If the market can't clear, the price will drop until it does. Saying bitcoin has reached a certain price carries with it the implication that the market is clearing at the price, i.e. that people are indeed buying.
Million-USD transactions already occur in BTC all the time.
You can't really know that except for a few publicized ones. Those "transactions" you see are simply transfers. They "could" be a transfer to someone in exchange for USD. Or, as they are in almost all cases, they are transfers from one wallet to another both owned by the same person or exchanges that are holding large amounts of BTC moving money around internally as well.
To support your argument, according to this[0] the largest recent transaction about 3 hours ago was almost 25 million USD. 5 other transactions also exceeded 1 million USD in the last hour or so.
I could be wrong, but I read somewhere that almost all of those large transactions are inter or intra exchange movements simply moving money around into different wallets. Also, they only indicate a transfer, it seems very unlikely that anyone has cashed out $25m all at once with bitcoin.
There's a VR webapp that was shared recently that shows live btc transactions. Just thought i'd share that for the 10 minutes I watched it the other day I saw numerous 10M+ transactions
Those are transfers, not necessarily transactions. No one probably traded 10m in bitcoin for USD. If an exchange transfers btc from one wallet to another for holding, it will show up on the transactions list.
I'm in the same boat. CPU-mined somewhere between 1.5 and 2 BTC back in 2010 or 2011, and lost the wallet years ago. I wonder how much BTC has been lost to similar mistakes, but I guess there's no way to know or even estimate, right?
"parked"? No, since no real money or asset is held to back up bitcoin. It could go to $100 million tomorrow based on a few transactions, but that wouldn't be indicative of what anyone else will be able to get for it.
Money supplies are constantly inflating, every financial instrument can be looked at as a form of money, and quite a few of them are actually considered to be money, such as treasuries and traveler's cheques. According to Wikipedia, the broadest measure of money supply currently in use was 10.5 trillion, in 2013.
That cryptocurrencies are not currently considered to be money by the world economic order, it goes into a much broader range of financial assets like stocks and bonds. The S&P 500 market size reached 19.6 trillion USD in 2016
Bitcoin has a lot of room to grow before it even comes close to playing in that league. Everybody on HN should be buying crypto right now, the upside is that huge.
Except it isn't parked in any way. The money goes from the hands of the optimistic buyers into the hands of those who decided to cash out just now. The only asset "backing" Bitcoin is the people willing to buy it.