This doesn't make sense - gold and silver markets are manipulated DOWNWARD, not upward. I believe this is done via "naked shorting" - currently the infrastructure to naked short bitcoin does not exist. If the Fed prints money to buy up gold or bitcoin, they make it more valuable, and thus more likely to be held.
You are talking about a different effect here. The "naked shorts" imply a confusion between "paper gold" and genuine gold. In fact, paper gold is like good ol' fractional banking. As long as there is a "parity" between an once of paper gold, and of genuine gold, it seems as if this naked shorting is creating gold out of nothing and is causing inflation. However, this is actually only inflation for paper gold. When there's a lot of naked shorted gold (paper gold), it is the opportunity to acquire cheap physical gold, because when the bubble bursts, or when it deflates, the whole market cap of paper gold will go to physical gold.
But this is not the action of the FED. The action of the FED is to buy gold when it is expensive, and to sell gold when it is cheap. That sounds like a crazy doctrine, because normally you lose when buying high, and selling low. But if you can print money at will, that is no problem. What happens when doing so, is that the FED increases the volatility of gold, and "stabilises" the paper dollar. In doing so, it pumps effectively the held value in gold into the dollar. When gold is expensive, its policy makes it even more expensive, meaning that people have to spend a lot of value on the little bit of gold they can acquire. Later, when the gold price diminishes, the FED throws even more gold on the market, making the gold that people held, less worth, so that they can obtain much less value against it.
For any other agent, this would be a terribly lossy and expensive thing to do, but as the FED can print the money it likes (and is "backed" by the very stuff it is buying), it doesn't cost the FED ziltch doing so.
In fact, the naked shorting of gold counteracts the FED's manipulation. I'm pretty sure they don't like it.
There's nothing that can stop the FED from doing exactly the same with bitcoin: buying it against printed dollars when it is high and selling it (absorbing dollars) when it is low, increasing its volatility.
The only thing that would make sense to kill bitcoin would be to "corner the market", which will be difficult for even the Fed, given that bitcoin has an $11 billion market cap right now. Remember also that as the USD price of bitcoin goes up, forex arbitrage opportunities present themselves...
Suppose the FED is willing to print $50 billion dollar to "own" bitcoin, what would be the problem ? It could print 50 billion, buy up all bitcoin, which is then "backing" the printing of those $50 billion. When the FED has bought 4/5 of all bitcoin, and people have been spending fortunes on the 1/5 that's left, the FED sells its stash of bitcoin all at once, crashing the price.
All the value that people had been spending on acquiring that 1/5 of bitcoin is now gone (into dollars printed by the FED).
And the cycle can start over.
Value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in bitcoin. Like value is pumped out of people wanting to store it in gold.
