If Winklevoss tried to cash out, they’d probably crash the Bitcoin market | Hacker News Reader

If Winklevoss tried to cash out, they’d probably crash the Bitcoin market

inverse.com

19 pointsmatchcohnn15 comments

This seems to be inaccurate. The twins could choose to simply sell the private key in a private transaction. Assuming they didn't create one wallet with 50,000 bitcoin, they could even sell portions. This gets them paid AND puts the onus for moving the coins to a new address on the new owner. They could exit in 5 minutes if another billionaire wanted their coins bad enough.

> simply sell the private key in a private transaction

Then why not sell it three times to three separate parties? And also keep a copy of the key and engage in some spending from the wallet themselves?

I'm not saying that these particular people would engage in such trickery. But I would be very wary of any proposition to sell me bitcoins in an out-of-band transaction of this kind.

Agreed, not saying it is smart but it IS possible.

"Typical trading volumes across the major exchanges are only about $2 billion globally"

Sounds like they could just sell ~$20M everyday, which would account for only 1% of the daily trading volume. After ~50 days, they would have cashed out $1B.

That depends on how much of the daily trading volume is wash trading. Bitfinex can just decide to give a couple accounts a pile of USDT on margin and self-trade to stir up a sense of FOMO and convince folks to buy in. It's pretty much free to do if you run the exchange.

Same with buffet

Winklevosses

Winklevi

Didn't you see "The Social Network?" Winklevi! ;-)

Touche (with an accent aigu) -- I had forgotten that. But I knew SOME kind of plural was called for.

I don't get why people downvote corrections to the title.

Dont we know this by now?

It's the same with Bill Gates but nobody's doubting he's rich.

No this is nothing like Bill Gates. He owns less than 2% of the shares.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/bill-gates-stake-in-microsoft-i...

So, what percent of the BTC market cap do the the Winklevoss twins own? I haven't seen anything suggesting that they own more than 1%.

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