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Ask HN: How much money can actually be taken out of cryptocurrency?

10 points by s17n ↗ HN
All these hundred million dollar USD ICO's have me wondering, how much money can actually be taken out of the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now? Say I owned USD$1,000,000,000 worth of BTC - how much of it could I actually sell for fiat in, say, the next quarter? Is there any way to get even a rough estimate of this number?

7 comments

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nicholas73
One thing is for certain - a lot less money went into the system than its current face value.

It's the old stock market saying - better to sell on the way up than down.

[dead] mgnr
Daily volumes on exchanges is usually > 100,000 bitcoins, hence USD$~413,900,000 at current price (source: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h)

If you wanted to liquidate USD$1,000,000,000 over a quarter (~90 days), that would be USD$~11,111,112 per day, a bit under 3% of the daily volume. That would probably have a small negative impact on the price.

Moreover, if you were that size, you'd probably go through over-the-counter shops (such as https://cumberlandmining.com/), reducing your slippage even more.

paulpauper
A common misconception is that BTC must be sold on an exchange. If someone has a large amount they could sell it on a secondary market or to a private buyer offmarket.
coralreef
Is there some sort of bitcoin escrow service that would manage that transaction?
miroslav5411
Hello Coralreef - about the escrow for BTC. Yes, there are such services. Typically used for large transactions
alt_f4
You could sell all of it. But, for such a large trade, the market will move, so your BTC priced at USD$1,000,whatever will be worth much less. The trick would be to sell in many smaller batches.
imhoguy
Like in any Ponzi scheme - FIFO with profit. Anyway whatever you want to sell you need to find enough buyers who will pay what you want. Simply supply and demand works here [0]. See more topics on microeconomics to get better understanding how markets work.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand