Bitcoin Forum

In the past months, I have been a close follower of the institutional adoption of bitcoin from Big players.
I am convinced that Bitcoin is a Digital Gold 2.0 and it's #Phase5 narrative is the Ultimate Store of Value.

So I have been following Grayscale, Square, Paypal and Microstrategy Gobbling Bitcoins in the past months.

	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/bloba7d80741f45791d1.png	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobb222c7e8240e0406.png
	GBTC AUM has been growing steadily	Microstrategy buys

It's undeniable that the continuous, relentless buying has contributed driving the price up.

This aggressive buying has been coupled with a constant reduction on the exchanges balance, sign that the coins left at the exchanges, preseudmely for trading purposes, have been draining constantly over the last months:

	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob5cafac6f31565ebd.png (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313900.msg56044946#msg56044946)
	Exchanges have seen a continuous drainage of funds. It is not a single one, but every exchange had very similar pattern.Source (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313900.msg56044946#msg56044946)

With such drainage from exchange's wallets, it's easy to guess Excahgne's books have bee quite empty too, offering little resistance to the wall fo buyers, hence driving the price up.


Exchanges have another problem sourcing bitcoins: apparently, miners have not been selling a lot of bitcoin, lately:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob0679853498e5b27e.png (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313900.msg56051500#msg56051500)
Source (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313900.msg56051500#msg56051500)

They have been selling roughly 500 daily BTC, against the daily 900 mined Bitcoins. This means they could hold 400 daily BTC or 45% of the total supply.


Of course, miners are probably selling also OTC to people interested (for various reasons..) to newly mined BTC, or they could also have been selling to institutions like Grayscale, but surely the percentage flowing into exchanges has dropped significantly.

So we had a nice price action, with price constantly rising and an average of 1,000 USD per day, erasing with incredible ease any momentarily dip.
This was so different from the tiny pump of 2013, or the irrational excess of 2017: in this run, the market followed quite closely the Stock to Flow model prediction:

	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobfc6440186a7bbc4b.png
	Stock to Flow Multiplier. Values grether than unity means market price is above the model price, whilst values smaller than unity means value is above the current market price. Please note that the model is conservative: can overshoot only the twice of current market model, while can be overshoot 4 or 5 times by market prices during peaks.

We see that while in 2017 the market was irrational with a quote more than 3 times the model price forecasted, now he excess is only 30% of the model price.

This means the rise has been extremely organic and "well behaved".


All this make me think about a deep-pocketed, cold-hearted institutional driven price action: no sign of retail-driven FOMO:

	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobc7d7206ddbf496c8.png	https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob1891eb4ec01b5f59.png
	Search Interest for Bitcoin is still a fraction of what it was in 2017	Searches are well spread all over the world, without any particular spot

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmtgVkuXcAIuX_O.jpg

	https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EmtgVkuXcAIuX_O.jpg
	Chain Analysis by Whale Map shows a consistent Whale activity in the first leg run
	https://twitter.com/whale_map/status/1327260627463761921?s=20 (https://twitter.com/whale_map/status/1327260627463761921?s=20)

All good then?

Well.... not exactly, if we dig a little bit under the surface of the things, we might discover something interesting.

First of all, Grayscale closed their investments on Christmas Eve, they haven't been buying a single BTC since Dec 24th, when the price was 23,000 USD.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob3414944fcdc3f1a8.png

Second I see that exchange volumes have been pretty consistent during both weekdays and weekends during the last weeks:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob1879cba97398d629.jpeg

This is a sign that maybe a good chunk of those buys have been made by retail, who typically operate also during the weekend.

Another hint is given by the iBit volumes, which are mainly driven by PayPal Buys: those have been considerably rising over the last few weeks.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blob87e2e251545c749a.jpeg

What I mean is that: is it possible that the last leg in this rally hasn't been fueled entirely by the institutional, as the main narrative tends to convince us, but also there is a consistent inflow from retailers, which, without FOMOing, have definitely contributed to the rise in price in the last, say 70% leg up from 25K to 42K.



