Bitcoin Forum

Just wanted to get thoughts and do sort of a survey..

In your opinion, who fits the description Bitcoin Whale? Who's eligible to be called a mini whale?

Responses appreciated :)

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Mega early adopters or already fiat millonaires with 100000+ BTC can move markets at will, specially under cooperation. They can rig the market if they all act in sync, thats why we need price crashes, to scare all those lucky individuals holding too much money and spread out the wealth across individuals.

I think a miniwhale is anyone with more than 1000 BTC. Alone can't do much, but a group of them can set trends.

I know a few people with over a 1000 coins, I've seen them start a 5-10% downtrend on Bitfinex with 4x margin back when that was available.

Are they forum posters? The only people in here that have admited to have 1000+ coins as far as I remember are rpietila and the main devs. I think Andreas said that he "doesn't how that many Bitcoins" but has never revealed his wallet.

i read about BCX that admitted that he had 5k bitcoin, i don't know if that true but it should be considered

also there was one early adopter here with over 200k bitcoin, i remember his story about police bursting into his home, i can't find the original topic, it was from 2011

who fits a bitcoin whale?

most likely are the ones who run and offer services to the bitcoin community. eg: coinbase, primedice, the twins recent exchange thats about to launch.

Those are all whales.

He said he came along in 2011 so the super early gains are unlikely. I think I've heard him mention having 100 something coins but I might have imagined it.


That might've been Knightmb. There was some weirdness about Bob Dole's tax records or something related to that raid. At one point he said he had 371,000 coins but has given them away. Er, ok.

Thats what I would call a serious whale :o Although I think nobody can keep themselves from selling a massive portion during the various price peaks on the way to this point. No way he still has such a number, probably he is swimming in fiat now..

It all depends on what definition of Whale you have. Some people could say that whale is someone who owns 1000 BTC. Others may say that we need 100.000 BTC to be called a whale.
I did not find any firm and clear definition of what whale really is. Of course the biggest bitcoin services could be called a major whales too. Leading exchanges or bitcoin casinos...
But we are not gonna present you a clear answer Op, because there isn't any.

For me a whale is a something can change the price and change the people to panic mode xD
Some one have 10000+btc if he/she can't turn people to panic mode, I think he/she is not a whale.

IMO a whale is someone who has a lot of fiat or bitcoin, can pump up and dump down the price, influence the market sentiment etc. Some things like this often are on the news, some whale are to launch a hot bitcoin related products, like Winklevoss Twins, or some whales predict bitcoin doomsday and sell a large portion of his bitcoin stash.

A bitcoin whale is generally a person who holds a huge amount of bitcoin and if he decides to pump it in the market, it could have some effect on the price of the bitcoin, any person holding upwards of 50,000 bitcoin can be called as a whale, since those bitcoins can be used to create a small wave in the price of bitcoin when traded in an exchange.

I think the bitcoin whales is not some one but some company.
The exchange may be the most possibilty the bitcoin whales.

This is a very good point. At this moment in time no laws are being broken by exchanges who rig the market or front run trades. As long as they spit out coins and fiat there's no reason for them not to use customers funds either.

They do have an incentive not to as if it ever emerged they'd lose customers very rapidly, but I'm not sure a few exchange operators think that strategically.

I see Bitcasino.io has 63 900 BTC in Slot Jackpots. Do they physically have those coins or do they just offer that amount of coins, when people win these jackpots at different times?
It would be interesting, if someone could quote statistics on price movement on exchanges for the different amounts.
A whale should be someone, who can move the price of Bitcoin when he/she sells their coins. If that is the case, you are defined as a whale in my books. 

Bitcoin Whale: Have 100,000 BTC + holdings

Bitcoin Mini Whale, Dolphin whatever LOL: Have 20,000 BTC + holdings.

We could apply sociology here and use some income inequality metric, e.g. share of top holders. Thereby we could consider as whales those Bitcoin holders who make up the top decile (10%) of all individual Bitcoin wallets (ordered by size). Thence, mini whales will constitute the next decile after the top one, and so on...

there is also satoshi who is holding the most of any whale, what you consider him a super whale? or just The whale?

there were also, in the past big whales(bigger than 100k) who lost their coins, because of their incompetence

How do you know how much satoshi is holding? because of the same addresses that never moved any money?
I would consider all that money gone. If he wanted to do something with it, he would have done so already. Im starting to believe that either satoshi lost control of the coins somehow and now they are frozen forever, or satoshi is dead. I don't believe anyone can fight the temptation to have tons of millions and do nothing without them for so many years now.

Or the NSA created bitcoin as a social experiment on the practicality of a decentralised financial system.

I guess i have a probability of being a "mini whale" if i were to dump my coins they would have a minor effect on the price.  ;D

or maybe he predicted a much better price, and this could be the reason why he didn't sold any coin

btw satoshi is holding indeed many coins, because he was the only one that was testing the network at first and with diff 1, you can imagine that blocks went in very quickly

a fast calculation says that he was mining 7200 coins per day, basically all the amount at disposal for the mining, in that era, you need less than half of a year(4-5 months basically), to reach one million...

