Topic: What if someone wants to buy out Bitcoin (Read 4224 times)

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.

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.

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.

Read the "Stupid Questions FAQ".

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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

Provided there are 1M bitcoins on the market at all (to be able to buy out them all).

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.

This scheme is not sustainable (in fact, it is just a perverted financial pyramid)!

If bitcoin is not used in everyday life (that is buying and selling goods and services in exchange for it), the bubble you thus create will soon pop up (remember tulips?). And then people will try to distance themselves from it as much as possible.

Not really. Just don't tell anybody and lend out a few and spend a few while trading with yourself to make the price look really high. You don't even need all 21M. All you need to do is accumulate the coins from all the "weak hands" that would have dumped the coins between the current price and the price you're attempting to manipulate up to.

Step 1: Spend about $500M manipulating the price up to $5k and buying up nearly all the coins
Step 2: Bitcoin gets lot of attention for multiplying in value again.
Step 3: Manipulate price down to $3.5K selling to anybody in your way (your mean price would likely be <$1000 anyway so its profit at this point)
Step 4: Hopefully attract the attention of shorters and lend to them.
Step 5: Quickly try to figure a way to find more people who you can lend to with reasonable collateral in any way possible.
Step 6: Manipulate price up again short squeezing all the borrowers
Step 7: ...
Step 8: Enjoy acting like a central bank

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.

Could not acquire all the supply, and there would need to be a lot of coins on the exchange to do it lol.
15 Million Presently so they would need to live till 2100+ to get to the full mintage  

Lol a FAQ for this would be useful

maybe this could be your reference
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btcsolutions-where-buying-and-selling-bitcoinbtc-679067

Haha yea, it would be good if all the newbies read a little more the bitcoin wikipedia before creating new topics in sections that arent newbie.

With a "Stupid Questions FAQ"... this thread would have gone on for 2 or maybe three posts, and died. Not 3 pages.

OP: What if someone wants to buy out Bitcoin?
Poster1: Read the FAQ, noob.
OP: Damn, it really was a stupid question. Thanks internets.

Threads with the most frequently asked questions (like this one) could be stickied in the Novice section of the forum (and new users should be allowed to write posts only there).

Even if there is a FAQ, it is extremely unlikely that people will read it before posting question.

That's how we know that we have got a new batch of bitcoiners into the fold.

Can we make an FAQ sticky for questions like this? It's an ignorant (no disrespect intended) question, that gets asked several times with every new crop of adopters.

I said that your coins could be considered as lost, as long as they wouldn't be in circulation. I changed the statement but didn't change the meaning. The effect is absolutely the same as if they were actually irrevocably lost. Until the moment they come into circulation again indeed. Then the effect is reversed to a degree.

If someone holds the majority of all the Bitcoin, remaining ones would be invaluable i guess, the high demand stay still

And the signal from the elevated bitcoin price will lure those saved bitcoins out of their hideouts. That is how peoples minds work. tldr - all coins can not be saved for the long run.

Again, true, but that is changing the statement and not the same as saying that if I don't have my coins on the market right now, that they are lost.

Of course - I was responding to someone saying that bitcoins that are not on the market are the same as being lost which has nothing to do with having 100% of the coins being hoarded

The assumption here is the price will self adjusted to artificially high level.

I do not think people mind work that way.

It is hard to envision that absolutely all bitcoins are stashed away. We need only one in circulation.

Stashed away money is bad for the economy (as if it didn't exist at all), and this has been known long ago.

It really doesn't matter whether they are "lost" or "not on the market", or even who owns them. If 100% of the bitcoins are hoarded, then Bitcoin is dead. The value of hoarded bitcoins is determined by the value of the bitcoins in use. If no bitcoins are in use, then hoarded bitcoins have no value.

If they never come into circulation again, then yes, they are lost. And even if they do enter into circulation somewhere in the distant future, today they can be safely considered as lost too.

