Bitcoin market cap is $291 billion right now and the trade volume an order of magnitude higher. So pretty sure they wouldn't have much problem unloading their position.
is not the same thing as liquidity
Surely there's a lot more sophisticated high-volume trading algorithms taking place than what I did.
Take a look at GDAX's full book [1] -- Even going all the way down to a BTC price of $8600 (-50% current prices), there's only outstanding buy orders to consume 5169 BTC if someone entered a market sell order. Obviously that would trigger a lot of automated trades that don't live on the book but I think the assumption that "trading volume" == "liquidity" is very dangerous.
I’m starting to lose sympathy for the people who are ultimately going to get hurt when this crashes. The signs are not hard to see at all.
Oh but this time it's different™
Seriously though, given all these trades occur on god knows what kind of sketchy exchanges for all we know half that stuff is literally random inserts in a database with no bearing in reality at all. Toss in "innovative" things like Tether and who really knows what the true value of BTC is.
This stuff is gonna fail, and fail hard. Hopefully for good. BTC and the whole crypto bandwagon is a massive, massive waste of energy.
We've seen those and the price jumps back almost immediately because BTC trades on many exchanges and currency pairs.
If you wanted to measure the current book, I think you'd have to sum up the various fiat books across exchanges to get a good sense of what the market can bear at the moment.
edit: Thank you for forcing me to clarify my thinking, I shouldn't have directly linked volume to liquidity but absent good data I tend to associate them.