Useful Thread:
Everything you wanted to know about Grayscale BTC Trust but were afraid to ask! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256529)
PayPal to allow cryptocurrency buying, selling and shopping on its network (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5283461)
MicroStrategy Buys $250M in Bitcoin, Calling the Crypto ‘Superior to Cash’ (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5268108)
Stock-to-Flow Model: Modeling Bitcoin's Value with Scarcity (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5191012)

Very interesting analysis which makes a lot of sense to me. I do believe that without instituational investors having created a solid foundation for the 10k - 15k price range our ride after breaking 20k would have been way bumpier though.



During which period? The early / mid bull market of 2017 was also fairly "well behaved" once we stabilized above the old ATH, except for a few weird skirmishes with Bitcoin Cash during the late summer. It was only after we broke 10k in December that the market went completely bonkers. I guess what I'm trying to say is: The rise has been extremely organic for now. Don't get me wrong, the current steadiness of growth bodes very well, but FOMO will kick in eventually.

Another point that could indicate the purchases of large investors are very low bitcoin transaction fees. New ATH almost every day and fees stays at 5-20 sat/vbyte for next block transfer. If retail small investors would be buying btc now we would see many small transactions and congested network.

Fun fact. In my city there is notorious lack of cash in bitomats. Yesterday one ATM went from full to empty in 2 hours. Looks like retail investors are dumping bitcoin currently not buying.

Yeah, somehow I have a feeling miners aren't exactly holding onto that many of their mined coins--true, some of them could be very bullish on bitcoin and could be waiting for an even higher price to sell at, but these big mining farms are businesses.  They're not really in business to gamble on bitcoin's price like that (that's my guess anyway).

I would imagine that at least some of the coins that the big institutional investors are buying are coming from the miners in off-exchange deals.  In fact I thought I'd heard something about just that a while back.

Anyway, I've been very interested in all of this deep-pocket, big-company bitcoin buying as well, though I haven't been paying attention to it in as much detail as you OP--so I thank you for the info you put into this thread.  It's definitely a seller's market right now because of all the big-boy buying.  I watched a Youtube video with the CEO of MicroStrategy last night, and man is he bullish on bitcoin.  Hopefully the market doesn't crash, because his company would take one hell of a hit on its books if that happened.

The coming days will answer your question. we have not witnessed real corrections since we broke the $ 20,000, which is a matter of confusion.
I don't think there is enough money to keep demand high and the price increases.
The positive point is the stability of the price, not as it happened in the year 2017, where the collapse was rapid, which means that we may reach a real evaluation point at 30,000 + or _ within a short period of time, and we may find levels of $ 70,000 in the future.

Does you know why Grayscale stop buying bitcoin?

Because of the holidays, presumably? Unlike us retail-coiners, businesses have business hours :) More interesting would be at which point they continue investing, assuming they haven't done so already.

They are just waiting for the price to go down so that they can buy at a better price and then sell them at a higher rate to make profit.


The correction might not happen , we didn't think about 40k did we ? But it did happen so I believe we won't have such an aggressive correction since the media is flowing with the 100k margin and people are panic buying.

As long as the people hold and the investors continue to pool in it we will have no problem maintaining the stability during the pandemic.

I think the aggressive buying is due to :
Government being foolish, giving excessive stimulus , riots , bad handling of covid cases etc ...they just presumed that soon enough we will have a very bad situation in all the countries and they at least need a stable thing like bitcoins. Even if it's Volatile the government cannot harm much now.

They are just keeping their companies safe and trying to make sure they don't lag behind.

I suppose you are referring to Stock-to-Flow Model (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5191012.0). Just a (probably dumb) question: does it predict a S-curve adoption? Because it doesn't seem to me and I've been seeing that concept mentioned a lot lately.


I believe it is quite likely. Searches show there is no FOMO but it's on the way. Also, in countries with very high inflation like Argentina, Venezuela or Turkey they are at an ATH


Yes, look at how bullish he is: Michael Saylor goes nuts: he predicts a $15 million Bitcoin price. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5308117.0)

In my opinion, in the future we will see bitcoin at $ 50,000 and $ 100,000, however, there will now be a price correction in the market.

Organizations that bought bitcoin for between $ 19,000 and $ 20,000 most likely sold it for between $ 40,000 and $ 41,000 (to lock in their profits).  

I currently expect the price to drop to $ 20,000.  The US political crisis is probably over.  This is another reason for the fall in the price of bitcoin.  

