Would you rather own all of Bitcoin (current market cap: $100B) or all of a company with $10B in annual operating income? If it's the former, why?
What is unclear to me is how many of these financial services (e.g., assisting with stock transfer, IPOs, raising capital, etc.) will continue to thrive in the same way that they have been, mostly unchanged for the past several years, when they can be executed in cheaper, more efficient, decentralized marketplace.
I'd love to expand my understand and be proven wrong though so I welcome feedback on this line of thinking.
Or trading derivatives? Derivatives are either traded on extremely efficient exchanges already (the automation of which put a squeeze on IB profits) or are for very bespoke products. I suppose in this area you can come up with a process for making the bespoke products more efficient via the blockchain but the actual ledger on those things isn't the hard part, its the contracts and risk pricing. Even then, the banks customers seem likely to continue to go to them for the expertise in the bespoke products.
For underwriting securities its not clear how the blockchain makes transactions less risky? Again the mechanics of the ledger are fairly easy and efficient already. I suppose there is room for improvement, but the thing people are going to the IB for, and what generates their profits in this area is actually taking on the risk, which the blockchain does not mitigate.
What a blockchain is useful for is eliminating the need for a centralized, trusted third party. Where I could see this being very helpful, and a potentially disruptive force is in areas like IPOs, mitigating counterparty risk, reducing conflict of interests, etc.
For example, if companies can raise capital and create liquidity for themselves with ICOs, the demand for IPOs will decrease. If investment banks break the "Chinese" wall and engage in market manipulation, then having public companies put their accounting on a public ledger will reduce the dependence on quarterly earnings reports. If more players are able to access the financial systems because they are on public ledgers rather than private ones, it will make it harder to banks to engage in oligopolistic behavior.
None of these things are guaranteed to happen, and certainly they won't all happen overnight. I do see though, the potential for these types of changes to slowly chip away at some of the revenue streams that banks have enjoyed for a long time.
Given that, If your question is altered to somehow own all of it while keeping its value, i'd rather the 100B easily liquidated assets over 10B revenue yoy.
I would also invest into $10B companies with the Bitcoin balance.
This is what you do with illiquid float you control, in any asset class. Whats the real question?
I'd sell it tomorrow and make about $1bn in profit and move on with my life.
EDIT: I'm editing this because people are missing the point. My point wasn't about how when 1 owner has absolute control BTC is worthless like this guy[1] seems to think or about the liquidity of BTC, like this guy[2] seems to think. My point was about the fact that the difference between BTC is that the only use it has is holding and hoping it moves up, whereas owning a company actually brings in earnings.
Happy? Do you miss the forest for the trees a lot, or only when you're on HN?
In my mind, it's conceptually similar to elastic/inelastic demand curves.
This is why institutional traders have to break up buys or sells over many transactions. If you put up a huge block saying "I want to buy/sell $X million / Y million units of instrument Z" it is going to strongly drive the market away from your bid/ask. In a market like BTC, it might drive the price down 50% within minutes.
In other words, who is going to be on the other side of your market? If you are selling 1000 BTC, and if the top bid price has a quantity of 0.1 BTC, you will blow through the first level, then the second, thrid, etc, through dozens of decreasing price levels, if you are doing market orders. You will take out the ENTIRE BUY SIDE OF THE MARKET, and the price of your last transaction will be thousands of dollars lower than the first price. If you are doing a limit order, then you provide the lowest price you are willing to go, so you might only be able to sell a few coins.