if they sold 380,000 btc for 3m, that would be $12 each. - must be a portion, or Im missing out on some seriously 'cheap coins'
Well it's unlikely that they will sell 380,000BTC for the full $173M they are worth. Someone will get cheap coins
Bitcoins are fungible, so even if they don't get dumped on the market, other coins that would have otherwise gone to the purchasers of the seized coins will get dumped on the market. Mathematically it is irrelevant if the result is selling pressure or lack of buying pressure. There is a downward price effect on the market either way.
+1 Same goes for 200,000 Gox BTCs to be liquidated.
And US goverment has now more than 500,000 BTC ?!? 30+k from Silk Road, 130+ personal Ullbricht stash plus 385k from this new drug dealer?
This. The amount of seized BTC that has to be auctioned and dumped on the market is so high... At least 400K (GOX+Silk+others), if not more, probably sold well under $250 for each coin, ready to be dumped on the market at any point. Truth is, even a relatively small 20K dump could totally crash BTC's value to $50/coin.
I could literally wake up one day and see BTC's value drop 50%. This will kill BTC's long term value, seriously scary stuff
In recent postings, you have become quite
intense in your FUD spreading. Your above post is filled with many unfounded assumptions. Coins would have to be sold for much below market rate before there would be an incentive to dump. I do NOT see whey the GOVT would sell BTC below market rate unless there is some kind of collusion.. .for example selling to some big bank that wants to bring down the BTC market.
I don't think that the government cares about or believes in a 'market rate' of bitcoin. The market is a manipulated game that we traders play against eachother and has meaning only to us. It is a very fragile illusion caused by hoarding and could not possibly withstand any signiifcant amount of selling. It would take a year to distribute all the those coins at market rate and doing so might cause a collapse and we're not even sure bitcoin will survive till then without some kind of technical glitch. The government is not a big bitcoin bull like you. The government does not want to speculate. What the government wants is cash, in their pocket, now. So if they can manage to sell all the coins and get a substantial amount of cash via large block trades under market rates offline, then they will do so and that would be great for them - a big success. They want a certainty, and a closed deal. I believe this is how the government operates will all kinds of seized assets, selling them at auctions for ridiculously low prices.
Yes. I agree with a lot of your logic and mostly that the govt has procedures in place to auction off assets and to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
This may or may NOT play out in that way with bitcoin, and really do you believe your own words regarding ridiculously low prices with a fairly liquid asset, such as bitcoin? Yes a $10 million dollar house may end up selling for $1million, but that is b/c the asset may NOT be very liquid.. and even its encumbrances unclear. Same with a $100k pink cadillac with 24 karate gold rims may sell for less than $10K.... the market value of bitcoin can be traced precisely on the day of the auction, and I doubt they are selling BTC for less than 90% of their retail value.. .. unless they were conducting some kind of secret auction.. which would NOT usually be the case.
The other possibility is that the govt contains various hidden agendas... and has NOTHING to do with my bullish or bearish but instead about perceiving BTC as a threat or a menace. Those kinds of perceptions by govt actors can cause problematic behaviors and uncertainty about how they are going to proceed, but we are NOT there.. yet regarding each of these various BTC stashes that are in Governmental hands.
I understand that this last motivation description that i have outlined remains contradictory and ambiguous, and really we do NOT know how various governmental entities feel about BTC. There is NO one size fits all b/c govt is all over the place regarding BTC.
