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What's stopping someone with a really fast computer from corner the bitcoin market? I'm probably being naive here as I don't know the details of bitcoin, just that it's a digital currency that can only be mined to come into being. Anyways, a good explanation from the HN community would be really helpful. thnx.

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(Opportunity) cost. Right now bitcoin mining is starting to require custom ASICs/FPGAs to be worthwhile (although the increasing price offsets that, obviously), because mining bitcoins becomes harder the more bitcoins there are found, so the costs of hardware and electricity start to get very large.

If you had a supercomputer with tens of thousands of CPUs it's probably being put to more scientific use than trying to corner the bitcoin market, which is basically still a gamble at this stage.

good answer and thank you. I was thinking of it more as an accepted currency. Because if it's seen as being such, then it would be worth it to mine as much as possible. And what happens when they run out? It's pretty confusing to me...

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