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Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

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Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#21

Post by sp332 »

tempestn wrote: post #16

"In turn, financial investors get a secure, levered exposure to bitcoin that is not hostage to an unproven price-setting and without the expense of setting up a system to hold physical bitcoin." I realize that securely holding bitcoin at scale isn't completely trivial, but isn't part of the value of bitcoin supposed to be that these costs are not large? Especially the use of the term, "physical bitcoin," seems a bit…

Bitcoin security is partly based on public-key crypto. So anything you would do to secure a private key, you can use to secure your BTC from being stolen. Encrypt it with a passphrase, or store it on a thumb drive and lock it in a safe, or print it out on paper and put it in your wallet to be scanned (e.g. in QR code format) only when needed, or even store it in a tamper-proof hardware dongle.

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#22

Post by jcranmer »

arisAlexis wrote: post #5
adventured wrote: post #3

Anybody that has that kind of gain in the last few years from Bitcoin et al., would be nuts to not be cashing some of it out. More and more headlines by the day are sounding like a rehash of the dotcom bubble type insanity that occurred right before the crash. The lifestyle difference between $300m and $800m, or $1b and $6b, is not meaningful enough to risk giving 50% or 97% of it all back in a serious crypto crash.…

Past bubbles didn't involve an economic paradigm shift

Except for the dot-com bubble, the railway mania, canal mania, South Seas, and that's just the ones I can think off the top of my head.

One of the classic warning signs of a bubble is people saying "but this time, it's different." Particularly in response to claims of a bubble.

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#24

Post by modeless »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #20
arisAlexis wrote: post #4

You can cash out with no problems

I thought 10's of thousands of transactions were pending. You mean just give someone your wallet for cash?

If you're a billionaire you can just pay the fee to have your transaction in the next block. The network works perfectly for anyone willing to pay fees.

Selling a billion on exchanges without excessive slippage would be difficult, but perhaps not impossible considering that the daily volume is above 16 billion right now. Certainly something in the 10-100 million range would be pretty easy.

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#25

Post by taberiand »

tempestn wrote: post #16

"In turn, financial investors get a secure, levered exposure to bitcoin that is not hostage to an unproven price-setting and without the expense of setting up a system to hold physical bitcoin." I realize that securely holding bitcoin at scale isn't completely trivial, but isn't part of the value of bitcoin supposed to be that these costs are not large? Especially the use of the term, "physical bitcoin," seems a bit…

Physical Bitcoin is just a piece of paper with a number on it, right?

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#26

Post by justboxing »

mtgx wrote: post #17
justboxing wrote: post #6

> the approximately 1,000 people who hold an estimated 40 percent of all bitcoin, or an average of around $350 million each. I've seen this statement over and over again for the last few months in various news outlets and blogs, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this statement. I understand these 1000 people are what are popularly known as the "Bitcoin Whales" but how did most of them come in possess…

People were spending tens of thousands of Bitcoins on stuff like pizza in the early days and there were significantly fewer Bitcoins back then. That's hundreds of millions of dollars today. So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did…

> Satoshi has a million Bitcoins.

Wow. Didn't know that. So if he/she tried to cash out, then the identity would be out right, since he/she would be attempting to deposit the cash equivalent ( FIAT ?) into a real bank account?

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#27

Post by neffy »

arisAlexis wrote: post #5
adventured wrote: post #3

Anybody that has that kind of gain in the last few years from Bitcoin et al., would be nuts to not be cashing some of it out. More and more headlines by the day are sounding like a rehash of the dotcom bubble type insanity that occurred right before the crash. The lifestyle difference between $300m and $800m, or $1b and $6b, is not meaningful enough to risk giving 50% or 97% of it all back in a serious crypto crash.…

Past bubbles didn't involve an economic paradigm shift

Introducing new forms of exchange isn´t an economic paradigm shift - it´s something that keeps coming around, viz.:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2338493?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

Now the Star Trek replicator.. that would be a paradigm shift.

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#28

Post by avprpl »

justboxing wrote: post #26
mtgx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were spending tens of thousands of Bitcoins on stuff like pizza in the early days and there were significantly fewer Bitcoins back then. That's hundreds of millions of dollars today. So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did…

> Satoshi has a million Bitcoins. Wow. Didn't know that. So if he/she tried to cash out, then the identity would be out right, since he/she would be attempting to deposit the cash equivalent ( FIAT ?) into a real bank account?

I don't think they would cash all of it out anyways. That is, if Satoshi is just one person

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#29

Post by jameskegel »

acover wrote: post #13
justboxing wrote: post #6

> the approximately 1,000 people who hold an estimated 40 percent of all bitcoin, or an average of around $350 million each. I've seen this statement over and over again for the last few months in various news outlets and blogs, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this statement. I understand these 1000 people are what are popularly known as the "Bitcoin Whales" but how did most of them come in possess…

The mining difficulty was much lower at the beginning. Satoshi, the creator, has about 1 million bitcoins from this early mining. [0] [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

Also Hal Finney and others who helped in the beginning may have left sums of BTC behind (RIP). A personal anecdote, somewhat related: In the early days, I mined several blocks from the wallet itself, on an AMD Sempron or Duron, at about 800-900mhz. Even then, this took a few days and then weeks before eventually becoming impossible with the advent of mining pools and GPU mining arrays.

Speaking for myself only, some of us just lost or discarded them because they had no value, and mining them was more of an act of altruism, so while it was fun seeing the numbers go up, it was easy to lose track of a wallet. I don't think electrum seed phrases were around yet at that time, either, or I had no knowledge of them if they were.

Re: Bitcoin Billionaires May Have Found a Way to Cash Out

#30

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

justboxing wrote: post #26
mtgx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were spending tens of thousands of Bitcoins on stuff like pizza in the early days and there were significantly fewer Bitcoins back then. That's hundreds of millions of dollars today. So all some of them had to do is keep them around. Others just bought them later on. Winklevoss twins put $100 million in Bitcoin years ago. I imagine many rich Chinese people wanting to evade money transferring rules in China did…

> Satoshi has a million Bitcoins. Wow. Didn't know that. So if he/she tried to cash out, then the identity would be out right, since he/she would be attempting to deposit the cash equivalent ( FIAT ?) into a real bank account?

Given the amount of secrecy Satoshi has demonstrated before it'd be shocking enough to see the coins move much less move to a well known address (e.g. coinbase).
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