[1] http://www.hbscny.org/s/1738/cc/index2.aspx?sid=1738&gid=4&p...
He is worth ~$2B. Assuming he put 0.2% (only $4M) in Ethereum during the crowd sale, 3 years later Ethereum appreciates 48× and represents 10% of his net worth. Of course he says he is also invested into Bitcoin, not only into Ethereum. Say he purchased only $2M of ETH, that's 3300 BTC as of the crowd sale's initial phase (22 Jul - 5 Aug 2014 when 1 BTC was ~600 USD and purchased 2000 ETH,) so he got 6.7M ETH which is 9% of the total ETH supply at genesis.
Edit: oops. He didn't say he purchased at the crowdsale (0.0005 BTC or 0.30 USD per ETH) but when it was 1 USD per ETH. So he would have needed to plunk 0.6% / $12M of his wealth into Ethereum. Still a tiny fraction.
If so, he can't sell it without tanking the value so hard he'd never be able to get a decent fraction of its "worth".
That's not even talking about alternate ways to transfer his wealth out of ETH (eg. approaching his billionaire friend: "how about you sell me that mansion for 100k ETH?")
And again off exchange block/bulk sales tend to go for lower than market price. They are rarely, if ever, executed at market price. So most probably he will have to offer 100k ETH, 4.8mil, for a ~4 mil mansion.
"4.8mil, for a ~4 mil mansion" I agree and that's totally reasonable. Only a 20% hit. Pxtl was saying something much more dramatic ("he'd never be able to get a decent fraction of its worth").
No, the blockchain is the data structure that stores historical transactions.
He could be a large owner of the circulating currency, and he would face issues trying to sell a huge chunk of value all at once. The crypto markets are not very liquid compared with mature financial markets.
I was at the panel discussion and he seems wayyyy more excited about Ethereum - I wouldn't be surprised if he held more ether at this point (which is probably why he was so enthusiastic).