[mrb]

"Novogratz says he bought Ether when it was trading for about $1. Today it's worth over $48."

He is worth ~$2B. Assuming he put 0.2% (only $4M) in Ethereum during the crowd sale, 3 years later Ethereum appreciates 48× and represents 10% of his net worth. Of course he says he is also invested into Bitcoin, not only into Ethereum. Say he purchased only $2M of ETH, that's 3300 BTC as of the crowd sale's initial phase (22 Jul - 5 Aug 2014 when 1 BTC was ~600 USD and purchased 2000 ETH,) so he got 6.7M ETH which is 9% of the total ETH supply at genesis.

Edit: oops. He didn't say he purchased at the crowdsale (0.0005 BTC or 0.30 USD per ETH) but when it was 1 USD per ETH. So he would have needed to plunk 0.6% / $12M of his wealth into Ethereum. Still a tiny fraction.

[Pxtl]

I don't know much aboute Etherium but wouldn't he be owner of a substantial fraction of the blockchain at that point?

If so, he can't sell it without tanking the value so hard he'd never be able to get a decent fraction of its "worth".

[mrb]

Selling ~7M ETH is easy without affecting the markets too much. Kraken and Poloniex each do an average weekly volume of 3M ETH on the ETH/BTC pair: https://cryptowat.ch/poloniex/ethbtc/1w If he spread the sale over 10 weeks he would only increase their weekly volume by 10%.

That's not even talking about alternate ways to transfer his wealth out of ETH (eg. approaching his billionaire friend: "how about you sell me that mansion for 100k ETH?")

[thisisit]

It will affect the market. The weekly volume is irrelevant because that is gross sum of all trades taken place. What you are proposing is that he occupies nearly 23% of all "asks" on these exchanges which will be difficult to achieve.

And again off exchange block/bulk sales tend to go for lower than market price. They are rarely, if ever, executed at market price. So most probably he will have to offer 100k ETH, 4.8mil, for a ~4 mil mansion.

[mrb]

Sell also on the ETH/USD pair. Sell on a 3rd exchange. Lengthen the sale to 15 weeks. And he will be at 10% of all asks. 1 in 10 ETH sold being sold by him would hardly "tank" Ethereum as Pxtl was implying.

"4.8mil, for a ~4 mil mansion" I agree and that's totally reasonable. Only a 20% hit. Pxtl was saying something much more dramatic ("he'd never be able to get a decent fraction of its worth").

[hectorr510]

That's a problem for any substantial wealth in securities. Also why Wall Street stock and bond traders exist.

[clarkmoody]

> owner of a substantial fraction of the blockchain

No, the blockchain is the data structure that stores historical transactions.

He could be a large owner of the circulating currency, and he would face issues trying to sell a huge chunk of value all at once. The crypto markets are not very liquid compared with mature financial markets.