Ask HN: How much money can actually be taken out of cryptocurrency?

10 points·s17n··6 comments

All these hundred million dollar USD ICO's have me wondering, how much money can actually be taken out of the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now? Say I owned USD$1,000,000,000 worth of BTC - how much of it could I actually sell for fiat in, say, the next quarter? Is there any way to get even a rough estimate of this number?

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Like in any Ponzi scheme - FIFO with profit. Anyway whatever you want to sell you need to find enough buyers who will pay what you want. Simply supply and demand works here [0]. See more topics on microeconomics to get better understanding how markets work.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

You could sell all of it. But, for such a large trade, the market will move, so your BTC priced at USD$1,000,whatever will be worth much less. The trick would be to sell in many smaller batches.

One thing is for certain - a lot less money went into the system than its current face value.

It's the old stock market saying - better to sell on the way up than down.

A common misconception is that BTC must be sold on an exchange. If someone has a large amount they could sell it on a secondary market or to a private buyer offmarket.

Is there some sort of bitcoin escrow service that would manage that transaction?

Hello Coralreef - about the escrow for BTC. Yes, there are such services. Typically used for large transactions

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