Is it a billion dollars, though? I mean, if you started selling them, the market price would likely go down. In other words, are there enough people looking to buy 94504 BTC at current market value?
uhhh... check your math bro -- as of this moment there are 6,453,450 BTC in existence -- and you can buy them for $18.24 a piece leading to -- 117,710,928M USD -- sure it isn't a billion but it's more than enough to hustle a few hundred k through whenever you want
Of course, there is almost no way to liquidate those BTC for $1.5 billion. Unless you can find a buyer for all of them at once, the market price will fall sharply as you sell them off.
To save you doing the math, that many bitcoins is about $375 million at today's prices - not that the market is deep enough to be able to sell it for anywhere near that price.
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.
Hardly. If you tried to sell 195,000 coins you'd wipe out all the exchanges and cause a crash.
Talking numbers, you could sell them all on BTC-E right now, bagging you just $7M, and take the price down to ~$36. You can spread that around the exchanges of course, if you're quick, but you're still nowhere near $147M at current market depth.
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?
Based on the current price it makes roughly 25K bitcoins, and using the current BUY backlog on MtGox, selling them would push the price back to $550. However such a volume will certainly create a panic wave and it could go below that.
If they are clever, they won't put everything on the market like this.
Sure, but the flip side is that if you had a billion dollars you couldn't acquire this many BTC because the price would move against you the other direction.
Selling 1,000,000 coins on MtGox right now would take the price down to $0.10, with an average price of $19.64, so you'd net $19 million.
Of course, what would really happen is that everyone would see it happening and cancel their bids before the wave reached them, so you'd likely not be able to actually sell them all at once.
Leaking them out a few thousand a day, though, would be completely possible. And if done correctly need not move the market at all.
Even in 10,000 BTC chunks you're looking at dents in the market price of ~30% at most exchanges. How long would you plan on selling off these coins if you chose to do so?
The big question now is, what happens when somebody sells big for dollars. This would be an excellent time for someone with 10,000 Bitcoins to sell, take their $160,000,000, and go home. Could the market handle that?
I'm curious - if you actually had $300m worth of bitcoin and started selling it, would you be able to actually sell everything off for that price before the price started dropping like crazy? Would whatever exchange you're using even be able to wire $300m USD to your bank account after the sale just like that?
Except that bitcoin doesn't have $400 million of liquidity. If you sold them you'd get way less than the current price suggests. I doubt many creditors would be willing to accept bitcoin directly.
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