Bitcoin Forum

I probably shouldn't be asking this question because I am an old member of this forum but this recent article on Cointelegraph quickly inspired me to ask this question here today. Satoshi-era dormant Bitcoin address wakes up after 10 years (https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-era-dormant-bitcoin-address-awakens-transfers-43-9m).

My questions are the following:
1. People who own hundreds and thousands of Bitcoins, where do they trade? It's risky to deposit such a high amount of coins on platforms like Binance and Coinbase because you aren't guaranteed that they won't block your account, even immediately after you deposit them. So where do they trade?

2. How do they convert their Bitcoins into fiat? I know that years ago there were some bank transfer deals on this forum, I remember that Bitmain wanted to sell 10 Bitcoin or something like that here and they probably had a deal with a forum member but today when the price is so high, where do these big holders sell their coins and get fiat in their bank account? On traditional exchanges?

I'm pretty sure that a lot of wealthy people have accounts in traditional exchanges just like any other individual. I also don't think they care about having their accounts locked with that wealth, when they know they can prove "the source of funds", or lawyer up if needed.

Alternatively, I would imagine that some of them also use OTC desks:

https://www.bitcoin.com/otc/#:~:text=Bitcoin%20OTC%20trading%20involves%20the,counterparties%20for%20large%2Dvolume%20trades.

Some exchanges like Kraken, do offer that type of service as well.

That is an interesting article which is different than usual articles on cointetegraph (with low quality), I like it. Even this is not new, the writer of this article actually did spent time to get information and made informative charts for readers.

You can get information on inactive UTXOs and make your own estimates.

• https://www.lookintobitcoin.com/charts/hodl-waves/

They can choose

• OTC market
• CEX without KYC, they must do their sale very slowly to avoid price impacts
• CEX with KYC, with high trading volume, it's more easier to take profit.

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Don't feel so cool with estimate on possible lost bitcoins (because it is an estimate only) or feel disappointed if some old era like Satoshi era bitcoins wake up.
We don't know how many bitcoins actually lost, forever, but we know one thing, there is donation to us by people who lost bitcoins!

Aside the OTC, crypto exchanges there are also  private wealth managers , family offices, or institutional trading firms that the whales approach to liquated their some of their huge assets.These people usually know someone that knows some that can do the trade for them. Like they know other wealthy people who would not mind doing the trade directly with them. Ofcourse there would be like a trusted middle person that facilitates this.

I like to think here that some institutional investors like BlackRock, Mircostrategy and the others are involved in buying significant amounts of bitcoin from whales. This is only how I think they can do it with security agency looking their way.a

I also saw this news and even shared it with my brothers as just to create a curiosity in them about BTC and how people made money from it. Well, talking about how these people would be withdrawing all those funds without getting their accounts banned. There could be many ways, like usage of DEXs but DEXs don't have such huge liquidity so they might have to trade in batches. Besides batches, these whales might prefer to do OTC trading or P2P trading as with bigger whales. And to convert the USDT into FIAT they might have to contact some big brokerage or OTC can do the work here.

Not a professional but other than this, CEXs can also do the world as the amount that he shifted is around 43 million dollars. Well, different accounts on different tier 1 exchanges can do the work. But it will take time and lot of time. OTC trading is not so easy but I think crypto.com provides it, and there might be other CEXs too which are providing this service so not a big problem.

What i noticed mostly is that they don't have to alter their main wallet, like they would send few money to an external wallet where they can gradually send some percentage to centralized exchange to trade, sending like 2 to 3 Bitcoin to centralized exchange if they did their kyc from level 1 to 3 or 5 as the kyc level could reached at this point they can easily trade without limitations or anyone to monitor them. For about account to send their fiat after having traded their bitcoin most uses company account to make out payment to bank with this nobody would keep monitoring their account than a personal account.

You are correct they don't care about if their account get lockup or not but truth but told, rich people don't afraid knowing too well that they have the available funds to take up whatever cases that comes up, and putting that they have lawyers backing them up to protect their wealth provided that their control doesn't prohibited bitcoin trading or usage.

Don't you think there must be an agreement between them before this could be possible?
Most times it's very hard to entrust people with money and in my opinion when something like this comes up there must be a written contract that binds between these people to avoid misappropriation of funds.

I think that many of them use OTC trades. It's not that broadcasted at all but being a responsible owner of that much BTC, they've done their research and they know the market where they're going to sell that. Some may be selling a bit from these centralized exchanges but they use them as an actual exchange, withdrawals after withdrawals and not staying their funds there for so long. We have the typical centralized exchanges and the same goes for OTC markets.

The chances of exchanges block that type of transfer is very low. They would never block it unless it was maybe stolen but if it’s a coinbase transaction which was mined by someone using his CPU back in 2010, it was most likely never moved and never stolen.

The proof is that it’s obviously his money and how he earned it was clear, no reason for the exchange to block it for suspicious reasons.

Like the above guy said, many can also use OTC if they don’t want it appearing on the order book. But it doesn’t make a difference since it’s moved and there’s already a record of the dormant wallets changing hands.

