[beala]

Calling the bounty in the headline ~$6,000 is disingenuous, too, because dumping the BTC into the market would drop the price significantly.

4 upvotes and no one actually bothered to check. Good job, Internet. Quite disingenuous.

I imported the data from Mt. Gox (main bitcoin exchange) into a spread sheet and calculated how much his $8500 BTC is worth if he sold it all right now: $5671.23

[jedsmith]

It sounds suspiciously like you're accusing me of something. The statement after the word "because" in your quote kind of matters to the original sentiment, and you happily ignored it in your calculations. It doesn't take a rocket economist to do:

    Quantity x Spot Price = "Value"

However, it also doesn't take a rocket economist to figure out that value there is meaningless, since (a) you're using the spot price, (b) the quantity of BTC to move is greater than the daily volume of the entire market, and (c) attempting a move of this size would probably devalue BTC significantly. You have a value, but there's no way that can be its value currently, because you'd have to spread the transactions out over time -- making the value a different number.

If someone owned $5 trillion of gold, do you think they'd be able to successfully move it all for $5 trillion? That's why the value is meaningless. You're talking about an exorbitant figure of money which the BitCoin market can't support.

[beala]

No, I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not using the spot price. I'm using the values that people are actually selling for. If you put in a sell order with a minimum price of something like $0.60, the orders would go through immediately, and you'd get $5600 in your Mt. Gox account. Once again, you've failed to actually fact check your post. The daily volume of Mt. Gox is routinely 10,000-15,000. Yes, you would bring the price down about $0.10 in a matter of minutes and possibly trigger a sell off, but that wouldn't make a difference to you if you just wanted your $5600.

EDIT: Here's the actual spreadsheet if you'd like to double check my work: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AomGTgVWFh3WdDAxQ01...

Here's where I got the data on mygox: http://mtgox.com/trade/history

[jedsmith]

It's amusing how you went from "you're misunderstanding me," admitting that there might have been a mistake, to "you failed to fact check". I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong, be educated by others, and learn from my mistakes because it does appear that I misunderstood you; when you're an abrasive shit, though, I'm not really inclined to give you the time of day. I gave you one pass to communicate like a reasonable human being, because you're obviously aware of interesting information that I'd like to know, but you are now a waste of my time.

I'm really tired of bending over backwards to be nice to people on HN. A few threads of arrogant snark like this in the last 24 hours, and I'm really stretching thin on patience. Now I see what the long-term users are on about.

[beala]

Point taken, jed smith. I do apologize for being so abrasive. I hope this doesn't turn you off from hacker news, as your patience is something I could afford to learn more about.