
Ask HN: How much money can actually be taken out of cryptocurrency? - s17n
All these hundred million dollar USD ICO&#x27;s have me wondering, how much money can actually be taken out of the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now?  Say I owned USD$1,000,000,000 worth of BTC - how much of it could I actually sell for fiat in, say, the next quarter?  Is there any way to get even a rough estimate of this number?
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imhoguy
Like in any Ponzi scheme - FIFO with profit. Anyway whatever you want to sell
you need to find enough buyers who will pay what you want. Simply supply and
demand works here [0]. See more topics on microeconomics to get better
understanding how markets work.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand)

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alt_f4
You could sell all of it. But, for such a large trade, the market will move,
so your BTC priced at USD$1,000,whatever will be worth much less. The trick
would be to sell in many smaller batches.

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nicholas73
One thing is for certain - a lot less money went into the system than its
current face value.

It's the old stock market saying - better to sell on the way up than down.

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paulpauper
A common misconception is that BTC must be sold on an exchange. If someone has
a large amount they could sell it on a secondary market or to a private buyer
offmarket.

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coralreef
Is there some sort of bitcoin escrow service that would manage that
transaction?

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miroslav5411
Hello Coralreef - about the escrow for BTC. Yes, there are such services.
Typically used for large transactions

