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Comment by raintrees | Hacker News Reader

Only if they sell, and wouldn't a $1B sale pretty much tank it? Is there enough financial coverage from the banking sector behind the exchange houses to cover such a large sell?

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Daily trading volume of Bitcoin is around $500M: https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

Obviously they wouldn't place a single sell order for the whole lot. If they wanted to get out of Bitcoin entirely, they'd do it gradually.

Daily trading of bitcoin is 5b$

Thats just one single exhange fuer one single fiat currency pair

Guess what there is Euros, KRW, Jen, Rimimbi.

Insane to see how buthurt HN is ober missing out on one of the best tech opportunities in the last decade.

Many here will probably hate the big family Christmas gathering because every relative assumes that the geeky guy surly must have bought some bitcoins.

But HN is no better then IBM or Dell. Its always easy to bash IBM and the way they went under, but beeing mid 30s and dismissing Cryptocurrency as fad of some kid traders is just the same.

Having said that, does anyone have an inspirational name for my Yacht? Satoshicruise?

> missing out on one of the best tech opportunities in the last decade.

Can you enlighten me on what's "best" is in this tech opportunity?

To compare:

During Singles Day AliBaba had a peak of 325 thousand transactions per second.

Bitcoin struggles to make 4 while consuming a power equivalent of several small countries.

Thats like WarnerBrothers saying in 1995 That movie streaming will never be a thing because its ridiculous to stream with a 56k Modem. Now we have Netflix and Youtube etc.

I could go on and on, but the kneejerk resistance is extremely polarised and I feel like preaching the Internet in 1995 to some 65year old Executives at a newspaper.

Watch this to remind yourself that the internet was not always around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3Y2_YiT-A

There was some other interview where Marc Andressen holds a presentation of the Netscape browser and is asked by a reporter what cool websites he can show or think of. He didn't have a good answer and for sure were not able to predict products like Facebook.

Watch this if you want to here some good arguments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SYVX2wcMVM

> Thats like WarnerBrothers saying in 1995 That movie streaming will never be a thing because its ridiculous to stream with a 56k Modem. Now we have Netflix and Youtube etc.

False analogy.

> I could go on and on

Please do. You haven't event started.

> the kneejerk resistance is extremely polarised and I feel like preaching the Internet in 1995 to some 65year old Executives at a newspaper.

Nope. You haven't event started preaching, much less to a 65 year old.

> Watch this to remind yourself that the internet was not always around

What does this have to do with bitcoin? Oh. Right. Nothing

> presentation of the Netscape browser

I've yet to see you go and on about bitcoin. So far you're rehashing stories about the Internet.

> Watch this if you want to here some good arguments.

An hour-long video can be easily distilled into a number of bullet points. Please, do go "on and on".

Gl in the future dinosaur

Well surely they don't have to sell all at once.. they can bleed it probably at a pretty high rate for a long time.. they may never get to $1B, but surely they could make tons of money selling.. so long as they pick a rate sufficient to not tank the coin.

Also we know $11m is not all the money they had.. so these guys have been crushing it otherwise for a while now I believe.. Its pretty incredible how successful they are.

It helps to start out rich and then go to Harvard.

True. But surely this isn’t the only reason for their success. Kudos for their being successful, given their predisposed privilege, as there are many in their shoes who would have otherwise squandered it.

I guess I don't really understand the point of it, but what is $1B "worth" of Bitcoin actually useful for? I saw one of the other comments link to daily trading volume, but I read those values as consisting of putting a dollar value on Bitcoin movement within the ecosystem, not crossing boundaries - am I correct?

So given the practicalities of shifting the value outside of the Bitcoin economy, the main value seems to be in speculating that this specific cryptocurrency is the future and will take on a dominant value in the real world in exchange for goods and labour, and its volatility seems to make that less likely lest everyone turns into the person who "paid X Bitcoin for a pizza on YYYY-MM-DD and now it's worth Y".

Am I missing something important here? I'm not an economist, and only have a broad understanding of the technology behind Bitcoin, but I don't see the point unless one day we start saying "$1 buys X bitcoin" and not the other way around.

Edit: It's telling that I hit post and then spent minutes obsessing over 'YYYY' and 'Y' being used in same sentence to mean different things :/

Just think of it as owning a share of a stock.

This is true of any company equity as well. If Bezos decided to unload his entire stake in amazon, for example, the stock price would tank. At that level, it's all based on valuation, not liquidation value

I'm pretty sure bitcoin is hell of a lot more illiquid than amazon stock is...

Well, according to marketwatch, if I am reading it correctly, the average trade volume of Amazon stock is 3.5 million.

USD trade volume of bitcoin is between 2 and 11 trillion.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data...

Right, but there is a fundamental value to Amazon. The stocking never go to zero dollars just because of Bezos selling because the company is clearly worth more than that.

If the Winklevoss twins tried to sell just 1% of their stake, $10 million, what would happen to the price of bitcoin? Would they have $990 million of bitcoin left?

I’m guessing it would be a hell of a lot less. I think it would cause a panic.

I’m not going to say would go to zero, but I’m willing to bet it would drop a TON more than Amazon stock would if Bezos sold 1%.

Not much would happen if recent history is a guide. One day in mid-September 2017, $4.2 billion of Bitcoin changed hands, and the price that day went up about 5%. That volume followed a rumor that China was cracking down on cryptocurrency exchanges.

I can't say I spend much time watching the tape, but I have seen >100-BTC trades on GDAX in the past, and at current prices your what-if scenario involves a sale of about 909 BTC.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/11-billion-24-hour-cryptocur...

USD trade volume for bitcoin has been around 2 to 11 trillion in the last month.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data...

according to the depth chart on GDAX, you could sell 10M$ in BTC and the price would dip by.... les than 300$ to 10850$.

100M$ in BTC would send the price in the 7000s

If Bezos just hopped into his Etrade account and hit the "sell all" button (just pretend it works that way), the stock would absolutely crater, at least for a bit. In practice, he'd find institutional-ish investors who were interested in buying a sizeable investment in Amazon, and he'd sell directly to them in a private deal. That kind of stuff happens all the time; I think, it's called a block trade... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_trade

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