If enough people want to buy, run to exchanges, and then try and withdraw, force exchanges to also buy in order to meet withdrawals
There have been massive amount of withdrawal of Bitcoin and other crypto assets due to the recent collapse of FTX and it's still ongoing but my understanding of how an exchange like Coinbase is different than the way you described it
Legitimate exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken will and should never sell bitcoins or other cryptos that are not already on their wallets
Let's say Coinbase has 100K btc's and 80K belong to their customers and 20K to Coinbase
Only 50k of those have a sale order at a given price, let's say the last btc is set at a price of $100K by their customer and let's say 100,000 rich Brazilians want to buy 1 btc each no matter the price, Coinbase will make a market using 20,000 btc's they own and every buy and sell they will control the order so that they have a spread they make money on
But the very last Brazilian wanting to buy that last btc will be paying $100K+. Of course, along the way, some of the 30K btc's will start to see the price going up and may want to sell and other people may deposit btc to sell so the supply is constantly changing
Anyway, at the end of the day, every single bitcoin should be available for withdrawal to a local wallet from Coinbase
FTX was a criminal operation that is why 70,000 btc's were stolen and cannot be withdrawn by the customers
The risk of exchanges is that they should have constant inventory, but they didn't buy at the very top, that's ET nocoiner price anchoring bullshit
Coinbase has been around for over 10 years as well as Kraken, they have a constantly revolving inventory of bitcoins, some probably bought at less than $20 and some they bought at $69K and some sold at $69K and some sold at $21 through the course of time through their market making operations
You have no idea how giddy I am with excitement that something like this is now possible. This could never happen with gold or silver because no matter how much physical stuff you wanted to hold, the price could be so easily manipulated in order to keep it where the big boys wanted it.
Mark Yusko has talked about this on several YT videos. JP Morgan pays $1 Billion every year in fines because of manipulating the gold price, but they make $20 B every year, They pay the fine without admitting guilt and most likely has the blessing of the US G
Mark has mentioned that JP Morgan or other US G operatives could in theory be manipulating the Bitcoin price already through the use of futures, but CME is not going to be very effective since low volume, low open interest, not 24/7. CME btc futures are also cash settled and not physical bitcoins, heh
[conspiracy theory is that SBF and FTX are Fed]
FTX was the perfect venue for the wall street institutional traders, they trade 24/7/365 through their international offshore companies and branches...
FTX shutdown was the best thing for Bitcoin and cryptos market. The players above got absolutely rekt
The worst thing that can happen is for FTX to "somehow get funding" and open up operations again. That pretty much guarantees it's a Fed operation
So anyway, gold and silver are easily manipulated because who takes physical delivery and then you'll have problems with verification some gold bars have been known to have other metals at the core, only the outside are pure gold
No so with bitcoins and other crypto assets that can be withdrawn any time or any day, and now there's a new mindset for everyone to withdraw their cryptos from exchanges and other centralized entities and we hope this continues, so far it's been ongoing from what I read on CT
