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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

3.7M is basically nothing for a country. El Salvador's GDP is $74 billion, so this is 0.005% of it.

And this gain does nothing unless the BTC is sold, and the proceeds benefit El Salvador in some way. This also assumes that amount of BTC can be sold. They need to find an entity that will send them ~$120M for their BTC, and better hope that this won't crash the market.

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And, all this has to be compared with what could have been achieved with a more typical investment (which would likely have carried less risk) over the same period. If they can make 4.5% speculating on high-risk commodities and 4.3% with low-risk lending to stable businesses, it's much more responsible for a nation-state to choose the latter.

$120M is, as you said, not that much in the Bitcoin market.

It's not much in the market at large, but you need to find some party or several that has $120M sitting around, and willing to exchange that for BTC.

I expect making that transaction isn't that easy.

Could literally just sell that on one of the major exchanges over the course of a few hours

I've sold $8M on Coinbase Pro within minutes by setting a limit order (not a market order - although I'm sure some people will reply without knowing the difference) and it didn't impact the price

It would be an over the counter sale. Even using an exchange directly, together Coinbase and Bybit are trading $1B/day BTCUSD - there's no shortage of buyers.

You don't need to "find an entity" to sell just $120m worth of BTC, just click the market sell button and you'll still get a decent price

El Salvador won't ever "sell" their bitcoin. Your grandkids will be working for it.

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