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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

"the whole public BTC order book on MtGox can be had right now for under $2mm USD"

No it cannot. Some people have placed sell orders at $1000, $10k, $100k, etc. To the point it would take trillion and trillion of dollars to buy up all BTC.

But you can be sure that if you tried to do this, a lot of other sell orders would pop up, making it effectively impossible to buy up all bitcoins.

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> But you can be sure that if you tried to do this, a lot of other sell orders would pop up, making it effectively impossible to buy up all bitcoins.

Yes, at entirely reasonable prices, right? :D A substantially higher cost basis starts to cut into fund profits...

Also, a minor correction to your comment: the depth of the MtGox order book is public, and it was accurate at the time of my comment. It's up to $2.2mm USD to buy the whole thing now.

Does the order book show all the "dark pool" trades? It surely cannot show all those who sit and wait (or have bots) for the price to change so they can move their ask price up.

The order book would show people who are sitting on either side of the market, so if they have a bot that's adjusting their quote it would still show it - unless I'm misunderstanding your question?

I think we're talking about parties who don't actually have an order in. Rather they have automated a process to enter orders in response to certain conditions. Depending on what those conditions are, you won't be able to rely on a continuous price trajectory.

Admittedly, I don't see how this is different for BTC than it would be for any other asset.

Those are not providing liquidity in a useful sense right now. Usually the measure is people prepared to trade at current bid or offer ie a very narrow measure. If you want to buy at 1% down that's not useful now.

So... if I put a sell order for 1BTC at $10 million, their number would go up to $12.2M?

Whatever site you are using to see the order book does not show it in its entirety. It really is a lot deeper than $2.2M. I know for a fact because there has always been sell orders at ridiculous amounts such as 1 BTC at 1 trillion dollar.

For example bitcoincharts.com now truncates the order book (2 or 3 months ago it was showing everything, on the sell side at least).

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