Bitcoin is struggling to break $12,000 and stay at that price for any length of time.  There'd need to be some new players (a pod of Whales?) come into the Cryptosphere and take a fair chunk of the available coins off of the market with a strategy to HODL them for three to five years.  If it were a sudden land grab, then that'd shock the market upwards, but if it was done softly-softly, then the market might not necessarily notice at first the availability drying up.

True, the price would go up (supply and demand) but not as much as a shock and awe plunder.