What if the Winklevoss twins would sell all their bitcoins?

[DubMatrix]

So, what would happen if the Winklevoss twins would sell all their bitcoins (or a big chunk of it)? Would the price go down quickly or would others just buy the coins in the hope it will rise even more?

[joshmontford]

from what i was reading, if someone puts huge numbers of bitcoin out there, it would crash the market. people will start selling it too in fear of what can happen and bam, bitcoin is spinning down fast

[eBet$coin]

they have like 1% of the total supply, so yeas it would go down and then going back again. They are not stupid, they wont sell. Why sell now when you can get 5 billions in 2 years ?

[Bitcoin_Investor]

If a major Wall Street firm or a Billionaire acquires the Winklevoss's holdings I think it would be viewed very positively by the financial markets.

   

[Tszunami98]

from what i was reading, if someone puts huge numbers of bitcoin out there, it would crash the market. people will start selling it too in fear of what can happen and bam, bitcoin is spinning down fast

Maybe if Satoshi himself would put his 1 milion btc on the market that would happen. But remember when people are selling there is someone who is buyng..so bitcoin will switch from weak hands to stronger hands.
Anyway i dont think this is a real issue...

[RealJoshuar]

The markets would crash, not absolutely but definitely back down to the lower thousands range. I already sold a few btc a few days ago, as this bubble is based on absolutely nothing aside from speculation, even the 2013 bubble has some basis towards it(willy bot), and this is going to crash hard eventually

[Yakamoto]

So, what would happen if the Winklevoss twins would sell all their bitcoins (or a big chunk of it)? Would the price go down quickly or would others just buy the coins in the hope it will rise even more?

Well, if they dramatically open up the supply then they could do something like that, sure. A lot of Bitcoin's value is coming from a heavy restriction of the overall supply and that's causing the price to be shooting up dramatically as we observe it on the various exchanges. Should such a restriction be lifted, you're now looking at a lot more value flooding into the marketplace and opening up everything for the value to go down again. However, it would only crash if they dump their (assumedly) large holdings. If they trickle it back into the market, there will be no crash. That's almost certain.

[Halcyon Days]

They have around 100,000 coins, which equals $1,645,280,000 at the current price of $16,452.80.
Today's trading volume is $17,818,300,000 which is 10x the amount the twins are holding.

Even though it will have some impact on the market, I do not think, that it will crash the market in the long run. It will rather swallow it deliciously.

[Betwrong]

So, what would happen if the Winklevoss twins would sell all their bitcoins (or a big chunk of it)? Would the price go down quickly or would others just buy the coins in the hope it will rise even more?

I don't know exactly what part of the total supply they have, some say it's 1%, and if that's true that's a lot, but that much to be able to change the situation radically. Most likely if they sold all their coins the increasing demand would eat them pretty quickly. But of course they are not so stupid to do such a thing.

[mahibul49]

no need to be worry!bitcoin price will go up after some correction

[Iranus]

In theory, the price would not drop that significantly at this point, because the current volume is at many billions (about 17 billion dollars in the past 24 hours).

Also, they can't simply press a button and sell them all.  It would take a lot of OTC trading and work over a long period of time which would spread it out, so really it would have even less effect on the market than that.

The futures trading could make whales like that have more of an effect if they consciously decide to short it, but still it would take quite a lot to shift BTC at this point.

[radwic]

from what i was reading, if someone puts huge numbers of bitcoin out there, it would crash the market. people will start selling it too in fear of what can happen and bam, bitcoin is spinning down fast

But then people like me that have been waiting to buy an entire 1 BTC will buy in, thus increasing the market value again because the supply will catch up to the demand (albeit on a small degree)

[RealJoshuar]

In theory, the price would not drop that significantly at this point, because the current volume is at many billions (about 17 billion dollars in the past 24 hours).

Also, they can't simply press a button and sell them all.  It would take a lot of OTC trading and work over a long period of time which would spread it out, so really it would have even less effect on the market than that.

The futures trading could make whales like that have more of an effect if they consciously decide to short it, but still it would take quite a lot to shift BTC at this point.

The market in 2013 dropped several billions

[ahmedjamal1998]

Well according to the plain rules of crypto currency trading and since they own kind of a lot of bitcoins, if they decide to sell the price will surely dip. Might even be a big dip. But the thing is, every single person will see this as an opportunity to buy at a lower price and profit from it later on. And that's actually what a lot of people are waiting and hoping for. They're waiting for btc to dip to about 10k or something and literally everyone I know is willing to buy at that price.

That's because across the years, btc told us a very simple note. If a price is reached once, it will get back to it once again eventually no matter what. Not convinced ? Check what happened in September and October. That's exactly what I'm talking about. And if talk about the price in general and that can be considered as the "max" price, I no longer have an answer.

In 2015, our far and look-up-to goal was to see btc at $1000. It was for less than $300 at that time. And when someone said that it will get above 1k a lot of people called them stupid and "live in your own dreams". Now look at the numbers and decide. That's what actually made me think of holding up for a longer time than I usually do. And that's why I bought a hardware wallet. To be safe and to slow down the selling process. Try doing the same thing and holding for at least 8 months or something.

[European Central Bank]

if they sold all at once if exchange order books were unchanged the price would probably go to zero. exchange order books are never fixed so fiat would pour in to meet it. there may not be enough money ready to avoid a vast hit, but it would be taken as huge opportunity at least with the current mindset.

[DubMatrix]

Seems like the question is also asked elsewhere https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/08/1325229/about-40-percent-of-bitcoin-is-held-by-1000-users-if-a-few-of-them-want-to-sell-that-could-tank-values

[btcjoin14]

So, what would happen if the Winklevoss twins would sell all their bitcoins (or a big chunk of it)? Would the price go down quickly or would others just buy the coins in the hope it will rise even more?

A bunch of coins get traded everyday. Them dumping their coins will only effect the market for a week or so then it would go back to normal.

[PMmesexycoins]

If they trade it for other crypto, it would probably just inflate the market further, but if they try to trade for fiat, then it should crash the market.

People with that much stand to become some sort of crypto monarchs by just keeping the crypto at this point. Assuming it just keeps growing and growing.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

they have like 1% of the total supply, so yeas it would go down and then going back again. They are not stupid, they wont sell. Why sell now when you can get 5 billions in 2 years ?

Holy crap, do they actually own that much?  That's freaking incredible.

I would assume they'll sell at some point; they're not stupid people by any means, and investors usually take their profits eventually--and MAN, did they ever profit!  Bitcoin isn't listed in any financial columns in newspapers (yet), but I'm assuming it's outperformed every other asset and even index of assets for the past 2 years at least.  It's definitely beat precious metals and the S&P 500.  But yeah, if they sell all at once, which I don't believe they're dumb enough to do unless there comes some bitcoin-destroying news, the market will crash.  No one is stupid to sell everything all at once and crash all their profit, too.  That would be crazy, and they have evinced no form of insanity yet.

[patt0]

they have like 1% of the total supply, so yeas it would go down and then going back again. They are not stupid, they wont sell. Why sell now when you can get 5 billions in 2 years ?

They had 1% when they bought the coins. More coins have been mined then, so they don't have that anymore, unless they've kept buying.
As for the OP question, I think that if any of those big players sold their coins they would crash the market, because we have a lot of weak bitcoin holders, that would panic if the market started moving down. I don't think there is any reason for those whales to do that, specially the twins, since they want to launch ETFs, so why would they risk crashing the market?