I have been speculating for months (maybe over a year now) that most of the action for bitcoin trade has been happening away from the retail exchanges. I think most of the big trades are happening on OTC desks. This is where Microstrategy, and Greyscale et al buy their corn. It's not like they use Tradeogre... lol.
I am not saying that you are wrong about these points, and it is even possible that MSTR has changed its ways somewhat, but based on some of its earliest of disclosures in late 2020 (several of them, in fact), I was under the impression that they were engaged in some kind of spot price multiple transactions in order to acquire their bitcoin.
Of course, on a personal level I remain constantly skeptical of representations that seem a bit out of the ordinary or difficult to pull off in reality, but there really is no concrete way to negate a claim that a person is making, such as Michael Saylor's disclosures of having had picked up his BTC (at least the first batch that he described) through a multi-tude of small transactions.
Another somewhat contradictory claim that Saylor made was that before he began to make his relatively large-ass bitcoin transactions, he put his lil selfie in contact with some people behind the scenes at Coinbase, which also suggested that he might have been getting some special arrangements or the Coinbase folks were helping him out to make sure that he could acquire his initial purchases of personal and company BTC of around 37k BTC (which would been around $370 million), and I cannot imagine any behind the scenes Coinbase (or any other exchange) that would fail/refuse to give some personal attention to someone intending to use their services for that level of initial BTC purchases.
I recall that Saylor said that he could help any other BIG fishies, such as Elon or other executives who were considering converting decent quantities of their company treasuries into bitcoin allocations, to get in touch with the "right" Coinbase peeps to help facilitate such bitcoin acquisitions without moving the BTC price too much.
Of course, it is healthy to take these kinds of representations with a decently-sized grain of salt, while at the same time acknowledging what they are claiming that they did may well likely have some truth to it.
And really what we are seeing cleared out are OG whales and miners backstock that they want to part with. I have speculated that there has been a LOT of this.
You are no way any kind of novel character when it comes to various kinds of speculating about OTC transactions taking place for many years.. for sure as long as I have been in the space, and likely longer than that because in the beginning there were hardly any exchanges available anyhow so sometimes there were just side deals with BIG holders.
Early bitcoiners with 4-5 digit holdings are most certainly hedging all kinds of regulatory risk as well as wanting to just go ahead and buy the nice house or diversify into real estate, collectables etc. While the miners also have back stock, and are willing to sell X amount for either the same sorts of reasons, or for cap-ex stuff.
For sure there are incentives to work off the books, too.. so no one is going to proclaim that bitcoin cannot or should not be used for various kinds of direct transactions, including BIG ASS ones, except perhaps folks who either do not understand bitcoin or are hostile to bitcoin.
I honestly do not think we have seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the feedback loop we all know is possible.
Call it whatever you like... supply shock? Ok.
To the extent that you might be saying that you do not know what the fuck the meaning of
supply shock is, then I am with you on that point... but it sounds good, especially in terms of just throwing in some random phrase that helps any of us to appear that we know what the fuck we are talking about. hahahahaha
Tricky , but maybe very very very good for mining.
Maybe you need to 'splain ur lil selfie a wee bit moar better, philip?
#nohomoWhat you are implying is counter-intuitive. Are you saying that the anticipation of lower fees will help status quo miners to profit more because such status disincentivizes new entrance from coming into mining?
Seems to me, in and of itself, lower fees means that miners should be less happy, less willing to mine, more likely to create BIGGER operations, less likely to have smaller operations even try to compete for what fees are available (presuming most of the payoff for mining thereby comes from the current 6.25 BTC rewards rather than fees).
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