What if a government just buys up all the bitcoins

[ardana123]

and destroys them afterwards to sabotage bitcoin? Wouldn't that just fuck everything up?

[BitcoinIssues]

Too bad we're all not selling

[DeathAndTaxes]

Awesome I will sell mine for $500K each and use the procedes to fund Bitcoin 2.0 and the other half to retire.

[wachtwoord]

Awesome I will sell mine for $500K each and use the procedes to fund Bitcoin 2.0 and the other half to retire.

Should we give out prices for being the 10,000th person to ask this question? Oh well, the price is a link to the search function! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=search;advanced 

[BitCloud]

instead of saying "destroys all the bitcoins" you could have at least said "make them lost/not found"

[escrow.ms]

We will move to litecoins lol

[ErisDiscordia]

they will prove that governments are even more stupid that anyone could possibly have imagined 

[Zufox]

There's no point to the what if ______ buys up all the bitcoins. There are millions of bitcoins currently out there and thousands of people that aren't willing to sell. It'll never happen. If governments forbid businesses from using bitcoins, that's a whole 'nother form of sabotage that they could possibly get away with.

[Kluge]

There are a whole bunch of ways government could sabotage Bitcoin. A truly epic $5000-$5 pump and dump would be one way... If the gov't spent enough, they could slowly build up to $5000, then dump to $5 and artificially keep the price down.

There are plenty of alternative ways to really disrupt Bitcoin, though. You can think of plenty of ways to disrupt Bitcoin while sitting on the can - it's just they all require a ton of cash, and a lot of effort to squash something which hasn't yet proven itself a major threat. Hmm... but then there's the CDC creating new strains of infectious diseases to fight... Anyway, I like the "Satosh Capture" route https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=151367.0 

[lucasjkr]

Why do people throw out the idea of the government attempting to buy up every bitcoin? It's insane. If the government did want to kill Bitcoin, do you think they would spend a billion dollars to do that? Or do you think they'ed spend $10 or $20 million, and have their own ASIC's deployed in order to over run the network? Or would they just locate each of the big mining pools, DOS them and/or block their traffic and leave Bitcoins difficulty so impossibly high that the rest of the network couldn't confirm blocks in any amount of reasonable time?

Buying out bitcoin would only cause people to rush and hop into the next coin, awating an even bigger buyout. Done properly, a decent attack MIGHT have the effect of making most participants wary of even trying to do this again.

Think about it.

[Kluge]

Why do people throw out the idea of the government attempting to buy up every bitcoin? It's insane. If the government did want to kill Bitcoin, do you think they would spend a billion dollars to do that? Or do you think they'ed spend $10 or $20 million, and have their own ASIC's deployed in order to over run the network? Or would they just locate each of the big mining pools, DOS them and/or block their traffic and leave Bitcoins difficulty so impossibly high that the rest of the network couldn't confirm blocks in any amount of reasonable time?

Buying out bitcoin would only cause people to rush and hop into the next coin, awating an even bigger buyout. Done properly, a decent attack MIGHT have the effect of making most participants wary of even trying to do this again.

Think about it.

They could even bump up the stakes by quietly having an ASIC farm in waiting (wouldn't have to be as big as in your scenario), DDoS all pools so difficulty plummets, then when difficulty changes, bring the farm online and double-spend as much as able to erode confidence and perhaps even convince some merchants to stop accepting BTC. At next difficulty change, halt the DDoS against pools and get everything in order to have all BTC exchanges served at once, while letting everyone mine until next difficulty change. At next difficulty change, shut down and seize funds from all exchanges able, then point their gov ASIC farm back to their old job of bruteforcing encrypted messages, letting the network semi-organically bring itself to a difficulty death spiral due both to the price plummet (due to many successful double-spends and sudden failure of many exchanges) and the huge dropoff in hashpower from the gov ASIC farm being pointed somewhere else.

[johnyj]

Governments have huge debts now, their only hope is to buy some bitcoin and sell them at a much higher price to pay back their debt, none other method will work

[jeannie]

They don't even need to do that, they just set a new law to confiscate and ban Bitcoin and we are all gone.

[Kluge]

They don't even need to do that, they just set a new law to confiscate and ban Bitcoin and we are all gone.

Fwiw, almost every Bitcoin exchange knowingly operates unlawfully right now. It costs tens of millions in bonds and fees (on top of exorbitant annual fees) to get the proper licenses just to operate everywhere in the US. Banks often end up being the enforcers of these state laws because they don't want to touch something illegal (unless it's a drug cartel, I guess). MtGox, for instance, partly because of the CoinLab SNAFU which may've resulted in a totally legal US BTC exchange, is basically a black market waiting for more seizures and cease-and-desist letters.

However, there are plenty of individuals willing to trade cash for BTC, which is important because a broad ban on Bitcoin would be completely unenforceable, which is one of the reasons Bitcoin is so valuable.

[cp1]

What if a government just buys up all our cars?  We'd have no way to get to work.

[Kluge]

What if a government just buys up all our cars?  We'd have no way to get to work.

yeah, but cars increase government revenues both in all the permits/regulations and the gas tax. It'd be revenue-stupid for governments to force eco-friendly means of transport. OTOH, Bitcoin threatens to decrease tax revenues by making taxes easier to evade (similar to cash transactions, which are heavily discouraged in most countries, either by criminalizing large cash transactions, forbidding large withdrawals, or even making it semi-criminal to have substantial amounts of cash on-hand).

[cp1]

What if a government just buys up all our cars?  We'd have no way to get to work.

yeah, but cars increase government revenues both in all the permits/regulations and the gas tax. It'd be revenue-stupid for governments to force eco-friendly means of transport. OTOH, Bitcoin threatens to decrease tax revenues by making taxes easier to evade (similar to cash transactions, which are heavily discouraged in most countries, either by criminalizing large cash transactions, forbidding large withdrawals, or even making it semi-criminal to have substantial amounts of cash on-hand).

Maybe they'll buy up all our cash then, and force us to use credit cards.

[Kluge]

What if a government just buys up all our cars?  We'd have no way to get to work.

yeah, but cars increase government revenues both in all the permits/regulations and the gas tax. It'd be revenue-stupid for governments to force eco-friendly means of transport. OTOH, Bitcoin threatens to decrease tax revenues by making taxes easier to evade (similar to cash transactions, which are heavily discouraged in most countries, either by criminalizing large cash transactions, forbidding large withdrawals, or even making it semi-criminal to have substantial amounts of cash on-hand).

Maybe they'll buy up all our cash then, and force us to use credit cards.

That sounds more plausible... Wouldn't be bought up, but the governments might devise a plan to ensure all cash gets turned digital, and perhaps set a deadline where physical cash is no longer legal tender.

Cash is so restricted, now, it's been made impossible to (legally) use in a lot of transactions...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/27/cyprus-emergency-restrictions-cash-withdrawals-banks
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-11/spain-to-limit-cash-transactions-to-fight-tax-fraud-correct-.html
http://english.people.com.cn/90777/8149850.html
http://rbth.ru/business/2013/03/25/russia_to_ban_cash_transactions_over_10000_24203.html

etc.

[marcus_of_augustus]

The govts are fecked whatever they do ... think about it.

[shantee]

Then they 'll have to buy all the litecoin  which is the only serious alternative for the moment and if they buy all the bitcoin we can expect it to rise  very high...that might cost them a lot (can they really afford that ? what the public will think ? shoudlnt they spent public money in a "smarter" way ? and if they buy all the litecoin then we will come up with an other crypto currency anyway...