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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

If this is true and any individual holds 1M BTC, it must take an incredible amount of self restraint not to dump those coins. That means the book value of his coins would have fluctuated between approximately $250M and $100M this week.

You'd also have to keep in mind that he would have been through the previous crash in which his coins varied in worth between $29 M before falling back down to $2M.

It would take a special someone not to sell those coins before they hit the prices we've seen these past few weeks.

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Trying to liquidate that much would simply cause the market to collapse.

Do you have any idea what the size of the order book is?

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php?type=SELL&nick=...

Adding to jacquesm: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_depth.html

I don't think you can tell if they aren't doing that. Large bitcoin transactions are fairly constant.

Note: I haven't looked at the bitchain and am guessing that you can't make assumptions about large holders from the bitchain alone.

At this particular moment, selling 1,000,000 bitcoins would take the market price down to 0.10 USD.

The average price realized would be $14.288 USD, so you'd get $14,000,000. Not bad, really.

Source- "Gribble", the bot on the bitcoin irc channels that calculates these things based on the MtGox order book.

Yes, if the holder was liquidating it all at once.

What could be done though, is selling a little at a intervals, or selling a chunk whenever the price hit some level.

Please read the whole thread; the first million BTC are definitely not held by one person.

(Also, I think you'd get no more than $50M for 1M BTC but that's a minor detail.)

My point was not that he currently has them, it's that if any person were to have them, they'd have been sold a long time ago.

Why would he sell real bitcoins for fake fiat? This is Satoshi we're talking about, not your average joe.

To him, USD is riskier than BTC.

True, to a degree, but day-to-day living still requires normal currency. Cash out $1M USD and you'd be comfortable to do whatever you liked for quite some time, while still keeping 99% of his coins.

I think there may have been an element of sarcasm in the GP.

Alternatively, sell half your remaining BTC every time they double in value relative to the USD. Infinite money!

Someone cashed out $1 million overnight. Dundundun!

> This is Satoshi we're talking about

I'm used to cult of personality on HN, but cult of anonymity is a novel thing! Who is Satoshi, and why do you put so much trust in them? What if I told you that "Satoshi" was brilliant quant working on Wall St., who came up with a scheme to invent an asset, give it incredible unreasonable value, then cash out for that value in USD, all while spinning a clever narrative about decentralized cryptocurrency for a new world?

If that were true it would be even more impressive.

Yes. I suppose we could try a game of making Satoshi look bad. Anything except for sex and murder, go...

that's some powerful delusion.

They could be playing the long game.

There are only 21M bitcoins possible. 1M is about 5%. The goal of many bitcoin-folk is for bitcoin to be in the top 3 currencies. Imagine only 5% of all the Euro in circulation... or 5% of the USD... $250M is nothing in comparison to that prize.

(BTW this is one problem I have with bitcoin)

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