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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Background: https://www.coindesk.com/learn/brc-20-explained-how-tokens-o...

> The total transaction fees spent by this entity to dominate the Inscriptions are estimated to be 1056 BTC as of May 25, 2023... We leave the conclusions to the reader.

I don't really understand what conclusion we are supposed to draw.

> However, we notice that by spending only 0.005% of the total Bitcoin supply on transaction fees, a single entity can significantly impact the entire Blockchain regime. This illustrates that if a whale or a governmental actor, possessing hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins, decides to spam the blockchain, they could impede its usability for normal payments.

Maybe this?

Interesting that someone was prepared to spend 1056 BTC on this. 1056 BTC is ~US$30M (edit: I had $3M before) at the current time.

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You're off by an order of magnitude. 1,056 BTC is currently worth approximately $29m.

But could you sell $30m of Bitcoin without tanking the price?

Easily.

assuming the lemmings don't panic :-P

The lemmings are all already dead for this cycle.

Only mountain goats remain, and they are comfortable with steep terrain, both up and down.

24 hour BTC-USD volume is > $15bn so yes.

Short selling and algo trading on exchanges would get counted towards that volume ?

With the exchange scams going around daily o wouldn't be surprised if that number is order of magnitude higher than the actual USD involved and in trading.

This seems an odd comment.

Algorithmic trading is an should be counted. It's volume!

Shorts and other derivatives isn't because it's a different instrument.

It's true there could (and probably is) wash trading going as well as other forms of laundering. But that's still genuine volume.

If I use 1 million dollars to make 1000 trades in and out of btc in a day that's a billion dollars of volume but maybe a couple of million in market depth could make that stable to enable those trades and a couple mill more could crash it.

Sure. As I mentioned:

> It's true there could (and probably is) wash trading going as well as other forms of laundering.

There's little evidence of large volumes of wash trading specifically on BTC though, and it's pretty easy to trace.

Of course you can.

> But could you sell $30m of Bitcoin without tanking the price?

Yes, at the spot market you can usually move $30 million in a single trade with only a small slippage. Bitcoin is more liquid than most stocks.

Sorry, miscounted digits!

Fixed it.

> 1056 BTC is ~US$3.1M at the current time.

Current exchange rate is around $27,774 USD, so more like $29,329,344.

They could impede its usability, at a high cost per hour. Worth it?

Depends on the motivation.

An ordinal minter trying to sell their ordinals to make money: no.

A government or an influential entity who wants to "prove" Bitcoin is unreliable (for whatever reason): yes.

> A government or an influential entity who wants to "prove" Bitcoin is unreliable (for whatever reason): yes.

There seems to be much cheaper ways to magnify negative public sentiment on crypto though.

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