$ 40,000 is a very high price for Bitcoin.  Further price increases are not organic growth.

So, institutional investors could have dumped their coins in retails for up to x4 profit, but didn't? This is good to know. Also, I'm a bit surprised that retail investors joined the really so quickly, I thought they would do it much later, although it makes sense, because it looks like this time the media is covering Bitcoin's rally much more eagerly than before. I read some general economic news sites, and they report Bitcoin news a few times per day, especially if there's a lot of price action.

I believe most institutional investors are in it for long term gains, rather than swing trading, so it's not all that surprising that they didn't lock in their profits yet. It will be interesting to see what happens once the market gets really crazy though, ie. whether they weather the storm or shed some coins to alleviate the subsequent crash and crypto-winter.




Yeah, I've been noticing the same thing. Lots of small but steady mainstream coverage. Usually that only happened a few months after an ATH was breached, towards the end of the bull market. Now it's more present. Seems like people are keeping a closer eye on Bitcoin these days. Presumably they finally caught on that Bitcoin only comes back stronger after each "death".

FOMO is incoming there is no doubt in my mind about it, even if the research from the OP seems to suggest that retail investors were the responsible for the last growth I still do not think this is the FOMO we all know, to me this are just speculators coming late to the party, once FOMO comes I will not be surprised if we see the prices that people have been dreaming for years, at minimum I think 100k will be touched and quite honestly the price could go much higher than that.

Apparently, but this influence is not just on the price but also on the people, the retail people that's what I mean. MicroStrategy buying thousands of Bitcoin may cause the supply to decrease as well as the price to increase. This will somehow signal retail investors of a bull run and many of them will probably jump in.

And as stated in the OP, there is a possibility that the most recent part of the rally was actually brought about by retail investors who are mostly operating during the weekends. Well, we cannot be 100% certain of this but there are signs of it. And this is great for the market and all of us. If there is strong buying from both institutional investors and retail investors, there'd be no other beneficiary but Bitcoin itself and those who own some.

There has been a drop in the market but knowing these companies buying large amounts of bitcoin, I think that a bounce back is possible and a 50k mark is possible, anything beyond that is still a little bit impossible.

I think the drop in the bitcoin price was due to sales by institutional investors who bought in 2020 at $ 9,000, $ 12,000 and 19,000 and sold now at $ 40,000 - $ 41,000.  

At the same time, retail investors continue to hold bitcoins.  That is why the collapse of the Bitcoin price did not happen.  

Institutional investors are waiting for the Bitcoin price (retail buyers will start selling Bitcoin) to fall to continue shopping.  

This is my version.  This version may be wrong.
If it is possible to confirm or deny it, it would be useful information.

Apart from Grayscale (<sorry typo there) at lot of other groups may have taken part in this pump too. You might never know it or get an idea much later in future when it is no longer needed. What people still need to know is that such cycles will happen and it is a part of the money making game of trading. In case someone is new to this, they might be FOMOed in, heck even experienced traders get FOMOed at times.

However 50k USD might not be reached in this cycle. See the downtrend started yesterday and now price is back to 34k and hoping to see this level holds.

These levels were newly touched so I dont expect much support levels at these prices, on the contrary to what other bullish investors might think. Hence I feel the price will fall a lot more probably stop at the levels of 20k-25k USD.

Even though I am a bull, I am not stubborn but sensible enough in such cases.

A few months ago, there was news that Chinese miners are having big problems selling BTC via OTC because the Chinese authorities have decided to regulate that part of the crypto trade as well. If there really is truth in that, then that might explain why fewer and fewer new coins are coming to market given how strong Chinese miners are in that regard.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/chinas-crypto-miners-struggle-to-pay-power-bills-as-regulators-clamp-down-on-otc-desks


Given how much Grayscale has been buying BTC for the past few months, can we conclude that their current absence in this segment just results in one such dip? Has some perhaps interpreted this in a way that big players might be out of the game or getting ready to make a profit?


I personally think that this is probably one of the options that should not be ignored, but what may make it less likely is the timing - people usually do not invest money in such things during the holidays, and even less after spending money on gifts and on New Year's Eve. But this year is different in that regard as well, so there may be truth retail are being a part of the last rally - especially since the mainstream media took a good bite out of the story that only the sky is the limit and that this time the whole thing is different than it was in the case of 2017.