Most big exchanges offer OTC & Execution solutions to institutional investors and private investors. Whales use these services to manipulate the maket according to their requirements. World's biggest exchange Binance has a dedicated portal for those services: https://www.binance.com/en/otc

I doubt the whales will be interested in converting their crypto to fiat. I think they will be more interested in converting their crypto assets to a stable coin as it keeps them in the trading loop. If they still want fiat then they will be using the same OTC service.

1. Mostly on big exchanges with high amounts of liquidity and OTC such as Coinbase. If their account gets locked, I'm pretty sure they have the money to actually be able to lawyer up.

2. Yes, through big exchanges with OTC. Can't go with shady smaller exchanges because of liquidity issues, and the fact that it's easier to explain to banks/taxman when the money came from big exchanges like Coinbase.

I don't know how the mechanism of OTC trading is because I have never used it, is it almost the same as spot? Or is it different again? But it is true that if the whale wants to trade large amounts of coins then it must have an OTC exchange that has large liquidation.

Converting bitcoin to fiat maybe that's what the pope can do, I'm sure the exchange will facilitate this and it is specialized exchange trading, it's just that we never know the mechanism and the popes are the ones who know.

2 to 3 bitcoins is not a small capital with many people and consider about potential of Bitcoin to grow more in value and price, it will become a fortune for many people.

I don't make any trial by sending 2 to 3 bitcoins to a centralized exchange and have more reasons to never do it, if I did not complete all KYC levels on that exchange for my account. But is doing KYC good for everyone, I guess many people are against this idea.

Lastly, let's see the reminder about risk.

Reminder: do not keep your money in online accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421039.0)

That is the whale's secret and we will never know where they trade. Maybe they not only trade on Binance and Coinbase but they also trade on decentralized exchanges. We also don't know if these whales want or don't want to carry out KYC verification as requested by centralized exchanges.

If I were a whale, I would just convert Bitcoin to fiat as needed and keep my Bitcoin. I don't want to invite suspicion from the regulators because they will investigate me and ask me for an explanation. It would take a long time for me to explain it and that's why I prefer to hide it from them.

The whales may look for a third party who can help them convert their Bitcoin to fiat. But these third parties are people they really trust because they don't want to experience any problems. The whales don't want other people to know that they are the whales and will carry out transactions secretly.

I learnt overtime from research and from studying the market that many Bitcoin whales opt for over-the-counter (OTC) crypto trading, so as to not affect or influence market prices, while others can decide to use exchanges with the aim of manipulating the crypto market thereby signaling large buys or sells.

To know where, when and how whales trade or withdraw money, one can start by analyzing trading patterns and can do so when they visit online platforms like Santiment, Etherscan, or Whalemap just to have insights into the wallet movements and any exchanges inflows/outflows of a specific coin that is being traded at the moment by these whales and it goes to help traders make decisions based on the pump or dip in price that follows.


Visit this link to learn more on how to track whale wallets and be knowledgeable about how whales trade or withdraw their funds:
https://medium.com/@snipecrypto4/how-to-track-whale-wallets-in-crypto-

One such wallet woke from dormancy in August 2023 after almost 14 years and transferred 1,005 BTC mined in 2010.

I don't think the owner of the wallet has a problem with that. What's more!  I think he can sell it above the market price.

Why is that? There are many long-term buyers who are not interested in the current price. They have a lot of money. They take bitcoin for diversification. And they may not sell it for 10-100 years (leaving it to their heirs).

But these people are very interested in making sure that the bitcoins they buy are never involved in illegal activities. Even buying on a major exchange does not guarantee this. A few years later, with the benefit of hindsight, exchange wallets can be labelled as dubious. This means that the buyer's wallet will also be marked as dubious.

This is why many large customers are willing to pay more than the market price for BTC. The main thing is that these Bitcoins are minted. And have never been moved before.

Whales with that much money obviously receive preferential treatment, so they can use the exchanges that we use to trade and sell their coins, while they have their bank accounts set by experts lawyers and accountants which have contacted the higher ups of those banks to tell them what they are about to do and their account does not closed or suspended.

Or they could sell those coins directly to institutional investors on private deals we do not hear about, after all when you have so much bitcoins, you can hire the best support team to help you out to sell those coins as they have contacts all over the world which could be interested on performing such a private transaction.

Yes, it may be a little difficult with these large amounts, but in the end there are many options for selling these large amounts of Bitcoin.

If I had such a wallet containing 10 Bitcoins and I wanted to trade, the first thing I would think about is not to sell it all at once but to sell it gradually. It is also better to use several unknown centralized or decentralized exchanges without KYC.

However, if you live in a country that prohibits Bitcoin, it is better to make P2P deals secretly in the form of small and medium batches with several sellers, not one seller.

I don't think, they will have any challenge if they want to sell all their Bitcoin because they will not sell all their Bitcoin at once, because it will bring some challenges in their fiat account which is the reason is not advisable to sell all your Bitcoin that worth billions at once, because bullish season don't use to increase higher only one day which they can use that period to sell all their Bitcoin to their different fiat account.To convert Bitcoin into fiat, I think you can do that in the exchange market, where you can find different currencies to make your choice on your traditional currency to transact your Bitcoin with and the person will send you the traditional currency. I think, you can get easy buyers in the exchange market, but selling your 10 Bitcoin at once to achieve fiat money, it will make such person to end up in jail in my country, because the bank the fiat money will be coming from, they will expose such person to the government.

