Have you ever wondered what would happen if some insanely rich person or institution bought every single bitcoin? What happens if Elon Musk wakes up one morning and has one of his light bulb moments and decides to buy all the bitcoins? What if Jeff Bezos wants to be part of that deal? In theory, if both tech moguls put together their sizable wallets, they would be able to afford all the bitcoins that exist at today’s rates.
In today’s edition of CryptoVantage, we explore what could happen to the Bitcoin market and whether this hypothetical thought exercise is even plausible.
The price of Bitcoin would skyrocket
In order to buy all the bitcoins in the world, both Elon and Bezos would first have to determine the exact number of all available bitcoins. Something that 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 BTC coins available are found in cold storage. In addition, the two billionaires will have to face the fact that millions of bitcoins have already been lost by early investors and miners who lost access to their original BTC exchanges.
So, where to start, you might ask?
Well, the two richest men in the world would first have to go after all the available bitcoins sitting on the different crypto exchanges and eventually start flooding the bitcoin market with buy orders. This would cause the price of Bitcoin to surely skyrocket through the roof until it shoots over the moon to hit Mars in no time. Perhaps it would be possible for the duo to somehow suppress the price of BTC if they decided to use alternative purchase methods, such as over-the-counter buying.
No matter how they decide to put their little sticky fingers on all BTC coins, these buy orders would quickly devour all Bitcoin liquidity on crypto exchanges, effectively blocking the possibility of further purchases.
Most likely, the price of Bitcoin will have skyrocketed so much by that time, that even the immense fortunes of both men combined would not be enough to devour all the bitcoin that is safely hidden in a variety of cold storage solutions.
To make this dubious effort even more complicated, is the fact that there are plenty of diehard bitcoin hodlers who swear 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 them all.
The price of Bitcoin would be impossible to determine
If we eliminate any sense of reality and imagine, for fun, that some elusive entity has the power to magically acquire all existing bitcoins, then what can we expect to happen at the price levels of the number one cryptocurrency?
Assuming this elusive entity has no inclination to sell any of its satellite stacks, the price of a bitcoin would be impossible to determine. For bitcoin to have a monetary value, someone out there must be willing to pay a certain amount of money for that bitcoin. If a person owns all the bitcoins in the world and is never willing to sell, eventually people would switch to bitcoin and start using other crypto coins. If no one is interested in bitcoin anymore, its price could be pushed to the point of total collapse AKA zero point zero.
On the other hand, if you hold all the bitcoins in the world, what would stop them from setting any price they want? How about $1 billion per coin? How about $10 billion? It doesn’t matter if they never plan 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 buy all the bitcoins currently available.
