What if someone wants to buy out Bitcoin

[ThomasCrowne]

All 21 million coin's won't be minted within our lifetime so technically impossible.

[DannyElfman]

It is a free market in which price is controlled by supply/demand. Someone who want to buy even 1 million BTC will drive price to the sky.

I was going to suggest that such a buyer could buy small amounts at a time.  But then I realized that in order to accumulate 1M BTC in a reasonable amount of time, he/she would probably end up increasing the daily volume of multiple exchanges by 5-10% or more.  That would certainly add a lot of buoyancy to the market.

Buying all of the bitcoin outstanding would actually decrease the value of bitcoin for the new owner as part of the reason bitcoin has the value that it has is because it is used for trade, if only one person owns all the bitcoin then it can no longer be used for trade (you can't trade with yourself).

[MarketTime]

He can buy out bitcoin at high price and then we all shift to litecoin ...

[peeveepee]

He can buy out bitcoin at high price and then we all shift to litecoin ...

Wish it is that simple. I sold out all alt coin a few weeks ago, not going to own any of them ever again.

[tee-rex]

It is a free market in which price is controlled by supply/demand. Someone who want to buy even 1 million BTC will drive price to the sky.

I was going to suggest that such a buyer could buy small amounts at a time.  But then I realized that in order to accumulate 1M BTC in a reasonable amount of time, he/she would probably end up increasing the daily volume of multiple exchanges by 5-10% or more.  That would certainly add a lot of buoyancy to the market.

Buying all of the bitcoin outstanding would actually decrease the value of bitcoin for the new owner as part of the reason bitcoin has the value that it has is because it is used for trade, if only one person owns all the bitcoin then it can no longer be used for trade (you can't trade with yourself).

It is more interesting to estimate the minimum amount of bitcoins required to effectively control major bitcoin markets (exchanges). There are many big whales out there (according to rpietila and his thread, 70 individuals hold together around 3.6M bitcoins), but they seem to be mostly inactive, so this amount shouldn't be great.

[InwardContour]

It is a free market in which price is controlled by supply/demand. Someone who want to buy even 1 million BTC will drive price to the sky.

I was going to suggest that such a buyer could buy small amounts at a time.  But then I realized that in order to accumulate 1M BTC in a reasonable amount of time, he/she would probably end up increasing the daily volume of multiple exchanges by 5-10% or more.  That would certainly add a lot of buoyancy to the market.

Buying all of the bitcoin outstanding would actually decrease the value of bitcoin for the new owner as part of the reason bitcoin has the value that it has is because it is used for trade, if only one person owns all the bitcoin then it can no longer be used for trade (you can't trade with yourself).

It is more interesting to estimate the minimum amount of bitcoins required to effectively control major bitcoin markets (exchanges). There are many big whales out there (according to rpietila and his thread, 70 individuals hold together around 3.6M bitcoins), but they seem to be mostly inactive, so this amount shouldn't be great.

It would not take a lot of bitcoin to be able to control the markets/exchanges. Any whale that tries this would be hurting confidence in bitcoin, which would hurt the value of the whale's holdings.

[Jabbatheslutt]

They would only get everything on the exchanges order books and even if they went and bought out everyone else it would be pointless cause then they would be the only one holding and everyone would move onto a new coin.

[CoinDiver]

Read the "Stupid Questions FAQ".

[hollowframe]

This would not be possible today, as the miners generate 3,600 new bitcoin every day so the buyer would never have *all* of the bitcoin in existence.

I would also doubt that satoshi would sell his bitcoin to someone that is trying to buy up all of them.

[dothebeats]

That wouldn't be possible and if ever that happens, bitcoin's value would be 0 because of the fact that only one person use it and have it. People would not be interested in using a coin wherein one person could control the whole system. Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized, that's why some people tend to keep it or use it rather than fiat. If one man bought all the bitcoins (which isn't possible because 21 million coins aren't minted yet and some bitcoins that are lost on the 'void'), the idea of being decentralized is broken.

[miffman]

Even though this won't happen, bitcoin is already groundbreaking. Even if it broke now, the idea is still valuable and it can't be destroyed. P2P currency will be around for a long time, just because of how fair it is. It's literally by the people, for the people.