What if a government just buys up all the bitcoins

[QuantPlus]

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.

You guys are way overthinking this.

There is roughly $300,000,000 in tax owing on the $1 billion cap...
This is illegal and subject to serious jail time.

The IRS will simply go through the Top 100 and locate 10 people...
Some total retards that are crowing every fucking day right here...
And do 10 dawn SWAT raids with full perp walks in front of the press...
You know the drill: drugs, terror financing, pr0n, money laundering.

These 10 people will turn in their associates in a plea bargain...
The same day the US files criminal charges against Gox, Bitstamp, BTC-E, etc...
etc, etc,etc...

BTC tanks by 90% and wallows about in purgatory...
Nobody cares except a few agorists and hipsters.

[shantee]

You guys are way overthinking this.

There is roughly $300,000,000 in tax owing on the $1 billion cap...
This is illegal and subject to serious jail time.

The IRS will simply go through the Top 100 and locate 10 people...
Some total retards that are crowing every fucking day right here...
And do 10 dawn SWAT raids with full perp walks in front of the press...
You know the drill: drugs, terror financing, pr0n, money laundering.

These 10 people will turn in their associates in a plea bargain...
The same day the US files criminal charges against Gox, Bitstamp, BTC-E, etc...
etc, etc,etc...

BTC tanks by 90% and wallows about in purgatory...
Nobody cares except a few agorists and hipsters.

But you tend to think there's only one government in the world , the USA  governement... What about France ? We don't have SWAT here


then if things goes like this were you live that's too bad you'll be out of the game but the rest of the world could continue very well.

[Luciddd]

It would be pretty hard to buy them all up.. 

That would be like trying to buy up all the gold in the world.

It doesn't benefit anyone but people who use bitcoin.

Governments have proven to be careless, they would probably lose all the bitcoins.

[AliceWonder]

If a government bought up all available bitcoins it would make a lot of people rich enough to easily start another crypto-currency once it became clear bitcoins were no longer being traded by as many people.

I assume most governments can figure that out.

[crumbs]

Why would any government be interested in *buying* bitcoin?  I can see something like QuantPlus' scenario, but *buying*?  Even if we assume that governments see bitcoin as a threat, buying it up is as silly as buying up all the drugz in an effort to sabotage the drug trade

[EscrowBTC]

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

Awesome idea!

What's better than selling your coins, retire, and live from profits.

[alh]

As I understand it, there's roughly 11 million BTC in "circulation". Assuming $100 per BTC, that's
just a bit over $1 billion. The total sum doesn't seem all that daunting for the US, or several
other governments. Even Warren Buffet could do that, though he'd almost certainly laugh if you
suggested it to him.

I can see it now: The Strategic Currency Reserve, kinda like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
or maybe they could set aside a small room at Fort Knox. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

As I understand it, there's roughly 11 million BTC in "circulation". Assuming $100 per BTC, that's
just a bit over $1 billion. The total sum doesn't seem all that daunting for the US, or several
other governments. Even Warren Buffet could do that, though he'd almost certainly laugh if you
suggested it to him.

I don't think you understand how market prices work.  $1B wouldn't buy 11M BTC.  It wouldn't even buy 2M BTC.  The current price is merely the last trade it offers no guarantee that ANY coins are available at that price much less 11M of them.

[QuantPlus]

You guys are way overthinking this.

There is roughly $300,000,000 in tax owing on the $1 billion cap...
This is illegal and subject to serious jail time.

The IRS will simply go through the Top 100 and locate 10 people...
Some total retards that are crowing every fucking day right here...
And do 10 dawn SWAT raids with full perp walks in front of the press...
You know the drill: drugs, terror financing, pr0n, money laundering.

These 10 people will turn in their associates in a plea bargain...
The same day the US files criminal charges against Gox, Bitstamp, BTC-E, etc...
etc, etc,etc...

BTC tanks by 90% and wallows about in purgatory...
Nobody cares except a few agorists and hipsters.

But you tend to think there's only one government in the world , the USA  governement... What about France ? We don't have SWAT here


then if things goes like this were you live that's too bad you'll be out of the game but the rest of the world could continue very well.

You are correct.

That's why I keep recommending...
That Crypto infrastructure be built offshore or in Crypto-friendly countries...
But noooooooooooooooo...
They plant Bitcoin Foundation, Ripple, etc in Silicon Valley...
And think that forming silly organizations will save them. 

[Razick]

As I understand it, there's roughly 11 million BTC in "circulation". Assuming $100 per BTC, that's
just a bit over $1 billion. The total sum doesn't seem all that daunting for the US, or several
other governments. Even Warren Buffet could do that, though he'd almost certainly laugh if you
suggested it to him.

I can see it now: The Strategic Currency Reserve, kinda like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
or maybe they could set aside a small room at Fort Knox. 

I can see it now: A SD card sitting with the piles of gold, and worth far more.

[Carlton Banks]

Besides, with only 11.5 million mined, there's still 10 million more to mine, at an exponentially decreasing rate. Does the OP believe that all current and future potential mining devices (all potential ASIC, FPGA, GPU (lmao) and CPU devices) will be commandeered too?

[pajak666]

LoL I wish they bought them all and destroy,
There will be less BTC in circulation therefore the value each remaining BTC will go up

[Pokerfan]

I will gladly sell most of my bitcoins @ 1 million USD.

[Kaiji]

I will gladly sell most of my bitcoins @ 1 million USD.

Same here. If the gov. tried to buy up all the bitcoins everyone will sell there coins for $10000 a piece. And then we'll just all move to Litecoin or some other currency and wait for a repeat. What's more probable is that they buy a million coins and then try to manipulate it for their own ends.

[cheater123]

its not possible currently no government has concern about this and not have time for this

[Kluge]

its not possible currently no government has concern about this and not have time for this

What? The SEC, FBI, DoJ, and DHS are all very interested in BTC and prosecuting cases it's involved in. A primary Bitcoin dev was asked by the FBI to speak at a conference way back - a year or two ago. That's just in the US. It's definitely on governments' radars.

[dethdeks]

they would have to find a way to make every single person who has so much as 0.000000000001btc sell to be able to do this.

[Businessleader]

It is more likely governments will seek a way to tax or regulate it, but if that fails then they will make the use of such currency illegal and punishable in their respective countries.