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Comment by Tao3300 | Hacker News Reader

If you sold that much of it, the price would tank and people would try to find you and kill you.

Isn’t the market cap of, say, Bitcoin high enough that selling a few mil USD worth shouldn’t really impact it? But maybe the trading volume is too low.

Nope, daily Bitcoin volume on Coinbase alone is over $200 million. Nobody cares if you sell 1% of that, at worst the price dips momentarily.

It’s hard to say how much of that are “real” trades, bots can have minimal liquidity but a huge trading volume.

Satoshi is in theory holding onto ~25 billion in coins. Trying to cash that out would however absolutely tank the current valuations.

But that’s hardly the only major risk. Bulgaria has something like 213,000 bitcoin worth nominally 5 billion or so and no particular interest in bitcoin, but trying to cash that out is again problematic.

I'm just saying $3 million doesn't do much to the price. If someone suddenly cashes out several thousand times that much, then sure, price will crash.

I've personally watched sell pressure on Coinbase in the multi-million range get executed over the course of a few minutes, with only a modest temporary effect on the price.

Yes, if the benchmark is 3 million then most of the time it’s inconsequential but there’s much larger wallets susceptible to being pillaged and I would expect a significantly larger impact from even just 30 million. Further liquidity isn’t a steady state. So, if you happen to execute a significant trade at the wrong time you can trigger a surprisingly large cascade effect.

Which is why very large transactions frequently occur either outside of open markets or across a surprisingly long period.

Unless it's some shitcoin with 0 trading volume, no chance. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and plenty of other currencies handle that volume daily with no issue.

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