[arglebarnacle]

I'm inclined to agree that bitcoin markets are far less robust than gold markets on the whole because of the long history and entrenched social position of gold. I do think you underestimate the effect on gold markets if they were flooded with someone trying to offload $70b of gold.

That's about 7 times more gold than the entire contents of the U.S. gold reserve of 8,134 metric tons of gold. I really don't understand why you think it would be easy to sell that much gold at the prevailing price.

Some random googling turned up about $100b/day of all gold changing hands worldwide, so you would have to sell it over a long period of time to avoid moving the price. If you were to try to keep your trades under say 0.5% of daily volume, or $500M, this would be the equivalent of trying to sell 1/14,000 of the total market cap each day, which would work out to about $12.5M/day if applied to bitcoin's market cap. Selling 0.5% of the daily volume of bitcoin would be more like $36.7M/day.

The reason for the difference in those numbers is that bitcoin turns over more of its market cap daily than gold, proportionally. So dollar for dollar, of course $1B affects bitcoin more than gold, but in terms of turning over 1% of the market cap the data suggests this might actually be easier in bitcoin.