Trying to spend $1B with $100 bill at a time will take 10 million transactions. No one's going to accept large amount of cash without a credible source.
Each customer's funds aren't keep in individual wallets. It's pooled into a wallet controlled by the exchange.
Exchanges do put most of the assets in a cold storage. Binance has $155B in assets and handles $14B of trade volume in 24 hours so not all of it are in a cold storage.
The Big 3 (Samsung, Hynix, Micron) have been playing this game for 30+ years.
There used to be many more DRAM companies but most of them went bankrupt when DRAM was cheap because the big 3 will intentionally drive the price down to bankrupt the competition.
Now that they have a tri-opoly, they're milking the profits.
New competition will emerge but they don't have the capital of the big 3 so they likely won't survive the next DRAM winter.
You seem to be adding a lot of intentionality to price swings that seem expected when supply is relatively fixed while demand fluctuates. (Maybe you’re right, but it’s not the simpler explanation.)
All three of those companies were convicted in a price fixing scandal.
I feel like it's "obvious" that it's not particularly in the interests of these companies to increase production in the current environment. Except perhaps in the long term "we don't want to get nationalized" or something, I suppose.
Personally I do not think think that they are dragging their feet extremely intentionally, but I do think they are structurally incentivised to do so.
The supply isn't fixed. A new plant takes 3-5 years to build and cost tens of billions. DRAM companies don't always know where the demand will be when the next plant completes. 2 years ago there was too much supply so DRAM price hit rock bottom. So DRAM companies held back on investing in new plants so here we are now.
> The Big 3 (Samsung, Hynix, Micron) have been playing this game for 30+ years. There used to be many more DRAM companies but most of them went bankrupt when DRAM was cheap because the big 3 will intentionally drive the price down to bankrupt the competition. Now that they have a tri-opoly, they're milking the profits.
Exactly this. Unfortunately, this strategy has become standard practice in every area of the economy and it's a huge corrupting force.
OpenAI may be what IBM was to PC or Motorola was to mobile phones. PC and mobile phones certainly changed the world but IBM nor Motorola controlled that change.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/24/chinaf-f35-components-hong-k...
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