One of the most profoundly dumb comments I have read here.

It takes 3 seconds to look up the 24h volume for BTC and it is $9.6 Billion

No matter how dumb it is, in general, it is always better to just respond with the answer and not comment on the comment itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

Might sound dumb, but there are still places in the world where having $400k worth of BTC != $400k in the bank.

Plenty of banks will freeze your bank account instantly.

And good luck convincing them that you stumbled upon $400k by solving a puzzle - only takes one suspicious fraud/risk manager to conclude that there’s a higher chance of fraud than legitimacy.

(But you are right, no problem to find someone to pay you the market price. That’s a done deal in seconds)

Examples of such places? I did KYC/AML with multiple European banks when withdrawing crypto, and while they checked thoroughly, there were never any issues.

From personal experience, a bunch of Norwegian banks. I’ve had transactions that are equivalent to $5k trigger such events. And you get grilled.

You don't need to sell it all at once.

Dont be mean

The current market easily eats up 6.6 BTC without much movement. Are you looking at a smaller pool like Canada exclusively. Look at the Euro or USD markets. They are much much deeper.

24h Volume: $9,800,480,342

Liquidity of less than a million worth of BTC hasn't been a problem for a long time

Bitcoin is more than liquid enough to offload a half dozen without issue.

The market is liquid enough to absorb a sale for $400K.

400k I think is no problem. I heard of someone with 10,000 BTC having some serious trouble finding a buyer though.

I can't imagine that getting that filled OTC reasonably close to the mark would be serious trouble. Germany managed to sell 50,000 BTC without much trouble a few months ago.

Then again, it may be serious trouble if you have serious issues explaining the source.

MtGox also sold 60,000 BTC.

That’s 5% of the daily trade volume. Shouldn’t be an issue.

Except trade in bitcoin is fee-free and mostly regulation-free, so there is a lot of wash trading.

1. Create Coinbase account

2. Deposit bitcoin

3. Market order sell all

4. Withdraw USD

Step 2.5 Argue with Coinbase about if you're a legitimate owner or not

Step 2.6 Coinbase blocks your account citing "Suspicious activity"

Step 2.7 Sign up to three other exchanges, split the loot across them

Step 5 Argue with the bank about the source of funds

Step 6 Argue with tax agency that you'll fill out your taxes correctly

Kraken would cause no problems for 2.5-2.7

Taxing this is super simple, you just mark as "other" - akin to finding money on the ground.

Arguing with bank - which specific bank would cause problems here?

Even if this is true (and I suspect it's exaggerated), I'd be happy to go through this trivial amount of hassle for $400K.

For something like $10k-20k I bet you could get someone (good lawyer?) to solve those problems for you, leaving you with $399-398k. Worth the deal, I think.

The math doesn't check out

Hence the need for a really good lawyer

Still better than depositing $400K of cash in a US bank.

If you have all of your ducks in a row this is actually much easier than it sounds.