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If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

ifyouhadboughtcrypto.com

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Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#11

Post by HighlandSpring »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and had successfully liquidated your position. That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something since the liquidation tends to depress the price. And in the world of Bi…

Here's an idea for a website in similar vein: liquidatemycrypto.com

Given an input of X amount of cryptocurrency Y, it will consult the orderbooks of a number of exchanges that trade it, and tell you how much of it to sell where in order to get the best liquidation price possible, and show you your slippage in percentage lost relative to what you may have thought your coins were actually worth.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#12

Post by sowbug »

Usability suggestion: tapping one of the icons at the top should change the drop-down to that currency.

Also I'll echo others' comments that cryptocurrencies are hijacking the word "crypto," which most definitely does not mean "cryptocurrency" to the crypto community.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#13

Post by psyc »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and had successfully liquidated your position. That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something since the liquidation tends to depress the price. And in the world of Bi…

You can watch multi million dollar orders get filled all day on the high-volume exchanges. So, all hypotheticals and FUD about literally everything being a wash trade aside, it sure looks like there's no serious practical difficulty liquidating Bitcoin at present.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#16

Post by ucha »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and had successfully liquidated your position. That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something since the liquidation tends to depress the price. And in the world of Bi…

To put it in perspective, the daily volume in BTC is a few 100,000s. 5-600'000 BTC is $10B. Sure the Winklevoss twins can't liquidate their entire holding in a week but if you only have a few million dollars worth of bitcoin, you can liquidate in a few days without moving the price significantly.

The other major crypto-currencies are more or less liquid in proportion to their market cap.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#17

Post by letsjaam »

paloaltokid wrote: post #3

This is fun but also pointless. There’s no guarantee you would have made any money. And the model assumes that you’d buy and hold this whole time. So if you’re looking at this and beating yourself up...don’t.

As the developer I couldn't agree more - it's pointless... but hopefully a little bit of fun along the way.

Isn't that what the internet is for?

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#18

Post by sowbug »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and had successfully liquidated your position. That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something since the liquidation tends to depress the price. And in the world of Bi…

Visit https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD. Notice the v-shaped graph below the price graph. Hover over to the left on the green side. You won't have an answer to your largest-ever-on-HN question, but right now I can tell you these are all possible (picking random zoom levels) with the quoted price around $18,100:

You can sell 556 BTC for $9.949 million for an average price of $17,893.

You can sell 2,160 BTC for $37.4 million for an average price of $17,314, which is 95.6% of the current quoted price.

This is if you are a complete idiot, transfer your Bitcoin to GDAX, and place a market sell order. Maximum slippage, and yes, you'd temporarily tank the GDAX market down to $16.5K or $17K. And it takes a while to withdraw that amount of money from Coinbase, but eventually it happens, and your trade is already complete.

Anyone with an ounce of sense would instead sell their BTC in a number of limit-order chunks over a day or two to reduce slippage.

Now, you can keep saying that it's a "common misconception" that the last ticker price means anything. Technically you are correct. But I doubt the guy who just liquidated BTC for over $30 million USD at 95% of that price would care.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#19

Post by letsjaam »

sowbug wrote: post #12

Usability suggestion: tapping one of the icons at the top should change the drop-down to that currency. Also I'll echo others' comments that cryptocurrencies are hijacking the word "crypto," which most definitely does not mean "cryptocurrency" to the crypto community.

Thanks for the feedback, we're looking at some little UI tweaks.

Re: If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you invested in Crypto?

#20

Post by gst »

HighlandSpring wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #5

There is a common misconception amongst people holding stocks, crypto coins and other investments: that they equate to cash. You would not be rich if you had invested in Crypto, you would be rich if you had invested in crypto and had successfully liquidated your position. That second bit is the hard part when you have a large volume of something since the liquidation tends to depress the price. And in the world of Bi…

Here's an idea for a website in similar vein: liquidatemycrypto.com Given an input of X amount of cryptocurrency Y, it will consult the orderbooks of a number of exchanges that trade it, and tell you how much of it to sell where in order to get the best liquidation price possible, and show you your slippage in percentage lost relative to what you may have thought your coins were actually worth.

IIRC there was a bot in the #bitcoin IRC channel years ago that did exactly that. Afaik it only looked at the Mt. Gox order book but given that Mt. Gox was pretty much a monopoly back then the result was still accurate.
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