Bitcoin Forum

Imagine I'm an early adopter with 50.000 BTC (more than 1M usd at today's exchange rate)
Imagine I need to convert very quick that amount to usd or eur

How would you do it?

I've read that many people got their funds stuck at mtgox for weeks. Does not seem a reliable system for a large amount.

And: how could you quickly sell that amount of BTC without causing a huge decrease in the exchange rate?

Slowly. :P

localbitcoin.com

#bitcoin-otc on freenode.net

pm me.

i'm always buying if you or anyone else is selling before the crash.

I happen to have a good deal of trust with the community that I can leverage, so I would simply start making offers on the forums and over-the-counter and get people to wire me money and send them the coins.

Clearly there is a disparity when it comes to whether this would work for the average joe (although, early adopters have a significantly higher chance of not being "average joe").

If I had 50,000 BTC to sell, without the advantage of a reputation to help me sell it, I'd be privately contacting many of the heavy hitters in Bitcoin and privately letting them know I had 50k BTC I wanted to unload, suggest a price more favorable than MtGox, and ask them to give me a call immediately if they later end up with a buyer.  I would want to make sure that person ends up making a few percent on the deal, but even so, I'd see a far better return than dumping them on Gox and slipping the price.

Those of us knee deep in bitcoin have the opposite problem: I have people coming to me asking if I can sell them coins, but I don't have any for sale, and I tell them to go buy from Gox or somewhere else.  If I had a short-list of people I knew were selling, I'd see an opportunity to swing a few hundred bucks connecting a buyer and a seller, and make both happy.

I don't have that amount of BTC at all, I'm a newby with less than 10 BTC. I just wanted to understand where we stand actually in terms of feasibility of exchanging a large amount of BTC.

Cass

This is really a good answer that gives me a really a good picture of where we are at the moment. Thanks Cassascius.

You could use https://fastcash4bitcoins.com and sell it off over the course of a month or so.  Also if this is more than just a hypothetical send an email to info@tangiblecryptogrpahy.com we have worked out custom deals involving more than ten thousand BTC many times. 

As for could you sell it in a single day without any change in price.  Probably not.  There are multiple companies which could handle large transactions but 50K BTC is still pretty large.  However if you were willing to accept multiple deals involving 10K to 20K BTC each that is certainly possible. 

If you are asking for how actual payment could be made, well there really there are only two mechanisms for transferring that kind of wealth in the fiat world, bank wire and bonded bullion delivery (probably to a vault of your choice not your home address).  Tangible Cryptography LLC has experience with both.

Sell it off-market to some high-volume off-market traders - like me. Define "very quickly". If you would send me 2000 BTC, that could be done so you have money in you bank account same-day, but there is a whole bunch of guys like me, if you contact lets say 5 of us, and let 10k BTC to each of us, you could be done in a week - not influencing the market rates too much.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140903.msg1501002#msg1501002