A bitcoin whale can be only Satoshi Nakamoto. Only him has the right to be named in such way: has one million bitcoins. All the remaining people which own bitcoins are mini whalers. Are diverse races so one have more and another less more but yet to much few compared to the one bitcoin whale. 

One million bitcoin is the qualification for being whales means only Stoshi would be the whale. But bigger amount of bitcoins hoarded by a people, may be referred as whale. Mostly the early adopter are whale they got bitcoins for lesser price.

A person or a group of people having sufficient resource to influence and decide the bitcoin price movement. Looking at the size of the market cap I think it needs at least 10000 btc to really shake the market. These are mostly early adopters but I wouldn't discount the fact that it could also be government bodies or even large corporations who have their own agenda.

Yes whales are mostly the early adopters. Rarely some people would have bought bitcoin for some money.
But whales would be more conscious about bitcoin price, so we need not to worry about them on price impact.

Please don't scare me anymore than I already am.  :o

LOL. No, it was just satoshi. He just put all the pieces together coherently. And if his coins ever move, it will be headline news, so don't worry about it. ;)

It's quite sad, but the state of wealth inequality we see in countries will probably precipitate to Bitcoin as well. Sure, large holders early on will hustle and tustle, but eventually it'll become more centralised if it hasn't already.

we can find out who the Bitcoin whale by checking the names and number of bitcoin he had, you'd better start finding out now and tell me if you have found  ;D

Owners of huge amount of bitcoin. So they can manipulate bitcoin's price alone.
They may be ex regular guys who joined early by luck or,
They are dark shadowy characters with power.

A bitcoin whale is someone who controls a huge amount of bitcoin  for example 100000 bitcoin. A whale probably has a HUGE capital which can sell or buy without making any losses.

I'm wondering how many wallets there are with more than 100k Bitcoins.

Those people that holds a lot bitcoins maybe those older ones that have collected many bitcoins before.

bitcoinrichlist is taked down unfortunately, but i was aware about at least 10 of them, if this changed recently, i don't know, but it was not sure if those belong to one single different entity or a group or something else

Most of the whale bitcoin addresses are from early adopters. So my guessing on bitcoin whales must be only very few people who got chances to get bitcoin in it's early stages. Later people might have hesitated to invest into bitcoin. So, there is a less possible for whales who bought bitcoins.

Anyone can become a Bitcoin Whale, if they buy a large quantity of Bitcoins. You do not have to be a early adopter to qualify as a Bitcoin whale. There might even be wealthy business people, who came in late and operated successful businesses. < Patrick Burn or some of the online gambling operation >

Early adoption does not make you a whale, some of those people already spend most of those coins on Lambo's and ladies. ^hmf^

Those 63900 BTC are there, but they dont belong to casino, but to people that invested BTC there, and get part of profit Casino makes. With Bitcoin is always that you cant have the imaginary ones. If you think you have them then they are not Bitcoins.

Aren't they the ones who can affect prices and pump and dump?
Whales can mean they can eat investors alive by making hypes about price going up but then these whales dumps to gain making investors look like sardines lol

It will change a lot thought time since yo uhave to consider the current price. In the future, anyone holding something like 21 BTC may have a decent impact on the market, as of right now while we are still on the early stages, here is how I see it at the current prize:

100 BTC: shark
1000 BTC: small whale
10000 BTC: medium whale
100000 BTC: big whale
1000000 BTC: satoshi

Good chart makes me half way to a shark.

Ok, so then this will be the visualization for the bottom feeders like most of us. ^joke^

1   BTC: Plankton
10 BTC: Krill
20 BTC: Shrimps
50 BTC: Squid
80 BTC: Sardines

They feed the sharks and the whales ^LoL^ and there are millions of them out there. We form a important link in the food chain for the whales to survive.

I am one of those Remora fish, swimming with the sharks. I eat the leftovers after they have fed and I keep them clean and healthy.  http://www.lightandsea.com/Tiger%20beach,%20Bahamas/hi-res/lemon%20shark%20and%20remoras%20fish.jpg


 

So confirmation120 still in Squad of Squid. And i still on plankton level.  :D
I agree with "1000000 BTC: satoshi"

1M BTC mean $279 x 1M
$ 279M
hmm..

I think 10k BTC you are quite a whale.  with 100k BTC you can drastically shake a market.

But i dont understand last chart, if Shark have 100BTC, how on earth can Sardines have 80.

Here is my chart:
0.5 BTC: sardines 
2 BTC: fish
10 BTC: tuna
50 BTC: dolphin
100 BTC: shark
1000 BTC: small whale
10000 BTC: big whale
100000 BTC: pliosaurus

Aren't tunas actually much larger than dolphins in reality?

Anyway, whoever satoshi is, if they wanted to exchange, they would have done so already - back in 2014.

Hopefully they aren't dead.

the whale has to have something like 1000 bitcoins to use it for gambling or something like that little whale would be the person with 100 btc

I would say they are about same size, but dolphins are smarter.

Actually the Killer whale is is 4-5 times bigger then Tunas and is biggest dolphin in existence.

