Nothing but a desire not to waste money would stop them from driving up the price of bitcoins to astronomical levels, effectively or directly handing money to anyone who already has a decent stash. I’m not sure why any government would want to massively reward people for having bitcoins, but they could certainly do so. If they bought enough coins to make commerce in bitcoin ineffective, someone will just slap up a ‘bitcoin 2’ and people will use it until a government decides to reward them, then repeat. It’s not like the bitcoin code is some big secret, people have already made multiple spinoff *coin systems by changing the name and where it starts.
A better solution for a government wanting to hurt bitcoin would be to slap down enough computing resources to take over the mining pool and use that to sabotage whatever people are doing.
Bitcoins aren’t stored on any one hard drive so you can’t destroy them that way. Anyone who has the wallet address could use them, even if it’s just a hard copy printout (I understand that some people do store them that way). Although I suppose that you could take them permanently out of circulation by putting them into a wallet and losing the wallet address (or whatever it’s called). As others have said, all that would do would be to drive up the value of everyone else’s Bitcoins.
This idea suggests a strangely lacking understanding of economics. For one, by doing so, they’d be giving money to all the holders of Bitcoins, and ending up with… nothing. Which would only support the idea that Bitcoin is worth something.
And it wouldn’t work anyway, It might work for some physical commodity, but Bitcoins are just math and software. Bitcoins can be subdivided quite a lot right now, and to arbitrary levels with a pretty minor software change. It is literally impossible to do this, because there’s nothing about Bitcoin that would fail to work if there was only one billionth of Bitcoin left, and everyone was trading around tiny pieces that billionth.
Having read the article about the collapse of Bitcoin linked to upthread, I am intrigued by the recent palaver about Craig Wright “coming out” as Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonym of the designer of Bitcoin) and the counterclaims that he is not, which dominate the Google searches but it seems likely Wright is indeed the guy. (Are the naysayers simply manipulating Google?)
It occurs to me that Wright’s emergence may well be related to the power plays going in described in the article. Is it? Is Wright’s emergence an attempt to break a formal deadlock? Or is it to lend moral authority to one side or another? Are the denialists simply distributing FUD to muddy the waters and preserve their position? Are there parallels to the South Park episode where Christ returns and the Catholic church denies it is him in order to preserve its power? Is Wright a player in any of this at all, or is he just coming out for completely separate reasons?
I doubt it. He has a history of offering fabricated evidence like backdated emails and webpages and faked cryptographic signatures.
There are known Bitcoin transactions that Satoshi Nakamoto made. All anyone would have to do to prove they were him is transfer some of Satoshi’s bitcoins somewhere. Or sign the front page of today’s New York Times with his private key. This is a trivial thing for the real Satoshi to do, and Wright keeps waving his hands around at considerably less conclusive evidence.