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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The big question now is, what happens when somebody sells big for dollars. This would be an excellent time for someone with 10,000 Bitcoins to sell, take their $160,000,000, and go home. Could the market handle that?

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There was a big multimillion dollar sale today, possibly the cause of the small dip. Looks like it handled it.

e: actually, tbf, it was a buy and a sell:

https://blockchain.info/address/366k4bqibNrbUyby4xtkDT1demdc...

But it does demonstrate the market can just about handle large transactions.

But did it result in an exchange actually transferring millions of dollars out of the exchange to a real bank? That's the question.

Compared to national currencies bitcoin is now top 20 in terms of market cap.

What kind of currency is measured in market cap? Isn't that a chicken-egg problem?

How big is big?

The one that was linked as 14400 BTC. At $15k/BTC that's $216m.

On GDAX the trade volume for BTC/USD is now about $1.4 billion per day. And there are other exchanges too. So yes the market could fulfill that trade. Would probably bring the BTC price down but it wouldn't be catastrophic.

Given the completely unregulated nature of these exchanges, that 1.4 billion USD could be legit, it could be wash trades, it could be inhouse bots doing crazy things to rig the market. , or it could just be a complete fabrication.

Looking at the chart, you could liquidate $130 million and it would move the price down to $5200.

Is that based on the live buy orders? If the price dropped below 10k then I think you would see a ton of new buyers (including me)

Catch a falling knife

You'd also see a lot of new sellers when peoples stop-losses trigger.

Flash crash.

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