And bitcoin hodlers are withdrawing from exchanges and cefi's, causing the supply to be at the lowest levels
I to this day don't understand the figure of how much supply is at exchanges. The numbers quoted are that there are 2 millions coins on exchanges.
The only way I can see to verify this is via all the cold and hot wallets of these exchanges. But the thing is that these wallets have to hold bitcoin that are already spoked for by the customers. We know FTX had 80k bitcoins that they didn't own but were on the books are being owned by customers. Even if FTX had a wallet with 80k bitcoins, FTX themselves wouldn't have been the owner of this. Would articles be claiming that 80k bitcoins are on exchanges? Technically all those coins were already spoken for. So if if someone show me a Binance wallet with 100k coins, this doesn't mean it has this many to sell.
If 2M are on exchanges waiting to be sold, how did the exchanges accumulate them? Did they buy them from the miners? I thought miners are reluctant to sell. I use an exchange that is local to my country. They don't do any shady lending and don't even have staking, and have some sort of backing like banks to protect deposits, so I feel good having some cash there and also bitcoin that I wait to withdraw until its a big enough move. (I don't want to have hundreds of UTXO's in my wallet) So I wonder how much bitcoin they actually own. Its a small business so its not like they have 1,000 bitcoin just waiting to be bought. And this is my point. I don't think there are exchanges out there that hold a shit ton of inventory as if they are valued are hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. How did the exchange get so rich to have this much inventory?
When you start a car dealership, you need to have cars on the lot to sell. But in order to do this, you have to get a loan from the bank. Perhaps the car manufacturer lets you borrow the car until it is sold so it can sit on your lot and costs you nothing. But somehow, if you're gonna have 30 cars on your lot, you need to have lots of money because I think most times, that car has to be purchased before you sell it to the customer. So how do exchanges have 2 million BTC in their possession that 100% belong to them so they can sell them?
So I honestly have no idea how this fits into all of these calculations. Of course the beautiful thing about bitcoin is that we can see where all the coins are. I've seen posts that show the biggest wallets and who own them, but its very sparse.