They don't put all their BtCs into the market. In my opinion not even a 5 years child would do that , He might be smarter enough not to make these kind of decisions. The BTCs they deposit are pre planned and discussed with the exchange owners.

They only put them to manipulate the market so that the exchanges , project owners and investors all can make profits.

There are numerous times that people moved their thousands of bitcoins to known addresses of coinbase and Binance which means whales does use the centralized exchange just like anyone else and there is no reason to block their account unless the exchange believe the funds are coming from an scammer but if it's whale then it's so easy to prove that their coins belongs to them for years in multiple ways.

Most of those whale wallets with huge capital can contact the private investors who are interested in Bitcoin and who may hold it for decades. We all know that there are some people who are highly interested in Bitcoin, and if someone offer them Bitcoin from 2%to5% cheaper than the market then those investors don't think a lot before buying any amount of Bitcoin.

If I'm not wrong the whale who sold his/her Bitcoin did something similarly, and instead of selling his/her Bitcoin holdings to one private investors he/she sold it to two private investors, who may hold that Bitcoin for many upcoming years. It's not hard to sell your holdings to such private investors if you offer than 10% cheaper rates. The ones who mined those for free may also not hesitate to sell their Bitcoin for 10% cheaper.

Most of this old wallets can belong to anyone, Satoshi wasn't the only person that contributed to Bitcoin back in 2009-2010, there were lot of solo miners then and some contributors that mine Bitcoin then because even your laptop then can mine then but things have change now because of the difficulties and judging by those wallets, the person only sent Bitcoin from his legacy wallet addresses to a segwit once probably because he change wallet to a modern one.


I'm not sure if you are taking relating to that coin but an exchange doesn't have that right to hold your account for having a large amount, you were verified by the way so they know where to take a lead if something is suspicious but I just think that it's not a good idea to always use centralized exchange for such, it breaks your privacy.


We have decentralized exchange like the hodlhodl that are still in existence today and are working perfectly, you can trade their but I think some people use OTC which is over the counter where you can do bulk of transaction buying and selling without going through the exchanges

My answers to these questions are:
#1. These whales trades anonymously, most of them utilizes swapping method using trustwallet dapps or metamask which is very common. Though there's no guarantee with binance, there's also other platforms where they could also store their converted fiat money and they're still holding that asset despite of how risky it was.

#2. Most probably they're trading their coins at traditional exchanges as well as those with secured KYC in order to convert their cryptocurrency to fiat.
But to those whales with wide visions on crypto, I don't they'll easily dump it. They're keeping Bitcoins at they're wallets until such time it's value skyrockets to top most price ever.

You are not the first to ask a kind of question like this, so don't worry OP. I think that if we follow the guidelines of an exchange, we will never have a problem. The main one would be is to do all the KYC requirements before we deposit a huge amount of money/coins.

If we are still paranoid, then we can end up on a decentralized exchange or P2P platforms. In our forum, I can still see the marketplace and currency exchange section, which tells me that users can still exchange their Bitcoins/cryptos here to fiat money or vice versa. This forum is in fact much safer than the other but of course as long as we are familiar to the users we are dealing with and then we use an escrow, for that extra layer of protection.

Some of them will be trading on the regular exchange that we use to trade too. I have seen a traders exchange account with $5million and more amounts. If they're companies they can have a meeting with the exchange owners to make them know they are the ones using the account to trade and they would not be banned. Regular users can also make that amount of deposit and be trading on the exchange after completing their KYC verification and other verification that the exchange will need to verify that they are proving a service to a genuine individual and not a criminal organisation. They also trade through OTC. They can contact the exchange and offer to sell their Bitcoin off the market so it does not affect the price of Bitcoin on the market because selling a large sum of Bitcoin will cause the price of Bitcoin to fall.

Good point. Btw I like Cointelegraph's graphics, they always attract me.

Exchanges don't have the right to freeze your account for no reason but as you know, it happens and it happens quite often. If I had 100 or more Bitcoins, for example, I wouldn't risk depositing them on any centralized exchange because I would be in huge trouble if any of their support or automatic systems banned me. Imagine, holding yourself millions of dollars on exchange and waiting for the moment to get your accidentally banned account unbanned. That's why I asked where whales trade with hundreds and thousands of Bitcoins.

P.S. Thanks everyone, I heard very good answers. Shame on me but I didn't know much about OTC trading until now.

When the amount to be released in an exchange is really large, it seems a bit scary. Of course, it's a centralized platform, as if they have the ability to really freeze your account or ours. So it's really safer with hardware wallets, or maybe with DEX platforms or non-custodial wallets, where only we have control over our wallet accounts.

Or it is also possible to release little by little, not a sudden large amount, because they will really question it; that's why the risk is still there. I haven't even experienced such things yet.