many of the issues/questions that are being raised have previously been discussed to death in earlier threads...
Not surprising. There is good reason to.
Reggie designed the software with institutional investors in mind... he was very clear that the only time us small fish...
As I said earlier, these are not 'institutional markets'. Blockchains are not regulated stockmarkets and they don't make any distinction between an incidental retail trader and an institutional one. They, and the products traded in them, will operate whatever way we as creators, investors, users and traders consensually deem them to optimally work.
Ok, lets look at it another way. Reggie is trying to 'paint' this picture of an institutional market and a non-institutional one and that "us small fish" (as Ant1Tr0ll so quaintly puts it) had a chance to get in on some 'members only' elite asset. But that's just stock-market mumbo-jumbo for what is no more than 1 wallet holder's arbitrary discernment.
Here's what the real picture looks like:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FdWPn0ab.png&t=665&c=ZyuTvT-MDCaaVg)
If you really need the mechanics of the situation spelled out, then lets take RM out of the equation and just do an accounting analysis on the asset:
• Wallet A holds 98 million tokens and trades in private
• Wallet(s) B hold 2 million tokens and trade in public
Market B trades openly, up to a value of 0.7 VERI per Ether.
The holder of wallet A negotiates 20 sales of 500,000 tokens each at a 75% discount on the "Market B" token-to-coin exchange rate.
So lets take stock. I'll be generous and use the loosest possible definition of "in circulation" as to mean only the subset of the blockchain supply which has been traded. So we now have a 12 million token supply at the publicly traded price = 8.4 Million Ether marketcap. At that point the market will likely short the asset back down by, say a 50% retrace in marketcap due to the sudden jump in supply which would still leave the cap at a 300% growth but the token-to-coin ratio now trading at 0.35.
So who gained and who lost from this movement?
•
Wallet A held 98 million tokens valued at 0.7 ETH. It now holds 88 Million valued at 0.35, but Wallet A didn't need a price hike, it needed a liquidity hike and got it.
• the
OTC buyers of Wallet A's supply are still at a 100% gain "on paper"
•
Wallets B didn't need a liquidity hike but needed a price hike. Instead they got a marketcap hike paid for with a 50% loss on their holdings.
Just before anyone jumps on me again, it isn't that OTC private trades are a problem - that goes on in all assets. It's the double standard of making sales out of a supply that doesn't count towards reported marketcap. I realise that happens in equity when companies "issue new shares" but if you do that in decentralised token markets it just looks like misleading the market.
I'm sure I'll get another slap down from Reggie at some point when he gets a chance to get his oar in. It will be an honour as I respect him and have always enjoyed his commentaries - on Max keiser, you name it.
All the same, I thought quite a lot about this and keep coming to the same conclusion so I post my opinions in good faith. These are evolving, decentralised markets and we need to shape their conventions ourselves and according to our prevailing values.