I appreciate you engaging in good faith and explaining what you meant, since wqaatwt thought you were engaging in "obvious hyperbole" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44475519 and I was suspecting you of trolling.
It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't had the opportunity to sell US$100k of Bitcoin, but I expect it would be closely comparable to US$100k of US$100 bills, except that I can't zap those across to fixedfloat.com to change to a different cryptocoin or a friend on another continent in 30 seconds. Maybe it wouldn't be prudent to entrust all US$100k to fixedfloat.com in one transaction; maybe you'd want to use a series of smaller transactions of different sizes to reduce the counterparty risk.
But this doesn't seem like an issue of Bitcoin being particularly illiquid. Rather, it seems like exchanges make commodities more liquid, an assertion I don't think is controversial. But most other assets, such as real estate, shares, and even precious metals, are vastly less liquid than Bitcoin in the absence of an exchange. Finding someone on the street willing to buy Bitcoin is enormously easier than finding someone on the street willing to buy your MSFT shares.
I appreciate you explaining your speculations about 51% attacks in more detail. I think the course of action you're outlining would still be very likely to cause chain forks as big exchanges decided whether or not they were going to accept blocks from the compromised mining pools. The world's investor class many be absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, but they're very interested in mitigating political risks that threaten permanent loss of their capital.
I do not think your description of the People's Republic of China is a "shithole countr[y] with no leverage" or that it was "pretend[ing] to pressure bitcoin miners". The majority of Bitcoin mining was happening there, the majority of the world's coal was and is burned there, the vast majority of the world's solar panels are made there, the vast majority of the world's other electronics are manufactured there, and virtually all Bitcoin mining hardware is still designed there. But when they prohibited mining, most of the world's Bitcoin mining activity stopped within a few weeks.
It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't had the opportunity to sell US$100k of Bitcoin, but I expect it would be closely comparable to US$100k of US$100 bills, except that I can't zap those across to fixedfloat.com to change to a different cryptocoin or a friend on another continent in 30 seconds. Maybe it wouldn't be prudent to entrust all US$100k to fixedfloat.com in one transaction; maybe you'd want to use a series of smaller transactions of different sizes to reduce the counterparty risk.
But this doesn't seem like an issue of Bitcoin being particularly illiquid. Rather, it seems like exchanges make commodities more liquid, an assertion I don't think is controversial. But most other assets, such as real estate, shares, and even precious metals, are vastly less liquid than Bitcoin in the absence of an exchange. Finding someone on the street willing to buy Bitcoin is enormously easier than finding someone on the street willing to buy your MSFT shares.
I appreciate you explaining your speculations about 51% attacks in more detail. I think the course of action you're outlining would still be very likely to cause chain forks as big exchanges decided whether or not they were going to accept blocks from the compromised mining pools. The world's investor class many be absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, but they're very interested in mitigating political risks that threaten permanent loss of their capital.
I do not think your description of the People's Republic of China is a "shithole countr[y] with no leverage" or that it was "pretend[ing] to pressure bitcoin miners". The majority of Bitcoin mining was happening there, the majority of the world's coal was and is burned there, the vast majority of the world's solar panels are made there, the vast majority of the world's other electronics are manufactured there, and virtually all Bitcoin mining hardware is still designed there. But when they prohibited mining, most of the world's Bitcoin mining activity stopped within a few weeks.