network of mind control, will accomplish the pariah-effect that you seek and will cause people to hate bitcoin much quicker.  The TV lemmings have a great power in mobs, and in the end, you could just hire 1,000,000 soldiers for a cheaper cost, to police your anti-bitcoin laws.  I am thinking of something like the SS and what Himmler/Goering accomplished.  Sure it was a loss for them as two men, but Bretton Woods was a very big win for the money powers, so you could ditch your whole army at the end.  Bankers fund warfare, of course.

Assuming Leo Strauss and Edward Bernays are correct in understanding herd mentality and core-hypocrisy of the human being (not saying I agree with them, but so far they are right), I expect a mass media blitz of negative bitcoin-hating propaganda, over say two years, would accomplish your goals.  It would be combined with shame and legislation of painful prison sentences for bitcoin users/miners (bribes to politicians are fairly cheap), while secretly the prison powers like Wackenhut (who changes their name every year it seems) and Bechtel and so forth, will simply use prisoners and mega-tech, to mine coins and this will give them bitcoins and will increase difficulty for other non-cartel miners who are jailed or hunted, and also by running their own secret bitcoin farms in prisons, they work 24/7 on a path toward the 51% moment where they poison the chain, long enough to shake the system, and scare people or just fork it toward destruction.

So yes, from the perspective of generational warfare, public shame of bitcoin users/miners, combined with jailing them or straight up assassinations and pogroms, combined with secretly putting mega-billions into secret bitcoin mining operations with prisoners (like the ones who now build Patriot missile parts for Ratheon for example) would produce good results that you seek.

The people, as such, overestimate their ability to fight long term wars.  Typically the people, will not want to keep fighting.  They will sue for peace and accept war debt, just to have fifty years of "peace".  But OP speaks for powers that are not human.  Central bankers like Rothschild and the shecklemonger class of people, live only for money.  Mammon itself, demands they sell their own children into the fight.  And bitcoin is a threat unlike any they have ever seen.  If OP's words are grasped, then perhaps bitcoin can be a weapon wielded by the people, to their advantage, but the key is that you can only "make profit" when you SELL.  And how shall the people, NOT SELL THEIR BITCOINS at 1,000,000 USD per coin?

That's the key, if it takes 100 years, and starvation, and nuclear meltdowns, that all will be done, anything it takes to get the regular plebes, to part with their coins.  If the people can never sell their bitcoins, then all that will happen is that they will keep the banker class at bay, but this battle can never be won.  Even Jesus threw over the moneychangers, but guess what?  He died, and they won.

[notme]

Agree with your banker buddies to clone bitcoin, but with a fresh blockchain.  Slightly change the mining algorithm so bitcoin mining setups don't work.  Integrate the new coin with your online banking software and offer it as an option when nonchargebackability is desired (such as for international settlements or when a merchant requires it (scammer prone industries)).  Create financial products based on the new coin that can be traded by anyone with a brokerage account.

Same as the Microsoft strategy for open source: embrace and extend.  Sure it only works if you own the market, but there is no industry more locked down than the finance industry. Even putting themselves into bankruptcy wasn't enough for banks to lose their place at the table.  The strategy isn't working for Microsoft anymore, but that's because the market they own (desktops) is being replaced by mobile devices where other OSes took root first.

[mindtomatter]

Agree with your banker buddies to clone bitcoin, but with a fresh blockchain.  Slightly change the mining algorithm so bitcoin mining setups don't work.  Integrate the new coin with your online banking software and offer it as an option when nonchargebackability is desired (such as for international settlements or when a merchant requires it (scammer prone industries)).  Create financial products based on the new coin that can be traded by anyone with a brokerage account.

Same as the Microsoft strategy for open source: embrace and extend.  Sure it only works if you own the market, but there is no industry more locked down than the finance industry. Even putting themselves into bankruptcy wasn't enough for banks to lose their place at the table.  The strategy isn't working for Microsoft anymore, but that's because the market they own (desktops) is being replaced by mobile devices where other OSes took root first.

