30 December 2021
I think this is a fair question to ask, first off if the IMF did this it would have to be done privately because if the public found out about it then they would start doing the same thing and then fiat currency would hyper inflate extremely fast.
So let's say they're printing and buying in private, buying a lot of coins without moving the price right now is extremely hard due to how many coins are for sale compared to how many are in cold storage. However let's say that this recent run up was a government buying bitcoin privately so that they could manipulate it. The question is what do they do once they've bought a lot?
Everone knows that Bitcoin can't be controlled so what does the government do? Do they dump all their coin on the open market and hope to drive the price so low that Bitcoin collapses? We've seen massive bear markets before and every time Bitcoin comes back because Bitcoin is still Bitcoin regardless of the price. Needless to say that by the time said government had enough coins to manipulate the market down by a large percentage the price of bitcoin will probably be over 100k due to them accumulating so much.
What price could they drive it down too? 20k? Maybe 10k? Regardless, unless Bitcoin suffers some catastrophic problem like a bug in the code or something similar I will continue to buy regardless of price. I know that others will do the same. So a government buying in an attempt to dump coins on the market would only works short term if at all, reality is that they would just drive the price up extremely high and then cause a minor dip.
We all know that Bitcoin can't be control by large groups, minors have tried and failed, individuals have tried and failed, if governments try on a large scale they will fail and in the process they will demonstrate why everyone in the world should be using Bitcoin as a currency, because it cannot be manipulated by outside agencies.
In closing I don't think you have anything to worry about, the worst case scenario is that a government accumulates a massive amount of bitcoins and then causes a bear market. Good for us because I know I'll be happy for cheaper bitcoin prices, and I know I'm not alone.
Yes, they could try to corner the market. While corrupt there should be some regulations, i.e. if hundreds of billions of dollars just showed up to buy bitcoin, there could be people saying that is destroying the fiat currency through inflation, as well a significant percentage of bitcoin has never budged, these people would become far wealthier than they already are. Third, at least since the Federal Reserve act, money primarily comes into existence as debt, i.e. when there is a loan for 10,000 the banker just creates that money out of thin air into a ledger and tells the customer you have ten thousand dollars, now you have to pay me back 10,000 at 5% interest. the money for the interest is never created so in order to pay back principle + interest someone else must go into debt. It is literally a ponzi scheme designed to indebt all people to banks. If money is printed without corresponding debt it is a credit. So in the case of printing credit money to buy up bitcoin it would actually help people get out from under the banks thumb. Lastly, most importantly, the value of bitcoin derives in significant part from its community. If suddenly the only BTC available was the GS special reserve BTC note with its 2% transfer fees (to make sure there's no fraud and money laudering and stuff, and really the note is backed fractionally by a genuine BTC, really) then after shovelling hundreds of billions of debt free money at people, making them fabulously rich as opposed to indebted, debasing and eroding confidence in their own controlled fiat currency, demonstrating the viability and value of crypto, people say, you know litecoin isn't a bad alternative and I hear the original BTC developers are gonna release BTC gen2. What then, give out another trillion in free money to the people you are trying to get into debt? It is a good argument for the existence of altcoins. If BTC was ever co-opted in some form or another there are a dozen coins that could take its place, personally I wouldn't mind seeing Dogecoin as top dog. ;) Rather then spend money what the line of attack has been so far is to try and convince people that a random shtcoin is better than or actually is BTC. That hasn't worked for BCH or PetroCoin and doubt it will work for JPM coin or Libra Coin. But if all BTC ended up in the hands of bankers, well just use a different coin. Just as a last thought that occured to me in a sense we the BTC community can print as much money as we like as well by attaching value to crypto. Buying into it from the controlled fiat banking world only validates crypto and degrades their currency.