Let’s play a game. You are a whale. You have 1172 Bitcoin and you’ve been accumulating since 2012. You sold some 6-7 years ago to put a down payment on a modest house but you have kids now and want something nicer. You know you can take a loan against your stack but you’re not sure you want the trouble. It’s worth ~$123 million so you decide it’s time to reward yourself.
You buy the nicest waterfront home you can find. It’s $5 million. You decide you should also get your family second passports and that you want to buy a cattle farm in El Salvador - $3M all in. This is fun. New cars for your family, a boat, pay off your brothers house and your Dad’s legal bills from his DUI - $2 million. You’re really feeling fancy so you buy an extremely nice small plane used -$4 million and start taking flight lessons. You go skiing in Jackson Hole and Scuba Diving in Thailand all in the same week.
You’ve spent almost135 Bitcoin. A little more than 10% of your stack. You’ve bought everything you ever thought you might want to buy. The price runs up 20% in a month and you get a tight feeling in your chest thinking about all the generational wealth you just burned on silly luxuries. Time to stop spending.
Point is this: there’s about 450 Bitcoin a day coming from mining. The rest has to come from situations just like this (and smaller scale sellers). Let’s say there are 1000 whales in this position per year. If they have held this long they know Bitcoin is the most valuable thing they can own. They are not diversifying for stocks or silver coins. They only have so much real stuff they want to buy. At some point they are satisfied just hodling. They consider charity but decide not spending their coins is the most altruistic thing they can do. So the question is how long until the ETFs and treasuries suffocate the supply with their demand? And what happens when we enter price discovery.
