How Much Money Do You Need to Move the Bitcoin Market?

Whale Science 🐋

I did a quick estimation to figure out what kind of investment you’d need to be able to move the Bitcoin market in the short term, in a particular direction.

I looked at Gdax trading data which handled about 2.98% of all BTC trading volume on February 26th, 2018.

Source: Coinmarkercap.com

On February 26, between 11: 54 PM PST and 11:55 PM PST, the total volume traded on Gdax was 65 Bitcoins which was worth around $686,440 USD at the time. This resulted in a .557% increase in the price of Bitcoin.

I picked this particular minute for my example because it had visibly higher trading volume compared to the minutes before it.(See image below).

We can now estimate that the total volume of Bitcoins traded in ALL markets during that 1-minute was about 2181 Bitcoins (~23 million USD worth) from the fact 65 Bitcoins traded on Gdax represented 2.98% of all Bitcoin trade volume in the world.

The actual total volume should be lower since it is unlikely that all markets are completely efficient and received the same magnitude of above average volume like Gdax did during that 1-minute in question — But we will continue with this estimation for simplicity.