Did he actually cash out the full $2 billion or some portion of it? I cannot imagine wanting to put $2 billion in cash, but I could imaging cashing out some portion of it, maybe even $10million to $100 million.. if the guy might have had some specific purchase in mind.
afaik still he is hodling 60K BTC in his private wallet.
CCN reported that out of 80K BTC he just moved only 20K BTC to Galaxy Digital and is up for negotiation. All of those 60k came from his 2011 era wallet which is worth around 2.3 billion dollars, and moving such a massive position piecemeal is smarter.
So you are right, it is very unlikely for a Hodler being nocoiner so early stage, he is taking smart profit and bulk of the haul still Hodling...

Without knowing very many particulars, I wouldn’t presume it to be very “smart” to convert BTC into cash, unless there is some specific purchase in mind , especially that much even if it was only 1/4 of the whole total it’s still a lot to convert into cash when bitcoin is likely the better place to keep it.
Sure. The total is $9.6 billion and 1/4 of it would be $2.4 billion.
Another thing is that, it would be difficult to imagine that the guy would be getting excited right now about such stash since it’s likely that he has other coins and/or other wealth since there wouldn’t be too many situations in which such a guy would totally not touch that quantity of coins for 14 years absent having had lost access to them, so a more plausible explanation would be that he had some other decent quantity of coins and/or other wealth.
I do like one of the explanations that I heard, which was that he had come to realize that he needed to move his coins to more secure kinds of newer locations/wallets, which doesn’t negate the theory that he either had decent amounts of other bitcoins or that he had decently large amounts of other wealth that contributed towards his not being motivated to previously do anything with the 80k stack of bitcoin.