[tyxodiwktis]

I worked in the trading dept of a large hedge fund and this could easily be them, or someone like them. They regularly traded several billion in bonds, currencies and short rates each day and just aren't used to those trades posting publicly (outside the exchange). I can see them seeing this Twitter thread, scratching their head and wondering, "what's the big deal?"

[JackFr]

In the fixed income, currency and money markets a billion dollars is not a lot of money -- and yet a billion dollars IS ALWAYS a lot of money.

I used to work on the repo desk of a primary dealer. One role of the repo desk is that it finances the banks position. We might hold $50 billion of bonds, but $40 billion of that is borrowed with the bonds as collateral.

One day because someone had keyed in a start of day position wrong -- off by a billion dollars -- 20 minutes before the FedWire closed for the day, I got to watch 2 traders get on the phones and borrow a billion dollars in 20 minutes, without letting our counterparties know that we were kind of desperate.

Had they failed, the bank would have had to go the the Fed, discount window and borrow $1 billion overnight at the discount rate (which would have been substantially more than we were paying in the repo market.) Additionally, it likely would have triggered process audits and incident reports which would have been far worse than the interest.

[thaumasiotes]

> Had they failed, the bank would have had to go the the Fed, discount window and borrow $1 billion overnight at the discount rate (which would have been substantially more than we were paying in the repo market.) Additionally, it likely would have triggered process audits and incident reports which would have been far worse than the interest.

> because someone had keyed in a start of day position wrong

I know basically nothing about this area, but I'm curious why what appears to be a mistake in data entry needs to be fixed by actually borrowing additional money, as opposed to issuing a correction. If you have the amount of money you're supposed to have, why is it so dire that you published a typo?

[JackFr]

We had $X billion dollars in bonds we needed to finance, that day. The traders thought they had to finance $X-1 billion dollars.

We had good collateral to borrow the the money, but it was the money we needed.

The legal-books-and-records system gave us the right starting number. The transferring it to the trading-book-dashboard was a manual process. So they traded all day based on the wrong number. No one noticed until operations called the desk with about a half hour left in the trading day to say “Do you guys realize you’re short a billion?” Ten minutes to figure out what went wrong. The clerk who keyed in the wrong number didn’t get dinged that badly, cause 8-9 people saw both numbers and no one else noticed.

[ineedasername]

I think the big deal compared to those normal hedge fund trades would have to do with relative volume. Trading in bonds etc., a billion is relatively small and unlikely to move markets very much. In Bitcoin, a billion is a bigger deal, representing a larger chunk of the whole, and buying or selling that much has a much greater potential to move the market.

[homologate]

There are 17 964 063 bitcoin[0] in circulation which means that this transaction accounts for 0,5261% of all Bitcoin. I wonder how common transactions that account for one half a percent of total markets are.

[0] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/total-bitcoins

[parsimo2010]

There is how many have been mined, and are an upper bound of that many bitcoin in circulation. Some of it is stuck with forgotten addresses and passwords, so some are just gone- I think bitcoin won't be used by the time we have enough computing power to track down dead addresses and crack the passwords.

Also, the short term price sensitivity of bitcoin is related to the depth of the order book and not the total market cap of coins. Someone placing a sell order at market rates for 94k bitcoin would wipe out the order books and the price would go way down, and take quite a while to recover. To sell 94k bitcoin without nuking the price they will have to sell at a slow trickle.