If the banksters and governments held 90% of the Bitcoin supply, what now?

[Kprawn]

They would be wasting their time and tax payers / investors money. We (Bitcoin community) will just sell our bitcoins when

this happens and buy a new Alt coin with similar features and we will continue what we are doing now. The amount of money

they would need to do this will bankrupt them, if they continue doing this and the coins will be worthless when people realise

what they are doing. 

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[franky1]

They would be wasting their time and tax payers / investors money. We (Bitcoin community) will just sell our bitcoins when

this happens and buy a new Alt coin with similar features and we will continue what we are doing now. The amount of money

they would need to do this will bankrupt them, if they continue doing this and the coins will be worthless when people realise

what they are doing. 

let the corporations pump and dump the market. if their only tactic is to pump and dump.
we will sell to them for high. let them dump and we buy back at a discount.

hoarding 90% does nothing. and once they start handing out a 90% their 90% becomes 89% 88% 87%... all the way down until they are back to zero..

so just being coin holders/pump and dump is meaningless alone. and can make investors alot of profit while they temporarily play with prices.

like i said. coin hoarding affects nothing.. its the code and rule changes that matter. which is more about influencing the influencers, merchants and devs

[bellamente]

Bitcoin should be in the hands of people! The larger the crypto community itself, the better. Indeed, then it will be extremely difficult to influence the course of Bitcoin. Buy bitcoin and keep for the long term

[franky1]

but anyone the 90% coin hoard is just a theory/scenario/concept question

lets take a more recent practical thing to talk about.
the merchant puppetry and paid devs by a corporation

http://dcg.co/portfolio

[Wind_FURY]

No one made a compelling debate.

If 90% of Bitcoin is controlled by a few centralized and powerful groups, what will happen? Will it cease to be a permissionless system?

[randythered]

No one made a compelling debate.

If 90% of Bitcoin is controlled by a few centralized and powerful groups, what will happen? Will it cease to be a permissionless system?

I think the simplest answer is that it largely depends on the 90%, they may wish for things to remain as they were or they may look to exert some sort of control over the market. One thing I do believe is that even if such a situation occurred there would be enough people in the community who would be against it and some sort of fork would occur, that way leaving the 90% to their coin and having a further coin which goes back to the more core ideals of bitcoin. We've already seen that situation a few times in the past just in not exactly the same such scenario.

[franky1]

No one made a compelling debate.

If 90% of Bitcoin is controlled by a few centralized and powerful groups, what will happen? Will it cease to be a permissionless system?

depends on HOW the 90% is utilised, presents different results

1. imagine people lock their funds into LN factory(fortknox) which accumulates to 90% locked into an address controlled by the small group of signatories.. leads to how banks done the 'gold standard' switch to paper money and now gold isnt even a payment method

2. imagine a small group bought up 90% of coins. first there wuold be a price spike. and people selling to the group would profit on the way up. then when the group sell. people can profit from the discount on the way down.. but all-in-all its just temporary drama

3. imagine the small group bought up all the coin. and just hoarded.. result. the rest of the community play with 2.1mill coins instead of 21m coiins. plus they play with them at a higher value... no other drama as its just about market play

4. imagine the small group obtain 90% of coins and then use those coins off-market to influence devs to write new rules, and influence merchants to adopt the new rules. thus thee remaining 10% users end up following the rules or find out they cant spend their 10% because the merchants are only accepting payment using the new rules

[tytanhamon04]

Interesting question ! I think that the state will have enough to buy bitcoins, but it is more profitable to buy them and just watch the growth in the future.

[kryptqnick]

Would it be fair enough to assume that the project has failed, or failing?

90% of Bitcoin being held by an oligarchy of the elite, a cartel of banks, and by governments working together might turn Bitcoin into their "playground".

This would not totally ruin decentralization, because various banks will be in charge making their own decisions and there are also miners who are dictating their own rules in a way. It will be a failure of an attempt to get rid of banks once and for all though. Governments cannot work together anyway, so it's not a viable option even if 90% was indeed held by governmental structures. Even though sometimes bitcoin price dynamics suggests that there are some manipulations, we cannot be sure of it and even if there are whales, we cannot know who they are. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, so I think everything is okay.

[munareal]

If this happens then the aim of creating Bitcoin has been defeated. Bitcoin is not created to be controlled by anybody most especially the government.

[Cassy14]

I doubt it, they are against on this since the first.
Well now that they dont have a choice but to accept cryptocurrency it is for them to grab some and manipulate it for the future.
They can have bitcoin now and just store it somewhere! then let the people struggle on supplies and they will just wait for the pump.

