Bitcoin - Part 2

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OK, so Bitcoin has hit $2,290. Assuming 15 million Bitcoins have been mined, that makes the Bitcoin "market cap" something around $34 billion. Who's going to pay up when one of the early adopters decides to redeem his BTC? $34 billion exceeds the capital in all of the exchanges combined probably by a factor of 100, if not more.
 
psionl0 said:
as long as it is seen as an appreciating commodity (especially in times of uncertainty) most holders will be more interested in acquiring bitcoins than spending them.
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Yep - right up until it crashes.

Though calling bitcoin a 'commodity' is a bit of a stretch. And as for 'times of uncertainty' the most uncertain thing right now is bitcoin itself!
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Yep - right up until it crashes.

Though calling bitcoin a 'commodity' is a bit of a stretch. And as for 'times of uncertainty' the most uncertain thing right now is bitcoin itself!
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The price has dropped from a peak of $2700 to its current price of $2300 today. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd

Do you consider your prophecy fulfilled or are you going to join the endless stream of posters who have said "this is the end (this time for sure)" since 2010?
 
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jhunter1163 said:
OK, so Bitcoin has hit $2,290. Assuming 15 million Bitcoins have been mined, that makes the Bitcoin "market cap" something around $34 billion. Who's going to pay up when one of the early adopters decides to redeem his BTC? $34 billion exceeds the capital in all of the exchanges combined probably by a factor of 100, if not more.
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Your question is if a huge stake (5 percent maybe?) wants to convert this currency to, apparently, USD.

That is a problem with ANY currency.

Take USD for instance (except with USD we wouldn't be converting to USD obviously). Let us say, as a quick & dirty comparison, that a number of people control 5 percent of the total "market cap" of USD. They suddenly decide that they want to convert to gold.

You would have the exact same types of problems that I believe your question is proposing.

Or more to the point, say that someone (a government most likely) tries to dump 5% of all of the gold in the world on the market in one day!

I will grant you that some currencies would have more problems than others in reacting to a huge conversion order. But the same problems apply to them all. Bitcoin would hardly be unique in that regard.
 
This is The End said:
ahem
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Yes, you are right. I didn't remind jhunter1163 (yet again!) that bitcoin exchanges don't buy and sell bitcoins. They are brokerage firms so their capital is mostly irrelevant.

Theoretically, a major bitcoin holder could attempt to crash bitcoin by depositing all of their bitcoins into bitcoin exchanges and offering them for sale at any price. This would mop up all of the cash deposits in the exchanges and remainder of the sale would have to wait for more buyers to make cash deposits. Knowing that the price would eventually rise again and that the holdings have been diluted would attract a lot of bargain hunters.

Of course, the major holder would be sacrificing a lot of money since they wouldn't get anywhere near the current price of bitcoin. That's why it hasn't been done yet.

However, this has been explained over and over and over and over again. I just couldn't be bothered. The naysayers don't like the facts to get in the way of their pet objections.
 
I tried to join the Gemini exchange back before bitcoin dropped to $1,900, and was finally verified when the price was over $2,900. I don't feel like buying any right now.
 
Its at $4,035 as of this post.

http://preev.com/

Basically every article that was written over the weekend about this (bitcoin hitting $4,000) mentions Overstock.com accepting them for years. Is that true?

So has anything in the history of the world had an increase in value comparable to bitcoin? Seven years ago it was $0.0003. Now it is $4,000.

So if you bought $100 worth seven years ago you would now have over $100 MILLION. (If you cashed out, of course.)

As far as I am aware, nothing has ever done that ever. Not even close. Someone more familiar with stocks, commodities, and currencies can correct me.
 
What is the highest cashout of Bitcoin so far? Lets say USD $1 million is a significant sum for a one time Bitcoin to USD transaction. Has anybody actually received any significant sums of USD for Bitcoin? Do the Bitcoin markets even have enough USD to exchange significant sums?
 
This doesn't really answer your question but tons of people use LocalBitcoins to cash out.

I'm not positive but I'm pretty sure it is like craigslist. You find someone on it locally that wants bitcoins. They hand you the cash. Sounds dangerous.

But dangerous or not, thousands of people are cashing out tons of money on LocalBitcoins every single day.

As for your actual question I believe Forbes has had a couple articles on people who have cashed out huge amounts of money from their bitcoin wallet.

A google of bitcoin and forbes.com might turn up something.

This might be one of them, I can't read it at the moment Forbes.com seems to hate my browser.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bishopjordan/2017/07/07/bitcoin-millionaire/

I would suggest not reading it if you are the jealous type. :D
 
This is The End said:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bishopjordan/2017/07/07/bitcoin-millionaire/

I would suggest not reading it if you are the jealous type. :D
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That Forbes story is rather meh, compared to my friend. He bought about $350,000 worth of bitcoin between $10-11, giving him nearly 35,000 bitcoin at one point. He held while it hit nearly $1200 before it tanked to around $330 before selling it all at a low. He then bought XRP, a crypto-currency for the company he worked for at Ripple Labs, ending up with nearly 400 million XRP. He then sold XRP at something like a 600% profit, just before it skyrocketed, at a fraction of a cent. Ultimately he left something like $70 million on the table in XRP, and cashed out with about $6m in XRP alone. The kicker is that he still has a large amount of shares in Ripple Labs, which hold the balance of XRP, and he estimates that those are worth over $100 million dollars, though they are not publicly traded. In addition to this, he re-bought bitcoin at around $900, and currently has a balance between 11-12k of BTC, which as of now at $4233 is worth about $46.5 million dollars.

It's worth noting that if he simply held his original bitcoin stake it would be worth about $144 million today, and his original XRP stake of close to 400 million would be worth about $68 million today at $.17, not counting his shares at all (I don't know how many of those he has, or what exactly they're worth). Needless to say, next time I see him the drinks are on him.
 
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