Originally posted at
RedditPlaying 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. - I win when I can cause situations that scare users away from using Bitcoins.
- I lose when non-technical users successfully and satisfactorily use any currency that's not controlled by a central bank.
So I'm assuming everyone understands why central banks will
never like Bitcoin.
It's a construct completely outside their control, and since
they get their power from issuing and being the central clearing house for paper currencies the mere existence of an alternative that doesn't have those problems is very dangerous, because it's obviously a better deal for its users in the medium-long term.
You can't manipulate a currency unless you have a lot of it at your disposal. With dollars, that's easy - Just create some new currency.
But with Bitcoin, you can't do that - So what do you do as a central bank with the ability to create as much paper money as you want.....
You buy a bunch of bitcoins, and the price doesn't matter. Actually, it's
BETTER for you if your buying causes the price to go up, the more the better.
The total market cap for Bitcoin just hit 1 billion, so if the Fed wanted to buy 10% at current market rates best case scenario it would be 100 million, which is pocket change for the entities we're talking about. The demand spike creates a price spike which pulls media attention which brings new buyers which feeds higher prices which feeds more media attention, the cycle becomes self perpetuating after a while. That's where we are now.
Because Bitcoin's fundamentals (stable supply, distributed decision making, borderless operation) don't really leave room to argue they're worse than Dollars, the only argument that can reasonably made against them is that they're unstable and therefore unsafe for the average person to use.
So the way you do that is help the price go way up by buying in quantity over a reasonable period of time without regard to the price, then once you've cornered a reasonable proportion of the market (say 5-10%) you dump them all at once, smash the price, and incur massive losses for the new users who bought in during the climb through higher prices.
Then (after the market exhausts itself at the bottom) you DO NOT buy any of your coins back, since the dollar amount is trivial it's better to leave the impression that demand in the market has completely left town.
This also means you can use the same trick of accumulating -> causes bubble -> encourages newbies to get in -> sell large stake -> pop bubble -> cause newbie panic -> advise currency is unsafe -> wait for fundamentals to become important again -> repeat
What do you think, why wouldn't this be easy for any major central bank to do?