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Ask CryptoVantage: What if Someone Bought All the Bitcoin?
Have you ever wondered about what would happen if some insanely rich person or institution would purchase each and every bitcoin? What if Elon Musk wakes up one morning and has one of his lightbulb moments and decides to buy all the bitcoin? What if Jeff Bezos wants to be part of that deal? Theoretically, if both tech moguls would put together their sizable wallets, they would be able to afford all the bitcoin in existence at today’s rates.
In today’s edition of CryptoVantage, we explore what might happen to the Bitcoin market and whether this hypothetical thinking exercise is even plausible.
Bitcoin’s Price Would First Skyrocket
In order to be able to buy all the bitcoin in the world, both Elon and Bezos would first have to determine the exact number of all the available bitcoin. Something which is easier said than done. We know that only a small fraction of BTC is currently for sale on exchanges and that most of the available BTC coins sit in cold storage. On top of this, the two billionaires will have to deal with the fact that millions of bitcoin have already been lost by early investors and miners who have lost access to their original BTC bags.
So, where to begin, you might ask?
Well, the two richest men in the world would first have to go after all the available bitcoin sitting on the different crypto exchanges and would eventually start flooding the bitcoin market with buy orders. This would cause Bitcoin’s price to most definitely skyrocket through the roof all the way shooting past the moon to hit Mars in no time. Maybe it would be possible for the duo to suppress the price of BTC somewhat if they decide to use alternative purchase methods, such as over-the-counter buying.
No matter how they decide to get their sticky little fingers on all the BTC coins, these buy orders would quickly devour all the Bitcoin liquidity on the crypto exchanges, effectively blocking the possibility of further buying.
Most likely, the price of Bitcoin will have skyrocketed so much by that moment, that even the immense fortunes of both men combined wouldn’t be sufficient to gobble up all the bitcoin that is safely nestled away in a variety of cold storage solutions.
Making this dubious endeavor even more complicated, is the fact that there are plenty of die-hard bitcoin hodlers who swear that they will never sell their precious bitcoin, no matter how high or low its price goes. In other words, it seems very unlikely that anyone will ever own all of them.
Bitcoin’s Price Would Be Impossible to Determine
If we do away with any sense of reality and let’s imagine, for good fun, that some elusive entity has the power to magically acquire all existing bitcoin, then what can we expect to happen to the price levels of the number one cryptocurrency?
Assuming this elusive entity has no inclination to sell any of his stack of sats, the price of one bitcoin would be impossible to determine. For bitcoin to have any monetary value, somebody out there has to be willing to pay up a certain amount of cash for that bitcoin. If one person owns all the bitcoin in the world and is never willing to sell, then eventually people would move on from bitcoin and start using other crypto coins. If no one is interested in bitcoin anymore, its price could be driven to the point of total collapse AKA zero point zero.
On the other hand, if one holds all the bitcoin in the world, what would prevent them to set any price they so wish? How about $1 billion per coin? How about $10 billion? It does not matter if they never intend to sell.
To conclude, in our humble opinion, it is highly implausible for anyone, not even Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or even organizations like Apple or Microsoft to purchase all the currently available bitcoin.
