11 ms·
259684 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 12.0032697 billion USD 643.27 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 29.7336119 million USD
by VikingCoder 5y ago
259684 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 12.0032697 billion USD
643.27 BTC * $46,222.60 BTC / USD = 29.7336119 million USD
- floatingatoll 5y agoSo if they still have those bitcoins, they're worth twelve billion dollars in theoretical value, assuming the market would cooperate. It is unclear if the market would be able to execute a currency outflow of that size successfully without cratering value towards zero. If they still have them, they could single-handedly demonstrate today whether the market can complete a currency exchange of this volume, and the outcome of the transaction would represent its maturity level at "one day of GDP" sized currency changes.
- judge2020 5y agoThe smart thing to do is to pull $1m out every week or so - big exchanges have the capacity to do that much.
- sudosysgen 5y agoAt that rate you will die before getting everything out. A billion dollars really is a lot!
- floatingatoll 5y agoFifty or sixty years to cash out at that rate, so you might still be alive.
- neogodless 5y agoDepends on your age, but it would take 19 years, 3 months.
- lategloriousgnu 5y agoAre you including the increasing value of the BTC in that calculation? I imagine if all goes well, it would be worth a lot more than what it is today in 19 years. It might be impossible to ever withdraw the whole thing at that rate.
- neogodless 5y agoHa no. Thought of that but didn't want to deal with the complexity. Ultimately a fine problem to have.
- sudosysgen 5y agoI was running with the 12 billion dollar number, but yes a billion would take 19 years.
- nearbuy 5y ago19 years to take out $1 billion. 230 years to take out all $12 billion.
- pmorici 5y agoHas there ever been a billionaire that managed to “spend” all their wealth before dying?
- romanhn 5y agoYes, Chuck Feeney: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-54300268 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-54300268
- ikiris 5y agoNo, the smart thing to do is take a loan out with the btc as the colateral.
- gruez 5y agoI'm guessing you got this idea from one of those "how rich people dodge taxes" articles? It's a terrible idea, because you still remain exposed to bitcoin. If you borrowed 1M dollars against your 2M in bitcoin holdings, and bitcoin crashes, you'll get margin called and be expected to pay that 1M back.
- ikiris 5y agoignoring most of the ignorance in your reply, that's what bankruptcy is for, especially if its a company holding.
- exikyut 5y agoThat only works if the loan snapshots the BTC price at the time of the loan. In the case of the most naive lender in the world who does this, you will be bitten by their incompetence in some other unrelated way almost immediately. In the case of any competent lender who knows anything about Bitcoin, they would go "way too liquid" and "haha nope". </uninformed_commonsense_guess>
- Johnny555 5y agoIsn't that the worst thing to do? I assume that a bank knows that bitcoin is volatile so the terms of the loan would include their ability to call the loan if the value of the bitcoin collateral drops too much. So you could have your $100M loan in the bank one day, and have to pay it all back (including what you spent) after a bad bitcoin day.
- imtringued 5y agoOnly if you want to tap into like 10% of your BTC. You'll also have to make sure you put some of the loans to good use in the real estate market for example.
- dillondoyle 5y agoI'm no expert or BTC fanatic but it looks like daily volume today was ~$34BB equivalent. Sees reasonably plausible to cash out in 'small' chunks even 200mm
- bouncycastle 5y agoMost of that volume reported is faked, especially if you are getting it from coinmarketcap.com
- beaner 5y agoSelling the Bitcoin for dollars rather than keeping the wealth as Bitcoin is the myth that still hampers most people's thinking.
- germinalphrase 5y agoIs it wealth if you never turn it into anything else tangible?
- ryoshu 5y agoIt's like how billionaires are able to get loans by putting up collateral and greatly reduce their taxes. Bezos isn't actually worth $200 billion until he sells the stock, which is a bit like what would happen here. He's going to die a very, very rich man with a 3-4% tax rate each year while he's alive.
- moftz 5y agoUnless you can find a way to pay for your retirement almost entirely in Bitcoin, you will probably need to transfer it out to something more liquid. No one wants to sell you a house in Bitcoin only for the value to drop significantly overnight before they could convert it to cash all because some tech billionaire made a funny tweet. Maybe a stablecoin has more potential for a payment system but Bitcoin is just too risky to hold onto if you aren't trying to make money off of it. If someone really had that much Bitcoin laying around, they might as well just take out a large chunk now to throw into a stable index fund and just live off the dividends. Even just a yearly return of 1% from $100M would provide a lavish lifestyle where you'd never have to do anything you don't want to ever again. Set your whole family up with trust funds, make a huge donation to get a hospital wing named after you, fill a garage with supercars, the choices are endless. Or you could just sit staring at a computer screen as your crypto bounces around waiting for some huge crash or new legislation to fuck you over.