But you have to get everyone to use it for that to work    The manipulation won't work if it's recognized and becomes a known factor, people will just work it into their assumptions.  Microsoft took people from a somewhat open platform to a closed platform with better usability, I don't think that same transition can happen here.

[mindtomatter]

Manipulate the market is difficult, the best a central bank can do is simply deploy $100 million worth of ASIC mining farm, which is more than 10 times network total hashing power, and hide them. They will select a time when BTC is suffering from an internal problem and start all those hashing power in one night and make a 90% attack, make millions of transactions invalid and cause huge loss for merchants

But what is the purpose? If bitcoin is so great then why not join the game? It is just another star performence asset in their portfolio. Their debt based money issuering have huge sustainability problem and bitcoin is their only hope to bring the sustainablility back. Unlike housing, the demand for bitcoin can be endless, and supply is always limited, its price will never stop rising, means economy finally have a growth area which can last forever

Imagine in not so far future, almost 20% of people are working with bitcoin related business, this dramatically reduced the jobless rate, and those who still work get higher and higher salary due to labor shortage, then FED have to tighten to prevent price inflation, and that action have almost no effect for bitcoin, by that time, bitcoin value could still be driven up by physical goods/services

Have read the whole thread.

This dude above has the best strategy, because the ASICs are factorially more powerful, and moreover, prisoners work for .50 cents an hour or less in Marxist countries, so an utterly phenomenal amount of hashing power will be fielded in the next 24 months.  It takes maybe 60 days to ramp up a chip factory if you throw X billions of dollars at the problem (an assumption on my part) and can get silicon, and college kids, etc.  So this is a battlefield shaping up.

OP, I agree with you in this respect:  Bitcoin is a threat to those who run the traditional money making machines: Coin mints and paper printers.  The money issuing class, cannot allow bitcoin to survive for let's say 100 years, but they have that long, to effect your plan.  Yes, I agree with your strategy, the guy arguing with you above, doesn't think long term and doesn't understand warfare.  You do.

Indeed, this is a generational war, as Rothchild himself started as a coin collector and became the richest man on Earth.  It took generational breeding his kids into royal familes, selling out to Satan on every level, but he succeeded.  This is the essence of the power which will oppose bitcoin, which effectively will end debt-as-money.

To illustrate the point simply, I can hold an FDR dime from 1963, when JFK was killed, and it's worth about 2.00 US.  But the face value is ten cents, and at the store, the FDR 1963 dime can only get me ten cents worth of product.  No cashier can give me 2.00 worth of product for it, or they will be fired.  Even if the owner allows his cashiers to accept FDR 1963 dime as 2.00 worth of goods, the Treasury lawyers can shut him down and jail him for doing so.  But, the 1965 FDR dime, is worth less than ten cents, and so the face value is what matters.  The coin itself is worth about 3 cents in moly weight melt value.

OP makes a good point in that he describes full on warfare, where money is no object, and winning is the objective.  OP describes simply, that to destroy to idea of bitcoin, at any cost, at any length of time, is a win.

when debt=money, there is no limit to the amount of money you can "make" because humans will always dig deeper into debt.  In fact if you look closely enough, a "Constitution" is a debt document, and WARFARE is what creates the debt, that causes nations to need "Constitutors" who then form a "Constitution"  ...Notice that the IMF could not en-debt Egypt until some men would stand up to pay the debt.  That is the legal definition of a Constitutor, "One who agrees to pay the debt of another, and this is always the primary obligation" - Bouvier's Law Dictionary.