[novokovskitve]

and how it will then differ from the current situation. if the government will hold a large part, then again we will return to the fact that the government will turn everyone to the fullest.

[dat.ho12492]

If this happens then the aim of creating Bitcoin has been defeated. Bitcoin is not created to be controlled by anybody most especially the government.

But surely the chance for this to happen is very low when the government and bitcoin are always in a state of war, bitcoin threatens government and government can not control bitcoin, this is the story we hear very regularly, both are inconsistent with each other. In addition, bitcoin has entered the maturation stage and development, most of the bitcoin has belonged to the miners and users, want them to sell all bitcoin to the government, that's possible but the government will need to buy it for a very high price, I do not think the government has enough time and money to do this.

[Huskarls]

Would it be fair enough to assume that the project has failed, or failing?

90% of Bitcoin being held by an oligarchy of the elite, a cartel of banks, and by governments working together might turn Bitcoin into their "playground".

in my opinion, this will not be possible considering that many people in the first year also have a lot of bitcoin, but unfortunately many of them forget their password / private key address, so if we counted, it's actually a lot of bitcoin that is still a treasure without the owner

[Larssoneos02]

It may not be so easy to do so. I mean how much money would you need to do that. I mean its not impossible but its highly unlikely. As we can see more people joining in bitcoin everyday.

[Herbert2020]

No one made a compelling debate.

If 90% of Bitcoin is controlled by a few centralized and powerful groups, what will happen? Will it cease to be a permissionless system?

maybe you should share with us why you think controlling a certain percentage of the supply will have any effect on bitcoin itself as a permissionless currency?

from what i see, you can't do anything with supply other than affecting the price. and that has nothing to do with the "permissionless" feature! as it was pointed out, bitcoin is not proof of stake.
additionally it is impossible to control 90% of the supply because it is already too late to do that since the distribution of 80% of the total supply has already happened in a fair way.

[Jacey Barnett]

It might be in their possession, but that doesn't mean the bank employers and others have included it to the bank. The whole currency is decentralised and indubitably in every way.

[Indamuck]

Would it be fair enough to assume that the project has failed, or failing?

90% of Bitcoin being held by an oligarchy of the elite, a cartel of banks, and by governments working together might turn Bitcoin into their "playground".

They can just type numbers into their computers and create money in an instan.  It wouldn't surprise me if they have stockpiled large amounts of bitcoin already.  I don't think it has failed if the banks control 90 percent of bitcoin because the most important thing is your are in complete control of your own funds.  They can not be seized without your private key.

[Wind_FURY]

No one made a compelling debate.

If 90% of Bitcoin is controlled by a few centralized and powerful groups, what will happen? Will it cease to be a permissionless system?

depends on HOW the 90% is utilised, presents different results

Leave the Lightning factories or the Core developers conspiracy theories out of it. My thinking is 90% of Bitcoins in the control or under the custody of banks, services like Coinbase, and governments working together so that users would have to "gain" permission to use it.

Has Bitcoin failed in that given scenario?

[krishnapramod]

I have abstained myself from posting on hypothetical threads, but as far as this:

1. How are the governments going to buy Bitcoin from all the ideologists?

2. If that happens, government would make a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts rich.

3. And then what, dump? And ideologists will still buy. Now what? It's not cyclic. Genie is out of the box. The banks and governments would have to tamper down the whole decentralization. Could they? No.

Bitcoin will go through hick-ups (hiccups). It may fail; but then it will be easily reinvented as we now know how it works. In its present state, it may not be convenient for transactions, not good enough to buy your decaffeinated expresso macchiato at your local virtue-signaling coffee chain. It may be too volatile to be a currency, for now. But it is the first organic currency.

But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.

https://medium.com/opacity/bitcoin-1537e616a074

Bitcoin might/might not become a tool of centralization. There would be another one, slowly building a network effect from the underground.

Majority of the world has come down to shared psychosis when it comes down to fiat, decentralization is a whole new term for them. They don't want change.

But transformation is something you would never know until it changed you.

I do believe that with SoV, Bitcoin would become a MoE, but now with the ETF's (even before that) getting into the scenario, not bad, but the peer-to-peer currency concept would be gone.

Store of value has a lot of established investments, top gold. If Bitcoin proliferation has to happen it should be as a medium of exchange or we are simply coming back to the circle that's shared with the centralized/governments, no change whatsoever.