Bitcoin Forum

Yesterday we saw another daily record turnover - 200K BTC changed hands... I suppose only 50K of original BTC are responsible for it (50K was traded 4 times)

The question is - where are 7 000 000 outstanding Bitcoins... why they not taking part in trading? Can somebody explain?

I dont wany to trade my bitcoins for another currency. I have money in my pocket, if i sell my bitcoins i wont have any of those. simple.

Prospects to get X% more by trading does not attract you?

For a lot of early adopters, Bitcoin is an ideological thing.  They've planned from the start to hold their Bitcoins very long term and have little interest in trading their coins any time soon.  Many of them see speculators as greatly damaging to the basic concept and ideology of Bitcoin, and view trading Bitcoin like a commodity as a bad thing.

There's also a non-trivial amount of trading which happens outside of the exchanges.

If early adopters sit on this huge BTC holdings, do they at least lend it somewhere?

I've been wondering why the 7M coins aren't all on my site. I mean don't people want to win more coins?

I've ridden a stash of coins all the way down from $11

Some even at $19

Not selling a single one.  Bottom line is, I want to hold some coins, no matter the price.

I will ride them to zero if I have to.  Call it emotional. =)

I'm doing this too! Well kinda...
I've been trading to increase my BTC "footprint" if you will. Though I only started trading about 2 months ago, I've since doubled my coins, and siphoned about a grand out of the market.
I do plan on keeping my BTC to spend once the "value" comes up a bit. But, I too held through the 30's, 20's, teens.

I have not sold a bitcoin on an exchange in months.

I have, however, bought many things from various different people with my bitcoins.

I'm not an early adopter per se (first began using them last year), though I almost never sell coins for other currencies; I guess repentance is right about it being ideological, at least sort of like that. I'd say it's an ordinary normative attitude, i.e. "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, will that it should become a universal law". So my strategy is to try to put them into use as much as I can. Besides spending and the transfers between my colleagues, I invest on GLBSE and hope to put more in venture capital investments. It would be nice if kiva.org accepted Bitcoins as well.

I have some of your missing coins. Like casascius above, I have a stash of coins that I paid less than $1 for.  Those I will hold probably until all 21 million coins are produced, no matter what the price does.

You don't want those nearly 8 million (not 7 anymore... our printing rate is astronomical)  to be dumped on the market.   It would send the prices down to a fraction of a penny.