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Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

Part of the irony around bitcoin is that some of the early users of Bitcoin are from the Occupy Wall Street movement. We all remember hearing them request donations via btc, people giving thousands of btc for them to buy pizzas.

I think (entirely without proof) it's likely that many of these organisers were/are holding large quantities of bitcoins themselves and have become unwitting millionaires.

I haven't heard anybody mention this before, but I'm very curious to know if this bears any grain of truth. If the people who led rallies against the top 1% suddenly find themselves deep inside that 1% tail.

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> I think (entirely without proof) it's likely that many of these organisers were/are holding large quantities of bitcoins themselves and have become unwitting millionaires.

I suspect (no proof either) many early bitcoin adopters sold most of their bitcoins long ago. They cashed out when their capital reached a significant amount, long before becoming millionnaire. For instance, I suppose that if today my BC portfolio were worth $5000, I'd sell them (because I certainly would not buy $5000 worth of BC today if I had none).

Why sell all? They could’ve sold in stages and thus, still hold some BTC that make them millionaires.

Maybe, but does it matter? If you made a few million, should you be sad because you missed out on a few more?

The first (few) million are life changing. But the difference between 20 and 100m is flying private and owning a yacht vs flying first and chartering one for the week.

The question is, can you actually cash out thousands of bitcoins these days? Would any exchange support that and then would you be able to get your money into your actual bank account.

Then comes tax.

You still have to pay your taxes but cashing out a few thousand BTC on one of the large exchanges can be easily done. 24 hour volume at bitfinex is $781MM so you would have to dump a lot of coin to move the needle. A multi-thousand coin sell all at once can cause a brief flash crash though. If you have tens of thousands of coins you go to the OTC market.

I mentioned this before, but one of my former colleagues quit to trade BTC and claimed he could account on some days for 10% of exchange volume.

No idea which exchange.

But his trading activity as far as I understand were on-average neutral (not net long or short). Though I think he also kept a bunch himself too.

So volume alone does not imply the exchange could absorb a large one-sided addition of sell orders without significant move in spot.

Also it's unclear if any of this volume is 'churning', by those with significant quantities of BTC happy to pay transaction fees to create a sense of false liquidity.

Definitely. I did see someone dump 1000 BTC on finex the other day though, and while it did cause a ~$1000 dip they were bought up in a few minutes. Like you say though, there's no way of knowing if the buyers were third parties or the seller rigging the order book (although I don't know how one could have much control over a transaction like that without having control of the exchange itself, but exchanges faking volume and manipulating the price is par for the course in bitcoin land).

It's not just selling your bitcoins on an exchange, it's actually getting the cash out of the exchange and into your bank account.

A large volume on an exchange means there's plenty of people trading, but it doesn't mean plenty of money going in or out.

I mean there are limits, so it's not like Satoshi could cash out in one go.

Not really. It wholly fulfills being financially responsible through this basic tenet -- buy low, sell high. Few asset classes can appreciate in value as astronomically as BTC and it would be prudent to overcome sellers' remorse.

Some may regard "going long" as the bedrock of strategic investment and realizing short-term gains is erroneous, but few will put it towards their retirement. There's absolutely nothing wrong with liquidating assets for life purchases (or even vanity projects (within reason)) rather than dutifully drawing down for one's twilight years.

Another way to look at it, especially for someone who got into bitcoin early because of their politics, is that the difference between 20 and 100m is the difference between being able to make enough donations to influence a politician, and buying the New Republic and influencing the conversation (though such plans don't always go so well [1]). At billions, you can think about buying the Washington Post.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/01/...

> We all remember [...] people giving thousands of btc for them to buy pizzas.

I've heard a story of one individual on a forum ordering someone two Papa John's online in return for another forum member sending them 10,000 bitcoin (or something like that) but I've never heard of people sending thousands of bitcoins to "occupy wall street" (who, exactly?) so they could buy pizzas. Where do you remember hearing that?

> I've heard a story of one individual on a forum ordering someone two Papa John's online

That was the famous bitcoin pizza[1][2] (worth $120,000,000 as of this writing), and it is believed to be the first real-world purchase using bitcoins.

[1] Original thread: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=137.0

[2] The pizzas: http://archive.is/a1IRg (archive link so we don't hug laszlo's servers to death.)

> https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=137.0

I'm not one for all that "if you bought $100 of bitcoin in 2013..." stuff, but wow, that first sentence...

Though I guess if he had 10,000 to blow like that, he probably had a lot more, and probably isn't short of a few now. (Hopefully anyway.)

I think I'd rather be someone who paid 10,000 for two pizzas though (which I assume was more or less the going rate in 2010), than being one of the people who didn't or couldn't take him up on the offer - two days later and nobody had done it.

I don't know about Occupy Wall Street specifically. But I do suspect that many of the Bitcoin 1% have cryptoanarchist roots. The smart ones have diversified, of course. Maybe they'll do some good. Whatever that is. It's hard to tell, anymore.

I suspect (entirely without proof) they spend all their BTC on Silkroad.

We're building a great movie script here, one post at a time.

Why in the world was this downvoted?

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