Trying to liquidate that much would simply cause the market to collapse.

yxhuvud · on April 14, 2013

Yes, if the holder was liquidating it all at once.

What could be done though, is selling a little at a intervals, or selling a chunk whenever the price hit some level.

pdog · on April 14, 2013

Do you have any idea what the size of the order book is?

jacquesm · on April 14, 2013

waterlesscloud · on April 14, 2013

At this particular moment, selling 1,000,000 bitcoins would take the market price down to 0.10 USD.

The average price realized would be $14.288 USD, so you'd get $14,000,000. Not bad, really.

Source- "Gribble", the bot on the bitcoin irc channels that calculates these things based on the MtGox order book.

mrb · on April 14, 2013

staticfish · on April 14, 2013

I don't think you can tell if they aren't doing that. Large bitcoin transactions are fairly constant.

Note: I haven't looked at the bitchain and am guessing that you can't make assumptions about large holders from the bitchain alone.