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I don't know why, but even some media outlets keep writing Grayscale wrong...


One little retreat and people immediately start to be pessimistic, as if similar things haven’t been happening for years. I wonder what will happen if we go below $20k, Bitcoin dead again :o

This analysis is great and I got to know a quite lot of things about it. Seeing the number of big investors into Bitcoin now I also have a thought that the last rally leg will be brought by retailers

Which retreat?
Ah, yeah, I just noticed it:
https://twitter.com/HTDcris/status/1348580043723841537?s=20

As long as BTC doesn't cross the 50% of S2F value (around 13,500 now and rising fast) or the 200 weeks MA (around 8,200 now and rising fast), you shouldn't have to be concerned and see it only as a possibility to stack more sats.

Also, as detailed in OP, a certain rotation of buyers seems healthy for the uptrend.

What can be extracted from this is that as more and more retailers adapt to this, without FOMOing, we could stay in this 25k to 45k range for a long time. That's what I think could happen, especially as seen in the current events and happenings.

As long as miners and HODLers don't sell their BTC, it will definitely drive up the price even more. That's if the demand is still there. Spot on analysis. :D

Can you also check on data with regards to the cause of dumping? Maybe after analyzing the data about it, we could foresee when it will go down, or something to that sense.

When you look at the chart then it really seems almost insignificant, but people still pay much more attention to the numbers - a drop of $10 000 is for most a sign of panic, and believe me some still expect a correction of at least 50% or more. How to explain to someone that 2018 and 2021 have nothing in common and that we are still far from max ATH...

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Maybe we can look for a reason in this "Bitcoin Crash Liquidates 262,344 Traders (https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitcoin-crash-liquidates-262344-traders/)", and if I'm not mistaken something similar happened in March last year.

I'm not an expert, so let someone correct me if it's about different things - but the explanation for such a sudden drop may be just this :

There is a big difference between retail and institutional and people mistake that. By retail usually what people mean is that "will you be able to go into amazon and buy something with bitcoin" type of stuff, as in people being able to buy things with bitcoin, as in "retail stores" and so forth and that is not the same as institutional investors because those are places like grayscale that buys billions of dollars worth of bitcoin instead.

So, people mistake what it is meant and they argue about the wrong stuff together, normally if you explained it to both of the parties that argue, that they are talking about different things, they would definitely make it a lot better and would figure out. I would say investors are in, all those wealthy ones, and they will keep coming in, but the online retail type of places, places where you can "spend" your bitcoin will not be around for a while.

Excellent analysis and compilation of evidence. Well done.


Certainly.

I do think that institutional forces cannot be overstated - they are still the main driver of demand for BTC in this rally, especially since they are not just trading BTC in this rally but actually committing to holding it for the long term.

But retail investors, especially those trading on leverage, can have a great impact on the market as well. What they offer is consistent, bite-sized demand - which arguably is just as important in the long run to BTC adoption.

I believe that the reason for the crash in price last year is that a lot of people have been cashing out because of the pandemic that has happened. I'm not sure with the recent drop though.

A lot of people are even betting for BTC to move up but it failed and having leverage liquidated them. There's no explanation in the article that explains that drop but basically, liquidation is what you defined here. The chart tells everything as to how humans act with their investments but it doesn't tell anywhere the reason behind them.

That is exactly right, the crash due to pandemic was in everything in the world. The price of stocks went down like crazy, fiat became worthless all of a sudden because nobody had it anymore but at the same time since nobody had it, it was hard to sell things so people increased their prices to make due, the price of gold decreased like crazy, and oil price was just a joke, at some point people didn't had enough storage to get all the oil in the world, it was like 1% of the price it used to be, that crazy.

In that period bitcoin price crashed too, but it wasn't even that bad, it was around 9k and it dropped to under 4k for a bit and increased to 5k in less than a week, so it wasn't even a 50% drop honestly. So the pandemic did made everything go down a lot, but over time everything increased back to where it suppose to be once again in few months.

