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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question maybe, but if you bought bitcoin at the right time and now have $ 1 million worth of them, is it actually possible to convert such a large amount to dollars right now, and where would you do that? What if it were 10 million, 100 million, a billion?

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You can see the depth of the various exchange’s order books on bitcoincharts.com. For example, if you sold 4000 BTC on Bitstamp right now, the price would fall from ~$3250 to $2300, and you would earn ~$11m: https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/bitstampUSD_depth.html

Selling ten times that (40.000 BTC) would only net you ~$26.5m so, to answer your question: selling just $10m worth of BTC on a single exchange will move the price significantly. For $1m worth of BTC you’d move the price very little.

That's assuming none of the orders will be pulled before they're filled.

That's what 'MARKET' orders are for. Don't be greedy and allow for some slippage, otherwise you would give yourself out and loose even more.

Anyway, if you have enough money, why not hire someone to write you a multi-exchange execution tool, and save some more money.

Right. The future is uncertain. It’s impossible to know whether there will be any orders at all in the order book a second from now. But as soon as you place your sell order, a proper order book locks all other orders such that they can’t be pulled until after your sell order has executed.

Bitcoin yes, definitely, Ethereum maybe, other crypto tokens that have gone up as much or more like Stratis or NEM probably not without a large drop off as you affect the market (can't remember the technical term)

Slippage is the word I was thinking of.

Yes, but why would you? If you understand it well enough to have hung on that long you understand that the full potential is a lot higher than where it is now.

Maybe you want to buy a nice house or yacht, because you think those are more practical and/or fun than a number in a database/blockchain. Obviously, you'll leave as much as possible in bitcoin.

The daily volume is something like 20 million dollars. So yeah, a million will be moved quite easily.

A couple of million - on most large exchanges. Prob don't want to sell it all at once

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