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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Got me wondering. What's the largest amount of bitcoin that you can trivially convert into USD in a very short timeframe?

Ie. Can "on paper" millionaires realise that wealth if they choose to?

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I think the term for this is "market depth". https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/bitstampUSD_depth.html The 3rd chart (and the 4th which is the same thing but zoomed in) shows: if I'm willing to accept as little as X USD / Y BTC exchange rate, how much BTC can I sell? The answer is the area under the curve above the price you're accepting.

If you have a lot more BTC to sell than could comfortably move on exchanges, auctions are the way to go. Sometimes the feds seize large amounts of BTC and auction them off in large blocks, and they not only sell but they go for above then-current exchange rates.

I think you can do $50-100m in a 24hour period without spooking the market much; that's on regular exchanges. Not sure about the depth of the market where they trade in blocks via some brokers.

Who or what service is going to give you $50mm in real money for Bitcoin in a 24 hr period,

You’ll have to split this amount between 7-10 exchanges. That becomes 5-10m/exchange. Coinbase volume today was $150m. $5m should be feasible over 24hours and btc trades 24/7.

Nobody. You’ll never find an answer and just get mumbles. The truth is crypto trading in actual USD (not tether) is super thin. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

I actively trade these markets, so I have some insights. While I didn’t do $50m-$100m on a single day, I’m judging by market depth on the different exchanges I trade at.

There many small fish trading with a small ($500k-$1m) capital on a 3-5x leverage. They can do some days 5-10m of volume in usd.

Are you trading in actual dirty government fiat (USD) or fake tether (USDT)? There is a huge difference. And also note that some of the larger exchanges aren’t very upfront about which currency you are actually trading in...

Check out listings on localbitcoins for your region. It's worked well for me in the past (keeping transactions off public exchanges). In my city, it's been trivial to move $20k dollars in a couple hours.

Most online wallets will convert your balance to USD instantly, but limit the rate at which you can transfer the money to your normal bank.

Swapping BTC for dollar-shaped entries in an exchange's database doesn't count.

Yes? Even a billion dollars? I'm not sure you're actually answering my question.

Big amounts, like 25M+ are usually done OTC. Several big companies in the space offer this service and are able to link you with one or multiple buyers to offload 9 digits.

You can easily offload 10M USD worth over 10-20 minutes without having a big effect on the overall market.

Can you link to an exchange that a) has the book depth to handle 10M USD currently and b) has a straightforward way to then move the cash position into a US bank in the same timeframe as an ACH?

It has been years since I looked but that wasn’t available when I did. It would be a positive sign for the maturity of the market.

At this moment, on Coinbase, you can instantly sell approximately 1000 BTC for $9.91M - about 4% under the mid market price against what is on the book. Assuming you are a US person (since you want to move the money to a US bank) and have no problem complying with their KYC policies, you should be able to get the money a day or two if you chose to accept a wire instead of an ACH. Just for comparison, for ACH in particular since you mention it, most traditional trading institutions (etrade, schwab, ameritrade) limit your ACH transfers to 250k/day - coinbase does as well last I checked. So you'd get your money about 10x as fast as if you tried to do it via ACH. Wires are typically unlimited.

Snapshot of live book depth at time of posting: https://imgur.com/a/rhi7ZKL

Taken from here, look for "view exchange": https://pro.coinbase.com/trade/BTC-USD

Coinbase has a $10k per day withdrawal limit. You have to contact them to get more. They don't specify how difficult or time consuming that process is.

It seriously isn't that difficult to get this limit increased.

Speaking as someone who watched a buddy go through this process it took him ~2 days to get his limit increased to the millions for a wire transfer.

In other words, it is not possible.

OTC desks are different than exchanges, and you won't be able to see their books. There are also trading algos meant to push things through the market without being noticed. Of course it comes at a cost, you'll usually pay a discount (up to 5% or so ) to unload a large amount of crypto.

Crypto is an unregulated wild west, so these OTC desks typically don't have BD licenses, might do prop trading and be the counterparty to your transaction and take your position on their books (and then try to unload it themselves at a profit), or might match trades with their own customer lists. It's typically a pretty low-tech operation running on chat rooms.

I've worked with a few of those firms.

Market selling that much Bitcoin in one place isn't quite possible right now, but you could do this in a day on Coinbase and get real dollars in your bank account. If you split it up and sold some on other exchanges like Kraken you could reduce the time required to sell it. You could also trade the BTC for other popular assets like ETH on exchanges without fiat markets then sell that off on exchanges that do.

CMC reports around $37B in global BTC volume right now, but the real figure is probably $2.5 - 3B, and of that it's fragmented in different fiat currencies with different restrictions on where those exchanges are able to send money. So while it's certainly not nothing and it's better than years ago, it's like a quarter of the average daily volume of shares in a single company like Apple.

google bitcoin otc like gemini, even coinbase pro can handle millions in a day. market is pretty large. have you tried?

Oh right. The mysterious “OTC market” that somehow lets people unload their massive gains without affecting the market. Yeah right. $10 million of actual US currency is going to have a massive effect on the BTC market regardless of how it was traded.

If you could somehow unload massive amounts of BTC without affecting the market it would be arbitraged away almost instantly.

People who suggest that it is possible to unload BTC without impacting the market don’t understand finance at all. Not understanding finance, economics, math, computer science, politics and monetary theory is par for course for most BTC supporters.

It’s an illiquid market, I remember during the peak I needed to unload amounts several orders of magnitude lower than the amounts being discussed here. It was not as easy or straightforward as some would have you believe on here. What kind of a fool would trade real world fiat currency for an asset as volatile as Bitcoin? That’s the real question that should be asked.

A lot of places can't do more than 10k a day. So you either try and sell at the peak and eat the risk of them going under, or you sell continuously and leave a lot of money on the table because price fluctuates week to week.

Sort of, the big places do have limits like this, but they can always be lifted by jumping through extra identity verification hoops

Another place I have to say this, but these limits are not difficult to get increased and don't take all that long either.

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