So OP is thinking tactically correct.  However, OP, I would say that plain old guns and poison and particularly public shame (associating bitcoin with pictures of naked kids or meth/heroin) via the HDTV network of mind control, will accomplish the pariah-effect that you seek and will cause people to hate bitcoin much quicker.  The TV lemmings have a great power in mobs, and in the end, you could just hire 1,000,000 soldiers for a cheaper cost, to police your anti-bitcoin laws.  I am thinking of something like the SS and what Himmler/Goering accomplished.  Sure it was a loss for them as two men, but Bretton Woods was a very big win for the money powers, so you could ditch your whole army at the end.  Bankers fund warfare, of course.

Assuming Leo Strauss and Edward Bernays are correct in understanding herd mentality and core-hypocrisy of the human being (not saying I agree with them, but so far they are right), I expect a mass media blitz of negative bitcoin-hating propaganda, over say two years, would accomplish your goals.  It would be combined with shame and legislation of painful prison sentences for bitcoin users/miners (bribes to politicians are fairly cheap), while secretly the prison powers like Wackenhut (who changes their name every year it seems) and Bechtel and so forth, will simply use prisoners and mega-tech, to mine coins and this will give them bitcoins and will increase difficulty for other non-cartel miners who are jailed or hunted, and also by running their own secret bitcoin farms in prisons, they work 24/7 on a path toward the 51% moment where they poison the chain, long enough to shake the system, and scare people or just fork it toward destruction.

So yes, from the perspective of generational warfare, public shame of bitcoin users/miners, combined with jailing them or straight up assassinations and pogroms, combined with secretly putting mega-billions into secret bitcoin mining operations with prisoners (like the ones who now build Patriot missile parts for Ratheon for example) would produce good results that you seek.

The people, as such, overestimate their ability to fight long term wars.  Typically the people, will not want to keep fighting.  They will sue for peace and accept war debt, just to have fifty years of "peace".  But OP speaks for powers that are not human.  Central bankers like Rothschild and the shecklemonger class of people, live only for money.  Mammon itself, demands they sell their own children into the fight.  And bitcoin is a threat unlike any they have ever seen.  If OP's words are grasped, then perhaps bitcoin can be a weapon wielded by the people, to their advantage, but the key is that you can only "make profit" when you SELL.  And how shall the people, NOT SELL THEIR BITCOINS at 1,000,000 USD per coin?

That's the key, if it takes 100 years, and starvation, and nuclear meltdowns, that all will be done, anything it takes to get the regular plebes, to part with their coins.  If the people can never sell their bitcoins, then all that will happen is that they will keep the banker class at bay, but this battle can never be won.  Even Jesus threw over the moneychangers, but guess what?  He died, and they won.

Great post   I understand the appeal of "overwhelming hardware addition" but I don't see what the end-game there is.   If it's obvious there is a manipulating entity, the value will just shift to a fork that doesn't have that vulnerability.

Honestly if one wanted to be thinking a few moves ahead, you could make the case for creating these currency forks IN ADVANCE and just sitting on the new protocol in the event something like this happened.  You could have one that is built to ignore hashing power beyond a certain maximum level based on geographical distribution, lots of options to keep power distributed.   Another scenario where this would be useful is the "All bitcoin coins are purchased by malicious entity, and destroyed", this would require a fork that has the ability to detect and recycle "lost" coins.     

But you get it

[mindtomatter]

Originally posted at Reddit

Playing Devil's Advocate here....

Let's play a game:  I'll be the Central Bank with say, 10 billion USD to devote to the "problem" of bitcoin.  You try to think of why my plan won't succeed.    
...

Extreme popularity of (possibly) faulty premise does not stop it from being faulty.

Quick rebuttal:

I'm a central bank.
I'm "old money". I understand money better than 99.9% of people on the planet. It can get pretty lonely here.
I'm already "filthy rich" as one might say. Greed doesn't phase me.
I'm already extremely powerful, and have been for generations. I might not be able to micro-manage the politics of the day (others do that), but I can influence whole governments and countries on a long-term basis. I must wield my power carefully and wisely.
I'm a "people person" but most people don't understand me, and it sucks to see them hurt themselves. Despite my 'power' I am powerless to help them.
Sometimes I just want to cut myself.

