Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xapata 3101 days ago
How much did the price change from the first coin you sold to the last?
3 comments

take a look at any bitcoin price chart and draw out 3 days? if you're thinking that 266k/day dump is going to move the market, it's not.
There's not a single market. The volume at a particular exchange matters. Note the disparity Coinbase had recently.
i just checked 3 relatively legitimate bitcoin exchanges (kraken, gdax, bitstamp). you could put a 300k sell order on any of them and have less than 0.5% of slippage, which is much less than regular trading volatility. plus if you really wanted to, you could spread your trades among multiple exchanges and execute them simultaneously for even lower slippage.
Not as disasterous as I thought, but still not great. Worse, when you most want to sell is when others do too, so the liquidity may change.

How'd you confirm that estimate, by making a trade?

you don't. how most exchanges work is that when selling, you can place a limit order (sell at that price or higher), or a market order (sell at whatever price). if you want certainty, you use limit. if you want to make a trade now, you use market.
Ah, so that 0.5% was just a wild guess. Others have chimed in that they've sold a bunch in one day and been fine, but ... there's always folks that want to pump the price, so I'm not sure what to believe.
We've happily changed >$500k per day 10 days in a row (all sales) with no slippage - we were doing market orders for all of them. Had no issues.
It actually went up some. This was in June. Market volatility was still quite high back then.