Quote from: gentlemand on December 19, 2019, 04:17:45 PM

Market cap is a really, really crappy metric but we seem to be stuck with it. It's purely the current price on an exchange multiplied by the number of all mined coins.

You could reduce Bitcoin's market cap by $50 billion by selling a few tens of millions of dollars worth of BTC in quick succession. The price is set by what's on the exchanges and there isn't a great deal on there to meet a giant sell.

Thats interesting , Because i always thought of it like this...

If there is 17M BTC in circulation and BTC price is $100,000USD Then market cap should be... 1.7 Trillion right?

Quote from: ChrisPop on December 19, 2019, 03:30:01 PM

I think you should learn how the markets work. What you have described above is an OTC (Over-The-Counter) transaction which is not on a public exchange, but offline or on an exchange like LocalBitcoins. The market cap of an asset is determined by the product of the last market price and the number of units in circulation. Moreover you're just transfering your asset to another person, you're not really taking away from MC. You can only do that if you have the financial power to change prices like making a huge market order of tens of million of dollars worth depending on the liquidity of the market and the participants.

So recently the market has lost 30-50B in market cap , So i'm assuming that institutions are buying BTC and then dumping it on the market whilst shorting it. If they made a bunch of Fiat Backed Crypto currencies (Through "QE") , Couldn't they just buy up the tokens , Long the price and then Sell the tokens and short it down again? Is that what is happening in the market right now?

Is there a better metric than Market Cap or is this the only metric that is used to measure the actual value of BTC ?