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

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by jacquesm on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @01:59PM (#15962964)

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 Bitcoin you might end up with nothing if the exchange accidentally loses your loot (chance of which goes up as you have more money outstanding).

So any realistic scheme dealing with the liquidation of such an amount of crypto coins would be to spread out the sale over a longer period of time in small amounts to be taken back out.

Which makes me wonder how much the largest successful one-shot liquidation anybody on HN has ever done and how they did it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by sowbug on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:32PM (#15963340)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by ucha on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:31PM (#15963326)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by etr-strike on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:33PM (#15963360)

Not sure what you’re measuring... gdax alone averages around 25k btc traded per day. At today’s price that’s 450mil usd

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by ucha on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:45PM (#15963496)

Thanks, I mistakenly wrote million instead of billion. Edited.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by psyc on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:25PM (#15963261)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by wink on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:35PM (#15963382)

True, but it's still a nice "what if" for small amounts of currency.

I wrote down my first bitcoin wallet address in May 2011 and revisited my noted in mid-2013. I had the real intention of investing the unimaginable amount of 20$ (insert Dr Evil Meme) - but I gave up after a bit of research because it was too complicated to get some.

The calculator tells me I could've earned 11460 Bottles of Budweiser (or hopefully 10k of real beer) - but I'd almost 100% had sold off everything at 1-4k per BTC.

The only cryptocurrency I managed to buy is DOGE. Too bad it didn't really increase by more than 20% in the ~2 years I held it. But hey, still ONE free beer if I sell all of it now ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by rhinoceraptor on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:56PM (#15963618)

Also, you might have gotten out at any of the previous all time high prices, such as four years ago when everyone though $1000 was absolutely ridiculous and that was as high as it would ever get.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by HighlandSpring on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:21PM (#15963215)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by gst on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:33PM (#15963359)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:If You Had Bought Crypto – How rich would you be if you i... by profalseidol on Tuesday December 19, 2017 @02:50PM (#15963549)

> Which makes me wonder how much the largest successful one-shot liquidation anybody on HN has ever done and how they did it?

Could be that one sale that flash crashed Coinbase' ETH/USD market. One big sale caused lots of margin positions to close; which spiraled ETH's price from ~350USD to 13USD. Went backup immediately tho.

[ Parent | on HN ]