No.  Just because you own a car and don't want to sell it does not mean it is lost.  Ditto for bitcoin, gold, silver, diamonds, real estate, your mind, or anything else.

It just means they are not on the market.

Lots of people who were paying attention did not sell (or spend) at $1, $33, $100, $260, or $1200.  Certainly some did, but many did not.

I think some people would sell a few right now to OP's buyer at $500k each, but I doubt they'd sell them all.

If they are not for sale (that is don't circulate), they can be considered as lost. 


According to rpietila and his famous thread, as of April, 2014, 70 people hold together about 3.6M bitcoins, which constitutes more than one forth of all bitcoins minted (mined). Not a majority indeed, but still a great deal.

If someone owns a majority of all the bitcoin, the function of it being a currency will be lost because no one can use it. Wouldn't the value of bitcoin actually falls?

Then he will determinate the price, but he cant do that fro next 100 years, since all coins dont exist yet.

impossible.
not all coins are for sale

absolutely
no turnaround in the world bitcoin

That is exactly my point. The higher the price goes, the more the early adapters are going to sell.

No one in their wildest dream can predict bitcoin to go up more than 1000 folds in 3-4 years. The early holders who sold at $100 already do very well and not have to constantly worry about volatility and crashes.

I have spoken to a lot of people who had sold the majority of their holdings at various price points that were well under even $250. I think that anyone that was paying attention would have sold their coins well before BTC was trading at $100 as they had these coins that were were virtually nothing and all of a sudden became worth a lot

While only the richest multi-billionaires could afford to buy a majority of the BTC out there, there are lots of hedge funds that have billions to invest.  But as many have said, buying all available BTC would make it useless.  Of course, that might be a sneaky way to try to destroy it.

This is very true.  That's why a lot of people held off selling at $1200.  That's why they held off selling at $265.  That's why they held off selling at $33.  If you see the price rise dramatically in a short period of time some people will always try to hold out.

This is why you see run down buildings and lots in the middle of a modernized city - the land owner is holding out (usually for more financial gain).

if it ever gets slightly close to happen, people will just move to another coin and let the buyer with a big stash of coins with no value.

Biggest financial self-headshot ever

This is not true. The higher the price of bitcoin, the more likely people will be to sell their coins.
The OP has a few issues with the sceanario. The miners will continue to mine new coins via block subsidies, this will make it impossible to have all of the bitcoin for several hundred years. Another issue is that once someone acquires the majority of bitcon the value of bitcoin would drop dramatically. Bitcon derrives it value from the fact that people will/do use it as a payment method/currency. 

Heh, I was really tired when I wrote that.

Has no-one said that all 21 million coins haven't been minted?*

What if someone buys out all the food you own?  And every time you try to buy new food they buy that from you too?  Then you'll surely starve to death.

You are being sarcastic, of course. $1000 times 21 million is $21 billion, not $21 trillion.

As for #1, it is not impossible to buy the 8 million unreleased bitcoins. Instead of buying them directly for perhaps $8 billion, a person could buy $8 billion worth of mining equipment and mine the rest. At current prices, that amount of money will get them 6.4 billion GH/s and 99.8% of the hashing power.

Yes take a photo before he disappears

Unlikely to happen as people with this kind of wealthy know monopoly will kill the value.

mathemagically sound reasoning prevails

Yes, if someone buys all the bitcoins its like hes paradoxically taking away the value of bitcoin itself, because for a currency to have value it must be distributed along many people.
Anyway with bitcoin its more difficult because of the several decimals but its the main idea.

A rare sighting of the mythical triple negative in the wild.

I really want to read what you're writing, but come on man.

Wait, so did no-one REALLY not say that all 21 million coins haven't been minted? Yeesh.

Ok so #1; We're closing in on 13 million coins. Barley half. Impossible to buy out Bitcoin fully.

