you think 1–4% is not enough to crash a market.. but here is the thing.. not all coins circulating are on the market.. only a small proportion of coins crculating are on market orders so a sudden increase of coins hitting the market supply would cause change
take for instance bitcoin, there are over 19m coins in circulation.. but there are not 19 m coins on the market. most market orders are 0.0X coins per order.. so if there was a sudden period where people were colluding to sell for instance 190,000(just 1%) coin the market orders would flood with sell orders compared to the norm.. now translate that to the numbers of ethereum circulation amount and market supply and see some scenarios of then dumping 1-4% of that circulation on the market supply.. you will soon see how it affects the markets
we seen it many times in the bitcoin market when the market orders were <1btc each. but then whales created walls and orders of just 1000 coin order lumps.. it had enough impact on the markets
This seems surprising to me. According to
https://bitinfocharts.com (today), the transaction volume is roughly 0.6% each
day. So I have a hard time wrapping my head around the proposition that transfers of 1%-4%, potentially over several days or months, would
crash Ethereum?
you linked stats about blockchain transactions. not market volume
also of the $10b estimated market volume of ethereum today majority of that is not sourced from staked ethereum holders but instead from a small amount of traders whom are bitcoin based and are arbitraging the markets in a loop pattern several times a second
so now put the math to work if you had an actual group of actual ethereum holders want to wealth transfer to then invest in bitcoin hardware. the numbers even over many days would effect the markets
also i know you want to imagine it as many people selling just 0.0x eth every second for weeks on end, but in reality knowing that over 2 million bitcoin asics need to be bought over say 6 months to keep the collusive gang in check/entertained that their plan can succeed. they would need to sell hundreds of thousands of eth periodically to then bulk order in batches the hardware
as for your next suggestion about having ethereum users lock their ethereum and try to convince physical hardware owners of bitcoin miners to disrupt bitcoin whereby they only get paid after the disruption... um no just no.. the asic owners whom will still have hardware after the attack wont shoot self in foot for a temporary payday if it meant long term harm to their long term investment they physically hold
this is why asic miners dont even go full on extreme accelerating the hashrate as they know pushing the difficulty too fast too soon would affect their rewards.. so dont think that asic miners would suddenly jump ship just to attack their own investments for such a temporary payday that "may" not happen(ethereum holders lie about payout)