Great point, I have forgotten that in fact using leverage is very popular in this market and as such retail investors can exercise a great deal of influence over the market as well because not only they are trading with an amount of capital many times higher than what they could do otherwise, they can buy more bitcoin reducing its supply even further, if anything I think this explains the recent crash, most likely a whale sold some of their coins and this was enough to reduce the price somewhat then those that used the most leverage received margin calls making the price to go down even further and creating a domino effect in the process.

Grayscale has just resumed buying Bitcoins  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5256529.msg56093429#msg56093429), this is going to help the rhetoric of institutional buying.
Of course, I hope it is a sort of rotation between the various category of Bitcoin buyers: institutional, then retails, and institutional again!

Liquidity has been ample on the exchanges, so I hope the organic growth can go on.

That would be a pretty sweet deal, sign me up! In all seriousness, I'm usually quite publicly pessimistic about Bitcoins short term value, but more optimistic about its future worth. However, this is the first time in a long while, that I'm starting to believe that Bitcoin might not give too much up on its current price. I'm not sure I'm as optimistic as you, reaching for the 45k, but I think a 25-30k is definitely something I can get behind. 


I guess whatever way you look at it they would be taking a risk. Although, you would assume that mining companies would be in it for the long term, and therefore might even benefit form offloading their earnings frequently to try, and get more capital to invest either in more Bitcoin, or in equipment to increase their profit in the long run. It would be a hard decision to make, and without knowing the calculations, I'm not sure which would yield more results.

If the new US President Joe Biden announces new measures to stimulate the US economy (i.e. continue to issue US dollars), then the bitcoin price will continue to rise. 

In any case, the main task of the government is to prevent hyperinflation.  Thus, the new dollars will not be allowed into the consumer market.  Instead, the stock market will rise and Bitcoin will rise. 

Unlike stocks, Bitcoin has no limits to further growth.  Bitcoin can be worth $ 50,000, it can be worth $ 100,000 or $ 500,000.

I fully agree with you, a strong dollar will increase bitcoin prices as well. Overall the upside potential of bitcoins is so much higher than for stocks, bonds or any other financial asset. The only thing I would compare to the recent bitcoin rally are maybe Stock Options, but with options you have a lot of risk to not end up in the money and then they are just worthless. As for bitcoins you will always have these coins even if there is a price drop.

Yes, assuming a significant depreciation of the US dollar and its withdrawal from monetary circulation, then Bitcoin can be effectively used as a currency. 

This makes Bitcoin a more promising investment than stocks, bonds, etc. For Bitcoin, the only catastrophe will be the complete destruction of the Internet's structure and serious problems with energy supply. 

The main threat to Bitcoin is effectively functioning central bank currencies (CBDC).  A complete rejection of cash, a system of social ratings, reputation tokens, complete control over the lives of the inhabitants of the Earth can make owning bitcoin meaningless. 

However, this is a very pessimistic scenario.

I have a feeling we are at the early 2017 again, the price is likely to move between $25k to $40k for 3 months for this to be the new floor respected by the market before we pump to $50k and above. The money buying and pumping the price is not retail money, agreed some of them might have bought this pump but for me the mega pump is coming and my take is that we will likely touch $250k which would be the top

If you are optimistic about the future and pessimistic about the short term, you probably realize that there are times when it should go up in the short term as well :D. I mean if you are optimistic about the future that means it will go up in the future according to you, that "future" should come one day and it should go up one day and that Is about right now.

I believe as long as these huge corporations keep investing billions of dollars into bitcoin, there should not be a shock to anyone that it will definitely go up in value and stay there as well. There are companies accepting bitcoin more and more, and there are corporations spending more to buy every day, that Is why many people think bitcoin will not go down a lot, sure it could have some falls we have seen 40k to 32k for example, but that "crash" may not come up again.

Yes, I agree with you.  

Many expect the bitcoin price to hit $ 100,000.  Therefore, this scenario is unlikely.  The market almost always plays against the crowd.  

A bear market is now also unlikely.  We see that the bitcoin price does not fall below $ 30 thousand and is confidently holding at the level of $ 35 thousand.  

This means that the price of bitcoins will reach levels well above the normal $ 100,000.  Soon enough, we'll see Bitcoin at $ 250,000 - $ 300,000.  

The rise in the price of Bitcoin will be accompanied by serious shocks.  Our world will change dramatically.

