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I don't think we have a ton of evidence either way, but: 1. Private exercise of of investment options usually occurs within the context of brokerages, hedge fu

I don't think we have a ton of evidence either way, but: 1. Private exercise of of investment options usually occurs within the context of brokerages, hedge funds, and companies exercising their own stocks, no? For the first two, they have to be large enough to have lots of clients, and the last one is limited to one stock. I'd see the brokerages/hedge funds as a form of federation so that it doesn't make sense to distinguish it from exchanges on the centralization/decentralization spectrum, and stuff internal to a company doesn't really occur on the open market in the same way so I'm not sure it's relevant at all. 2. Percentage of trades isn't the only metric: ease of trades is also relevant. I could find a Bitcoiner on Craigslist and give him cash at a coffee shop for coins. Doing this with most traditional financial instruments would be difficult if not simply illegal. Coins for cash at a coffee shop isn't probably the most common use case, but it's certainly easy and possible, and that's relevant.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
The coffee shop scenario: What's to keep him from handing over a thumb drive with random numbers on it? How do you register coins? Asking as a newbie. And given the stratospheric price on bitcoins, what's the chances of anybody wanting to transfer such amounts without some kind of audit trail/registration?
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  It's a coffee shop because coffee shops typically have WiFi. :) He doesn't hand over a physical object at all: you just show him the cash, then have him transfer the Bitcoins to your account, and wait for the transaction to post/verify in your wallet program (reversing even a single verification block would have an astronomical computational cost, so you don't have to wait for 6 verifications even though that's the cryptographically sound way to do it). Then you hand over the cash. Bitcoins are highly divisible, so you can purchase $1 worth of Bitcoin if you want. Probably that's not worth it to make it worth anyone's time, but lots of people are willing to show up to a coffee shop to sell amounts of Bitcoin >$200. So the astromical cost of Bitcoin isn't really relevant to how much you can buy/sell in a single transaction. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that transfers <$10K don't require an audit trail legally. That said, if you don't want an audit trail, Bitcoin's public ledger makes it not the best choice. There are lots of reasons you might avoid buying from exchanges that aren't about leaving an audit trail (for example: simply to screw over the exchanges for political/social reasons).

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

The coffee shop scenario: What's to keep him from handing over a thumb drive with random numbers on it? How do you register coins? Asking as a newbie. And given the stratospheric price on bitcoins, what's the chances of anybody wanting to transfer such amounts without some kind of audit trail/registration?

kerkeslager 9y ago
It's a coffee shop because coffee shops typically have WiFi. :) He doesn't hand over a physical object at all: you just show him the cash, then have him transfer the Bitcoins to your account, and wait for the transaction to post/verify in your wallet program (reversing even a single verification block would have an astronomical computational cost, so you don't have to wait for 6 verifications even though that's the cryptographically sound way to do it). Then you hand over the cash. Bitcoins are highly divisible, so you can purchase $1 worth of Bitcoin if you want. Probably that's not worth it to make it worth anyone's time, but lots of people are willing to show up to a coffee shop to sell amounts of Bitcoin >$200. So the astromical cost of Bitcoin isn't really relevant to how much you can buy/sell in a single transaction. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that transfers <$10K don't require an audit trail legally. That said, if you don't want an audit trail, Bitcoin's public ledger makes it not the best choice. There are lots of reasons you might avoid buying from exchanges that aren't about leaving an audit trail (for example: simply to screw over the exchanges for political/social reasons).