A comparable alternative may be gold, and it would be fair to say that the gold market could be heavily impacted by a few large holders who choose to sell their holdings. However, those holders tend to be governments. Many of the top holders are fairly representative governments, so initialization of a mass gold dumping is less likely than if they were individuals or small corporate entities, I think. They would be throwing away value that belongs to a large group of citizens, and there would be trade ramifications because their trading partners would take it in the face on their own reserves.
The real reason many people don't initiate aggressive sales is that, barring a mass exodus from a collapsing financial instrument where the price is going to drop anyway, nobody wants to hurt their own mark-to-market by pushing down the prices. The only exception to this would be a fire sale where there is a mandate to liquidate a holding in order to return value to creditors.
Not only that, but price impact is often reversed by other, later trading. So even if your intention is to put selling pressure on the instrument, it may not have a very lasting impact on the price.
However, if you assume everyone else will follow suit and race to the bottom, then there's a definite first mover advantage. That's almost certainly not the case for precious metals, and generally not the case for currencies issued by stable and relatively uncorrupt governments, but it may be the case for BTC because it is new, volatile, and unsecured/unbacked.
Note that this implies selling off X always decreases its price. This is not true if Y is $100 (people were willing to buy more X at $100 than we had X at all), but even so a market usually has something like a bid-ask spread, so if we were trading a small amount of X we could maybe even sell it all off without moving the big price.
So really, whether this crashes the market for X depends on how much people value X. If only a few people thought X was valuable, they probably all own it, so it's worthless. If everyone wants X and are willing to pay just a bit less to get it, Y doesn't really change much from $100. There are also non-currencies like equities that essentially have a price floor: below the price floor there is basically no risk that the item will ever be worth less than that (this could be determined by something like the total value of property owned by a business).
It's less the mechanism and the implication that people imply by following whales. Why should a store-of-value market react when someone sells a small amount regardless of their current holdings?
Which means Bitcoin proponents should really save the store-of-value label for later on down the road when it looks and behaves more like a store-of-value.
> The top 1000 holders of gold
> don't have anywhere near 40%
> of the market.
So just the to 2 holders of Gold have almost 40% of the market, and the top 10 have 80%.
How do you think someone who's gold holdings are 1 kg in a warehouse embedded in motherboards is going to extract that to dump it on the market? Most gold by weight is effectively illiquid, while every Bitcoin is equally liquid.
As the source the article uses[1] discusses the breakdown of those 187,200 tons is:
* Jewellery: 89,200 tonnes, 47.6%
* Private investment: 40,000 tonnes, 21.4%
* Official sector: 31,500 tonnes, 16.8%
* Other: 26,500 tonnes, 14.2%
* Below ground stocks: 57,000 tonnes
So around 50% of the number you're quoting is gold still in the ground. To repeat your snarky remark: Did you read the article?
I guess counting the official sector and private investment the top 10 official holders "only" have around 30% of the liquid market, which is way more distorted than Bitcoin, and very comparable in this context of a few owners of large liquid assets being able to distort the market.
1. https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...
We're talking about the entire BTC ecosystem. You can't compare that to a 16% sliver of the entire gold market because that fits your argument better.
> Most gold by weight is effectively illiquid, while every Bitcoin is equally liquid.
Which was basically my point, is that BTC-to-gold is an apples-to-airliners comparison and is at best a strained analogy.
Also you omitted the direct quote "Total above ground stocks: 187,200 tonnes" from the site you posted. So no that does not include gold that has not been mined.
If you want to argue a minimum amount that whales would need to sell to manipulate the markets, that's probably better for the thread than arguing about semantics.