How do big players buy?

[opentoe]

The Winklevoss twins, the ones that sued Zuckerberg (Facebook) invested in Bitcoin a while back. Said to have a very large amount now they took advantage of the "crash" that just happened and said they invested even more. How are these big players able to buy Bitcoin when there literally was a selling freeze? Even people that wanted to buy 10 bitcoins were unable to. All the sources/companies that I used temporarily shut down and ceased selling. I was curious as to how these guys were able to buy/invest in so many while most of us couldn't get one bitcoin into our wallets. Even right now I'm finding it hard to find any place "open for business" selling bitcoin. Do groups that invest in high amounts get preferred treatment? I was hoping the bitcoin community would try and get away from that old way of thinking. I know very well in our todays banking system customers are treated differently based on how much business you do. I thought bitcoin was better than that. I hope I'm completely wrong.

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[nobbynobbynoob]

The difficulties of purchasing bitcoin are not the fault of Bitcoin.

There are numerous possibilities regarding the BTC holdings of the "Winklevii". One is simply that they are lying. Unless they expressly prove they own the bitcoin they claim to own by means of signed messages using their private keys, we'll never know for sure. Maybe they bought the 'coin on Trade Hill. Maybe they run their own Avalon ASIC farm. We just don't know.

[leemar]

1000 coins a day for 3 months, hey presto!

[FenixRD]

Presumably the Winklevii would have no difficulty utilizing regular Forex markets to swap USD for something else (or probably, they already have holdings in multiple currencies). While the USD-BTC exchanges tanked, as well as exchanges of XXX-BTC that are connected (Mt. Gox, all markets crashed, same servers), many large ones did not experience the problems immediately or at all.

Example not even requiring foreign bank accounts: While the rate was around $85/BTC on the US exchanges during the mini-bulltrap after the major pop, I had preparatorily placed amounts of BTC in a couple foreign-only/predominant exchanges. One of which was Vincurex CAD-BTC, for me. At that time, it was still trading at 140 CAD/BTC. I sold my BTC. The price on Vincurex caught up to USD exchanges within an hour or so. I could then rebuy, taking advantage of having "seen the future" knowing the market movements all lag behind the major USD exchanges.

I am not a big player however.

edit - changed "? ? ?" -nospaces to XXX because a confused emoji was not my intention

[ex-trader]

There are several companies that exist to 'buy bitcoins', perhaps they are just a major client of theirs, or even setup one of those firms just to source coins for themselves, that would be a discreet way of doing it. Add in some farming and exchange purchases and you're there easy.

[mb300sd]

Possibly? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg1862030#msg1862030

I'm starting to think the off-exchange market is at least an order of magnitude larger than whats on the exchanges...