#2; The current market cap is 7 billion dollars. So it's going to be hard for most people to buy out BTC via buying all of them.

#3; If someone bought all 21 million, they would lose 99% of their money, and the community would proceed to buy up other alts such as LTC, or DRK.

#4; The potential market cap is $2.1 TRILLION dollars. That's 1,000*21,000,000. Good luck buying all of that. I have doubts even Bill Gates could afford it all. And that'd put the US even further into serious debt if they bought them all.

However, I have a hard time believing everyone would sell their BTC to a single person or small group of people. Most people would hold unless it was a REALLY good offer.

That's why BTC hasn't been bought out yet by bankers or so, they know if they try a stunt like that, they'll get shot down because of the simpleness of creating alt coins. If they buy up BTC, there's LTC, DRK, DOGE, NXT, NMC, PPC, I can go on and on...

I know for a fact, no matter how high the exchange rate goes I will always keep some. There isn't any point whatsoever in selling all.

Even if your goal is to get loads of fiat, there just comes a point when you have so much that it becomes pointless to even bother selling any more.

Say you start with 10BTC, Every time the price doubles you sell 10% of your BTC stash.

BTC Stash   Price   BTC Sold   $ stash
10.000000   $1000.00   1.000000   $1000.00
9.000000   $2000.00   0.900000   $2800.00
8.100000   $4000.00   0.810000   $6040.00
7.290000   $8000.00   0.729000   $11872.00
6.561000   $16000.00   0.656100   $22369.60
5.904900   $32000.00   0.590490   $41265.28
5.314410   $64000.00   0.531441   $75277.50
4.782969   $128000.00   0.478297   $136499.51
4.304672   $256000.00   0.430467   $246699.11
3.874205   $512000.00   0.387420   $445058.40
3.486784   $1024000.00   0.348678   $802105.13
3.138106   $2048000.00   0.313811   $1444789.23
2.824295   $4096000.00   0.282430   $2601620.61
2.541866   $8192000.00   0.254187   $4683917.09
2.287679   $16384000.00   0.228768   $8432050.77
2.058911   $32768000.00   0.205891   $15178691.39
1.853020   $65536000.00   0.185302   $27322644.50
1.667718   $131072000.00   0.166772   $49181760.09

I'm not saying BTC will be worth over $100m a coin, I'm saying if someone tries to buy it all, then it pushes up the price. Any sane person when seeing the price rise so far should take profits. Sure you could cash totally at any time, but why would you? at $1m a coin you already have $800k in the bank. You can cash out the rest to get $3m to $4m but going from $800k to $4m is hardly life changing, and in doing so you expose yourself to the risk of being totally short BTC. Instead wait for a few more doubles, you got your 4m in the bank and you still have $10-$20m in BTC. All of these figures are total pie in the sky, but that is what a market buyout would be facing. Pie.

I can't be the only one that thinks like this, ergo, nobody can corner the market because they will run out of money, because the asking price will go too high. Greed makes you sell, but fear (of missing out) is stronger and will make you hold something.

If somebody bought all the bitcoins, then Bitcoin would become useless and the value of those 21 million bitcoins would be 0.

well Dunkin Donuts only accepts checks and personal money orders.  no bitcoin

Only government have that money. But why would they want bitcoin for since they are auctioning them off

They can buy my coins off my dead body!

How would you find Satoshi to buy his million or so coins that he apparently mined in the very early days.

Some people will not sell the coins even if they were 100K USD presently.  Whoever wanted to buy all the coins would have to have government sized wallet

And yet nobody mentioned that the rest of the coins have not been minted yet.

I dont think its possible since no one has those kinds of funds to start with.. lol.

You have to be a 1% to even those crazy things.

You mean like the hunt brothers did with the silver market?

not all coins are for sale. Not all coins are avaliable(lost private keys issues)

21 million coins will cost trillions. No ones has trillions.

Like acquire all 21 million coins.  Then what?