Do you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?

They could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold.

This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0]

> Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...

Outside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.

After the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet.

But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.

A large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins.

It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.

The vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.

Just the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.

Like it's crashing now on this news?

There's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets.

While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC.

Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another.

That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.

It depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .

yeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking

Because maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary

if someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it