Exactly! It truly is impossible to know who is going to sell and when. If the dynamic shifts very quickly, the would be sellers might very well turn into the army. I have been disappointed that in the past, any attempt to organize a movement and get people to take coins off exchanges in order to expose any cracks in true ownership have not resulted in any real pump.
What makes me giddy though is that up till now in history, there has been no real way to corner any market. Paper markets for precious metals have always acted like a pressure release valve. Its true that the bitcoin futures is in a way masking whatever buying interest there might be, but shortage of coins will hopefully one day become a very real thing. True scarcity of a bearer asset has never been possible until now.
I'm so curious about how exchanges manage their inventory. Since I now understand that the 2 million coins quoted as being on exchanges actually refers to coins in people's accounts, its not sufficient enough of an answer for me that I am simply trading against another person when I buy bitcoin. Perhaps on exchanges like FTX when it was alive, or Binance, but most exchanges I've dealt with I assume are simply wholesalers. They have some inventory like a store, but when a hot item sells out, they need to wait until they get more stock. So if these exchanges run out, will they stop selling bitcoin? Or will they quote a higher price and hope you don't try to withdraw?
I am now using a new source for KYC free bitcoin. Its non-custodial, which means when you buy, you need to enter an address to receive your coins. About twice a day, they do batched transactions. I can see my coins on-chain in the batched transaction, and it appears there are usually 30-50 other recipients, and the totals sometimes approach 1 bitcoin. So if we consider in 1 day, 2 bitcoins are purchased, this certainly isn't huge in terms of the 900 mined every day, but this is a very small operation. These coins are going right to people's wallets, and hence, the army is active!
But what I really want to know is where do these coins come from? How much is the wholesale price for this exchange, and can they ever run out of inventory? Imagine the operation holds 10 BTC of their own. Its a huge price risk for them if it plummets and they paid 29k per coin, and in a day its only selling for 25k per coin. But they need to own it or else how could they transfer it out? Maybe they have a deal with a bitcoin miner, and maybe the coins come right from the miner and this operation is simply the middle-man taking a cut with never actually holding any inventory, kind of like a drop shipping company. The miner is probably not running out of coins any time soon, and they clearly always produce more, so shit... maybe I'm right. But this whole thing fascinates me.
I think its important to know this because if we are all waiting for the proposed green God candle one day, it would be good to know all the mechanisms of how this all work. We know FTX said they had 80k coins in client accounts, but held nothing. Binance right now is apparently selling Bitcoin, but CZ denied it. All of these will be factors for what happens when liquidity becomes a real thing. If a daily candle is 10k, lets say from 30k to 40k, how will this affect all the exchanges? What will be the price discrepancies between exchanges? Will people be able to withdraw? I read stories all the time from the gold bugs about how some dealers run out of 10oz bars and stuff like this, but you can't really verify any of this. But with bitcoin, you either have your UTXO or you don't. Its clear as day, and how exchanges will function is something I'm very eager to see.
God, I wish someone told me. I heard of it of course, and even thought why not just throw 1k at it and own 10 coins, but buying at the time was difficult I think. It really is a shame I didn't have any contacts. I might have lost it all by now, but I can't tell you how I'm hurting from buying silver for months, and hence trying to do something to protect my purchasing power, but completely missing the one thing that would have changed my life.
This is the one thing we disagree on. I know you have your leveraged long on right now, but honestly, if we take a dive down to 10k very quickly, I will be giddy with excitement. I know that over the next few months, I will keep adding to my positions, so if we fall sooner rather than later, it will mean I get to accumulate more. A test of 16k would be wonderful, and a move down to 10k would be even better. And honestly, even a return to 4k, which I highly doubt, wouldn't cause me panic. Imagine the tens of thousands of people who want to buy 10k or 5k bitcoin. There simply wouldn't be enough I don't think and the only way to get these good prices will be with resting limit orders.
![BTCUSD-BITFINEX[M] Weekly #2 2023-06-14 21_33_39.095.png](/et/data/attachments/299/299204-dbe796d288f666bd2bb8507ea5f3eaa3.jpg?hash=2-eW0oj2Zr)
