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by snapcaster 701 days ago
Is that true? I don't doubt it but can you describe what that would look like in practice?
1 comments

Sure, any currency can experience a liquidity crunch. This is a macroeconomic phenomenon. The main purpose of a central bank's massive currency reserves are to provide liquidity in the event of a liquidity crunch.

For simplicity imagine that there are just a few institutions that hold the majority of Bitcoin. Now imagine all of them are incredibly over leveraged on risky financial assets that suddenly all go to zero. Each of these institutions needs to suddenly pay off massive debts that they can't afford, and they start to spend their full Bitcoin reserves to pay. Investors notice the institutions are going belly up and simultaneously try and withdraw all their bitcoin deposits. There simply aren't enough Bitcoins to go around and the financial institutions holding bitcoin collapse.

When this happens in normal currency markets, the Federal Reserve steps in and provides a bail out of temporary liquidity to cover some of the debts involved for long enough to calm down investors so that everyone isn't simultaneously trying to cover massive debts with the same insufficient supply of currency. This is an absolutely critical part of modern macroeconomic stability. Every liquidity crisis that has happened would have been massively worse if not for this "monetary stimulus."