- thebradbain 5y agoYou say that, but luxury real estate agencies representing multimillion dollar homes in Los Angeles will and do accept Bitcoin. It’s not just a PR stunt, I’ve seen many legitimate brokerages state they’ll accept Bitcoin (the article I link makes it sound like it’s only homes worth tens of millions of dollars, but I’ve seen it for homes as little as $1.2M) Disclaimer: I have no stake in Bitcoin (0.00 crypto balance), but I did recently buy a home in Los Angeles. You’d be surprised how many sellers said they would treat Bitcoin as better than cash, as if competing for a home wasn’t hard enough already
- paulpauper 5y agoThe bitcoin market is huge , and also he could easily sell it in chunks OTC to hedge funds and other large buyers at a discount, and the funds in turn can report it as an instant mark to market profit. Or borrow against it. Tons of ways of turning it into cash. It's not like he would have to deposit it on binance and dump it at once.
- floatingatoll 5y agoIt's about having the ability to run a one-time-only unit test against Bitcoin. Yes, there's all sorts of ways to cash out, that's fine. I want to run a specific at-scale load test, a resilience challenge, to be run against Bitcoin. Can one person succeed at a serious and dedicated effort to withdraw twelve billion dollars USD from Bitcoin at once? If it succeeds, cool. If it fails, it'll be spectacular. Let's do it. (To me, success is "they get a few billion dollars USD out and bitcoin doesn't crash".)
- gruez 5y ago>Can one person succeed at a serious and dedicated effort to withdraw thirty billion dollars USD from Bitcoin at once? This seems pretty easy to test. Just go through all the exchanges and sum up their orderbooks. No need to actually test with 259684 BTC and lose a bunch of money through slippage.
- olliepop 5y agoAssuming those order-books are legitimate. @Bitfinexed (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed) would argue that order books based on USDT (Tether) are not, and either the rug would be pulled or you will quickly find that you're holding ~2% of filled value (actual backed Tether)
- askmike 5y agoThere are many big trading firms trading billions a day willing to do the tether leg for you if you don't trust it yourself (they will take the risk), but a sale like this wouldn't happen at once anyway.
- canadianfella 5y ago> It is unclear if the market would be able to execute a currency outflow of that size successfully without cratering value towards zero. Only unclear to you.
- omarhaneef 5y agoI think this was a question floating about when companies were putting a lot of BTC on their balance books. Elon Musk said they sold some Bitcoin to test the liquidity and it was fine. I believe they sold 10% of their BTC which came to about $1B without much of an issue. Here is Musk’s tweet about it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737 It may not have been all at once — whatever that means — or even over a day but it seems you could get it out over weeks or months. They made the sale between quarters so it was a max of 3 months.
- floatingatoll 5y agoThe $12b described above is 120% of their BTC, then. To me, I view it as BTC that have no current USD representation in the ecosystem. They were transferred at a tiny USD per coin or something, so the total USD pressure was only $1000 and easily managed without any computer system realizing something big was happening. So we have two major USD test datapoints: $1b (Tesla), $1000 (guy who bought 259864 BTC guy). Swell. Let's add $12b to that list! It'll help understand what happens at 10^10 beyond Tesla's 10^9.
- omarhaneef 5y agoIt is 1200%, or 12x. But the point is if you can unload $1B in a week or month without influencing the price, that sets a rate and you can drop $12B over 12 weeks or months or whatever the rate was.
- runawaybottle 5y agoLarge share holders in an ipo ditch their shares in a controlled way too so as not to tank the stock price. Why would Bitcoin be held to a higher test?
- bitcoinmoney 5y agoIt will crash the market if somebody put a sell order like that.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoNo need to sell it all at once. Ten thousand here, ten thousand there...
- agency 5y agoIf you’re selling 10k at a time you’re going to need to make 1.2 million sales so you better get cracking
- kube-system 5y agoI’m sure your bank and the IRS is going to love all that CTR paperwork too.
- yupper32 5y agoWith billions of dollars I'm sure you can shell out for a firm that will deal with all that mess for you.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoHe only got to keep 600 BTC.
- VikingCoder 5y agoWhich is 29.7336119 million USD
- xyst 5y agoThat’s the type of money that gets you 6 ft under in less than 1 year.