It is interesting to see the charts around 2012-13, 2016-17 ans 2020-21. See the stock to flow chart in black feature, it clearly states the period when bitcoin halving happened after which bitcoin has been raised both in the price and market cap very swiftly and like a straight wall. Best to notice huge amount of USD inflow happens during the year end and its multi-fold just before and after the halving happens. I am going to take the reference of this for my next investment plan during halving which is around 2024.

Whether the last leg is bough by retail or large pvt corporation for the investor like me they are big bone and motivation. Number one thing they will not allow the bitcoin market cap to fall down so yeah the whole analysis is cool.

Maybe we are now on a different  leg than the one I was referring to in the OP, but apparently retail still play a good part in the price action:

Retail Bitcoin Traders Rival Wall Street Buyers as Mania Builds (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-15/retail-bitcoin-traders-rival-wall-street-buyers-as-mania-builds)


https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/16/blobff3af30493207482.jpeg


I will try to put my hands on that report as well and share here on the forum. Stay tuned.

I am not sure that the tools of conventional market analysis are applicable to bitcoin due to the fact that the market is new and immature and the influence of many additional factors that do not and cannot have an impact in other market sectors. We can and should draw parallels with previous periods, because we need to focus on something, but no one will be surprised if everything happens contrary to previous experience ;) Personally, I'm not surprised by anything and I'm ready for anything, because it's bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Institutions has contributed to the increase indeed, but whether institutions or no institutions, we are still going to find the market heading towards the high price as it did, the only thing is that it’s going to take time for us to reach there, but it’s definitely going to reach there. I would have even preferred that there are more of retail investors than we have all these big institutions; that way the coins will be more distributed than one institution holding a bunch of it.

But anyway, it is good that we now have lots of institutions, there are still pros to every cons, in lots of ways they have contributed in the level of trust people have in this.

Interesting numbers, who would say that retail lead compared to institutions in Q1 2021, but all thanks to 3 times less investment when it comes to funds if we compare Q4 2020 with Q1 2021. I have to admit that this definitely breaks the theories that ordinary people stopped buying BTC because of its high price, obviously in this case we can apply the old saying "Vires in numeris".

We can assume that the share of retail will now increase even more due to stimulus checks, of course assuming that part of these funds will spill over into crypto as has been the case in the past.

I feel your reason but your last paragraph has answered it and that is better for the market and bitcoin. The institutional investors are the reason price is high making up the high cryptocurrency volume. And we have not heard the bubble kind of discussion about bitcoin because the market is getting less unstable unlike 2017 when it was majorly buy and dump investors mainly for gains. Confidence has been increased and more huge buyers are looking to hodl and that will push price further higher because of limited availability.

Retail is always the bigger one, but companies end up doing it all together at once and that is why it looks like they lead. Normally, every single day, we lead as retail and they are behind, nearly every single day, but then one day they come in and spend a billion dollars and get out so it looks like they beat us that day.

On top of that, they just buy and hold, which means they are not helping the market long term, sure when they buy it the price goes up but after that the market is again retail buyer and retail seller so we could end up having more retail sellers since price is higher and everyone wants that money, so they are not helping long term neither. Long story short, companies are a good thing for us, but they are not a great thing, they are just decent, sure it helps but it is not as big of a deal as people make it out to be.

Interesting point.
There has been recently a huge debate about exchange balances going down. Of course less BTC available for sale means prices going up. But I do hodling is not good per se.
If Laszlo, Hal and the hothead had only hodled, instead of spending Bitcoin to spread the Satoshi Gospel, today we wouldn’t be here.

Someone buys all these BTCs, through OTC or on the open market, and the fact is that these coins do not return to the exchange as was once the case in the past. While the average Joe is probably investing now to sell when the price reaches a magical $100k, big investors obviously have some other plans - but again, we know their coins are stored in custodial cold storage.

We can conclude that the liquidity of crypto exchanges is lower than before, but again we should not forget that we are currently at 18.66 million mined BTC, and even that 20% is lost (3.72 million) and 50% of what is available is saved as a long-term investment (7.47 million), we have at least as much BTC (7.47 million) left on the market. I may be wrong, but I think that no matter what, there is still a fairly large amount of BTC available at all times - at least I haven't read anywhere that anyone complained that they couldn't buy as much BTC as they wanted.