If I could just get rid of these damn banks and the endless stream of middle-aged corporate parasites hanging off my teats!...

...Oooo "Bitcoin"... Fascinating! Some old ideas with a fresh new groove! A big group of bright-eyed young people learning about money. Maybe we're finally getting somewhere. It's about time!

[on the telephone] Bob! Tell the CIA to... INCUBATE "Bitcoin" for a while... Looks like this baby might have teeth! What? Yes, that's right, Bob. It could be The One.

My problem with your argument is that once Money stops being important to you because you have so much, Power is all that remains. 

The power of a central bank is to control the issuance and the interest rates of that money, so anything that threatens that control cannot be allowed.  In this scenario, bitcoin is cutting in on a zero sum game - People conducting transactions or keeping their savings in Bitcoin of course do NOT keep that same value in another currency. In our current monetary reality, virtually every transaction in one way or another is enabled by the US dollar.  Most currencies around the world use the US dollar, and US treasury debt as the backing of their own currency.

Also lets keep in mind those "old ideas" were abandoned to remove the controls they put on the Central Bank.  It used to be they weren't allowed (but did it anyhow) to create more money than they could back with gold and silver.  That was inconvenient because what if they really wanted to print more money but didn't have more gold? It needed to be removed so the "proper" actions could be taken.

Bitcoin is like that, except when they want to "do it anyhow", they have to actually tell people their plan, explain the reasoning, and then hope enough participants will think it's a good idea and adopt it as their own.  Compare that to the system now where 12 unelected bankers sit around a table making arbitrary decisions that further their personal goals?  It wasn't until very recently that normal citizens even got to know what was said at these meetings, and now it's with a FOUR YEAR LAG.

If I were a central banker, I would be terrified of two things: Sunlight and Bitcoin

[mindtomatter]

So I'm assuming you don't pay much attention to world events? 

Exactly what do you think is happening with the Euro right now?

 Hint: It's not trying to stay a joint currency because it's in the best interest of its people over the long term.

You may view this as academic, but it is not.

 Don't prescribe malice where incompetency could be substituted, but similarly don't assume benevolence when the actions taken don't appear to be in  your best interest.  They're usually not.

[firefop]

Sorry for arriving late to this thread... but I think your plan is silly.

Why not simply allocate some small percentage of fiat and use it to buy and hold bitcoin... throw enough money at it, drastically deflate it...

Say central banks now own 90% of btc.

How much of what's left is horded? How much is actively being traded?

By forcing a massive bubble over a long enough period of time you might actually slow down the growth of the bitcoin economy. Since the supply is fixed - eventually it gets to a breaking point - where you have to start selling some of your holdings (for insane profits I might add) or stagnate the economy.

So if we give the bankers a choice between making an insane profit over a period of 30 years or consuming their investment to kill competition... which are they more likely to choose?



~



Also, this isn't about "real market value" in the same way a commodity is. . . bitcoin isn't a basket of goods. Even bubbles that exist for long enough will persist after you 'pop the bubble'. It's all about how people perceive the value - so there's no inherent value to a bitcoin.

[Mageant]

The problem with the strategy suggested by the OP is that the initial buying of Bitcoin will increase the price which will increase the awareness for Bitcoin.

That is what they *do not* want to happen. They want people to think Fiat currency is the only kind of money possible.

It does not matter if Bitcoin itself is successful or not, once enough people understand the concept of a decentralized cryptocurrency and its advantages, then all is lost for the central bankers. Alternatives cryptocurrencies can appear and take the place of Bitcoin if necessary.

So what the actually are hoping for is that awareness and understanding of Bitcoin stays as low as possible. They are two ways to acheive this, no information or misinformation on Bitcoin.
Both have been attempted, obviously the "no information"-tactic is working less and less.