Could there be a light at the end of the tunnel?

This past week it was revealed that the trustee for the Mt. Gox bankruptcy case had been selling bitcoin and bitcoin cash holdings to raise funds for defrauded investors.

The amount sold thus far was said to be roughly 40,000 bitcoins, which was worth just over $400 million. ($405 million to be exact)

That dollar amount is important and I will touch on that a little more later on.

How it was done:

For now, here is chart put together by a user on Reddit detailing the sells made by the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee from the roughly 200,000 bitcoins they were able to recover:

(Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/82ryay/ive_mapped_the_exact_time_when_money_was/)

As you can see, in many cases the selling by the trustee happened just before large drops in the price of bitcoin.

One might question how the selling of 6k-8k bitcoins, which is less than 1% of the trading float, could cause the entire market to tank...

The problem appears to be that they were sold all at once and they were sold on a single exchange, which would have been able to knock prices down on that exchange and cause selling pressure across other exchanges, triggering stop losses etc.

What is more, the trustee has "only " sold about 40,000. Which means he still has another 165,000 bitcoins that could possibly be dumped as well.

This fear of more dumping is part of what helped drive prices to those lows seen the last few days.

Remember that part about the amount sold thus far totaling roughly $405 million?

Here is why that is significant...

According to the bankruptcy filing, Mt Gox creditors were owed roughly $391 million USD.

(Source: https://qz.com/1003609/bitcoins-soaring-price-means-mt-gox-could-pay-its-debts-and-drw-wants-to-help/)

Which means, it is very possible that the amount of $405 million that has already been sold would be more than enough to cover the USD portion that was owed to creditors.

What's more, there hasn't been any more selling from the bankruptcy trustee for over a month with the last sell taking place on February 5th.

Which means... it is possible that no more bitcoin will be dumped by the trustee any time soon.

It also appears I might not be the only one who thinks that...

Check out the comment from Tom Lee at the 4:18 mark on Fast Money last night.

It appears he is also hearing that the selling from the trustee might mostly be over, if not already over.

I don't know about you, but that is welcome news to me.

Stay informed my friends.

Follow me: @jrcornel