Topic: Is this Bitcoin's achilles heel? - page 4. (Read 5901 times)

So someone would throw a lot of fiat in Bitcoin, thereby raising its price to $1 million per coin, so everyone around here could sell half their stack and enjoy a life of leisure and luxury. How is that even a problem?

Yeah, all it would do is drive the price incredibly high. It's true that if the price gets high enough pretty much everyone would sell. I can't imagine not selling them at $1million a coin...

But as long as there's even 1 Bitcoin left, the whole thing could still run. Remember, the basic unit is actually the Satoshi, which is 0.00000001 of a Bitcoin. So each bitcoin is 100-million Satoshis. If each Bitcoin is worth $1billion, then each Satoshi would be worth $10. Still manageable to run the entire economy off of 1 Bitcoin, but it becomes a hassle at that point as it would need to get divided further down. I'm sure the protocol could be adjusted to further divide it down though.

The biggest problem with that scenario is that whoever is doing the attacking is obviously anti-Bitcoin. Yet what they just did is commit a massive transfer of wealth from anti-Bitcoin individuals, to a bunch of pro-Bitcoin individuals, who now have the knowledge and the incredible wealth behind them to create Bitcoin2.0 (if each 1BTC is a Billion dollars, then literally anyone who's pro-Bitcoin is now a Billionaire). And since Bitcoin is open-source, making a Bitcoin2.0 would be trivial, and this time a hell of a lot more powerful with a bunch of Billionaires backing it.

They would have to keep going until everyone who's anti-fiat is a Billionaire. Personally, I sure hope they do that

At the moment there is about 40 000 bitcoin available on 'visible'  market  if they buy all of them price will sky rocket ....

Dude, it is not an attack, it is a buff.

I'm actually a strong believer in bitcoin don't get me wrong.
And this question has poped into my head sometime in the past but I never paid attention to it at all.
But when someone that just heard of Bitcoin mentions it, it kinda makes you ponder on it a little more than when you think of it yourself.

You can't deny however that for someone who has tons of fiat to throw around, this is way easier than the 51% attack we hear so much about (yes, this is a different kind of attack - but still effective enough to do serious harm)

I think the good thing is the fact that Bitcoin being mined slowly for the next few decades is one of the best defenses we have againt this kind of attack. At least we would have time to organize a response. If at a certain time a large portion of Bitcoin holders have not incentive to sell bitcoins for any fiat (at any price), Bitcoins should escape the reach of this attacker for good.

you figured it out 99bitcoins

everyone pack up it's over

Buying all bitcoins would require substantial funds. The current market cap is 1 300 000 000 USD, and the price of the coins would increase a lot as the buyer was emptying all available exchanges. The price would rise to very high levels, and the buyer would have to spend maybe 100 000 000 000 USD to buy all the coins that were available on the exchanges. Still, far from all coins are for sale.

Yep, some people are in it for the long haul, and some simply wanna spend their bitcoins on stuff instead of "cashing out". And many when seeing the sudden rise in the price will wait a bit to see it rising more.

At any price?

Not everyone is selling their bitcoins; if someone did buy all the bitcoins for sale at the highest prices, the value of the bitcoins of the people that didn't sell would increase a lot.

So I just told my younger brother about Bitcoin yesterday and today we got to discussing in-depth about it. It's the first time he's heard of them. As you would expect he was curious and asked very thoughtful questions.

One question he asked that really intrigued me is how an entity (one with very very large amount of fiat) that wanted to destroy Bitcoin could pull it off...

He asked: Couldn't they just buy up every single Bitcoin in existence at the highest asking price?

I don't know how to answer this, but it sounds to me that may be the single biggest soft-spot for Bitcoin to me.

Chances are this has already been asked but I don't know how to find the thread so I'll just post this.

What do you guys think?