This is an oft-repeated line that is entirely false. Ben & Jerry's ice cream spent decades turning down good business deals to stay true to their ideals. The Chicago Cubs notoriously refused to play night baseball games at home for decades after it became popular, and were even sued by shareholders to try to force them to install lights at Wrigley. The Court ruled that management of the Cubs could choose to ignore short-term profits from night baseball if it thought that the franchise was best served by keeping the traditional purity of the game.[1] (Of course, the Cubs ultimately relented, but maybe that's why they haven't won the World Series). Craiglist, to the extreme consternation of its investors, has prioritized a certain long-term vision of the service over lots of short-term profits.
Even publicly-traded companies can choose to pursue long-term goals over short-term profit. Autodesk is rumored to be setting up a subsidiary that blends profit and non-profit motives, and plenty of companies have done other acts that are not in their short-term interests.
[1] Shlensky v. Wrigley, 95 Ill. App. 2d 173 (1968).
> Ben & Jerry's ice cream spent decades turning down good business deals to stay true to their ideals
If, instead of succeeding, Ben & Jerry's had joined the ranks of the many other failed food retailers wouldn't the corporate officers have faced the potential of shareholder lawsuits for having blatantly "turning down good business deals" along the way?
well they can pursue long term profits. I think trying to monetize every possible interaction although a strategy, is one that is voluntary not required for survival
Actually no, that isn't the definition. You have it almost completely backwards in fact. The most successful companies focus on creating long term value.
See: Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Facebook, Costco, Procter & Gamble (raising dividends every year for 55 straight years, try that with short term thinking) and a very long list of other companies
That is awesome.
If you follow the chain of transactions from 12RYJjGk22NiNbhTHffCrCso4XgVzet5Eh (biggest wallet). It all ended up in a MtGox account...
For such large amounts, you can't simply calculate the number of bitcoins * price per bitcoin, since the act of selling such large amounts would itself affect the price.
This is true, of course (and a pet peeve of mine when people naively calculate e.g. how much it would cost to replace all coal-fired power plants in the world with solar). However, these days MtGox's average daily volume is in the $1m range. I think you could sell $1m BTC over a couple of weeks without anyone even noticing.
Same applies to a lot of wealthy people in shares. If they sold all their shares, they'd make the share price plummet and they wouldn't get anywhere as much as you initially quoted.
As volume picks up (market depth has nearly tripled in 2 months) this is a lesser problem.
No, we know that there is some fuzzy nebulous number of bitcoin millionaires which may be centered around 25 - more based on how many have coins split across many addresses, and less based on the known fact that many earlier miners didn't store their coins safely (because it was just an interesting crypto prototype they were playing with) and many tens of thousands of coins have been lost. (That Polish exchange running on Amazon without backups took out, IIRC, something like 10k all on its own.)