I used to be a shark until the goxxing happened. =(

I actually always thought that tunas were much larger than dolphins. I knew already that dolphins are one of the more intelligent mammals on the Earth. What really bums you out is that they manually breathe, all the time - so they can commit suicide at any point.

I looked up averages and it seems that Atlantic bluefin tunas had a max length of 4.6m and bottlenose dolphins in the Pacific go up to under 4m

Orcas are amazing, though.

Nice! They have a lot of bitcoins.
I think they are totally rich.

In my opinion to brand someone as a whale, you should be afraid of him starting to sell his coins.

In the current wide spread market distribution a whale would need approximately 30000 bitcoins to move a price significantly down across all exchanges without leverage.

In today's world, you need 100,000 bitcoin to be a whale. In 20 year's time, you only need 10 bitcoin to be a whale.

Good point of view. Not static classification but dynamic one. I would be more specific. And will change a little your classification. To be, in this way, more precise (according to me):

Today needed more than 100 000 bitcoin to be whale.
After 5 years needed       50 000 bitcoin to be whale
After 10 years needed       5 000 bitcoin to be whale
After 15 years needed       1 000 bitcoin to be whale
After 20 years needed         500 bitcoin to be whale
After 25 years needed         100 bitcoin ti be whale
After 30 years needed          10 bitcoin to be whale
After 50 years needed           1 bitcoin to be whale

Unfortunately I will be never whale. maybe my daughters with my bitcoins will both whales.

I would say if somebody owns more than 1‘000 Bitcoin or equivalent 100‘000 Litecoin or 10 Million Nxt, this could be called a whale for sure in my eyes.

Definitely not me. :(
Being a whale you need to have at least 50k bitcoins.Maybe more.
But with the years coming and going you will need less coins to be one.
Who knows in 2-3 decades 100 coins could be enough to be really wealthy.

I'm currently holding 160 BTC for the future. Would you call me a whale? I'm aiming to have 0.1% of all bitcoin in existence :D Then I will be truly happy with my life.

For me, it is someone who has a lot of bitcoin.
And also a bitcoin collector.

It can be one person or a big company who owns a lot of bitcoins

I think that 1 company holds more bitcoin than 1 single person

They are able to make bigger investments rather than just 1 person

LOL according to the chart i am a shark. Shark or not it doesn't matter for our influence on the price.

Only the whales can pump it ;(

I agree that some parties investors and miners own the most bitcoins. They should have it since they invested lot's of cash for their equipment.

With 100BTC there is not much you can do to influence the market. I think sharks starts at 1000BTC.

That amount of money gives you some nice oppertunities in 1 medium sized exchange.

With that much in bitcoin why not just cashout and get it in real fiat then be a millionaire instead of a whale?

BTCjam and Loanbase are a mini whales. They are making a huge business with less risk ratio. Just for the service provided by their website 1 - 3 % loan fee is too much income.

It depends on the exchange. On large exchanges as Bitfinex, Huobi, Bitstamp, OKCoin 100BTC dumps won't do anything. Currently at Gemini exchange it can make the price go down $10-$20 or even more if their order book is very thin.

I believe around 1000btc

I doubt any other bloke on the block has that

Well, it's a balance sheet business and now's a tough time to raise more. That will seriously constrain his business, just like it constrained Bitfinex and Coinbase back when they were remarketing Bitstamp's or MtGox's order book (not to mention the credit risk). The closest candidate for a whale is knightmb, who has admitted to owning 300K. Unless the numbers are ginormous, only a few people on this forum can beat a good old market order by 1%.

1000 BTC sounds more like it. But close to 5K BTC makes a real whale I think. With so many Bitcoin you can influence the market on a average exchange.

Loaded.  ;D

And with that extra cash, you can start grabbing more cash from manipulation...

Rich get richer.

That's around 1.5 million dollars worth of BTC, i don't think 1 person owns 5k BTC

But a company yes, sounds more like it

Nope, as the market grows and adoption increases, the depth of the market also will increase.
You will need more bitcoins to be a whale in the future.

early adopter are known to hold much more than that, not even talking about satoshi, every early adopter is in the range of 10k-100k

even if they dumped i'm sure they are not so crazy to dump every single coins and remaining at zero, many have still more than 5k coins

One of the biggest whale-sources is China. Big mining companies like Antminer/Hashnest hold tons of bitcoin and a huge portion of the mining share.
However I don't think they would dump the bitcoin because when the price drops, their mining fees (electricity bills) would be harder to cover.

1000 is good for a medium/small exchange. But it will not affect the bitcoin market as a whole. In order to do that, you need 100,000 bitcoins.

Even with 25000 bitcoins one can affect the bitcoin market

Have no need to have other aims such above written by you. You have reached already the happiness. Having 160 btc (the first one that I meet with such amount of bitcoins) mean to be sure for your future. But if I would be in your place for sure will invest some of those. Cannot resist to such temptation. Are enough (even much) but if can be more why don't try? I am doing some investments but my amount of bitcoin is ridiculous compared to yours. Even cannot be taken in consideration. But I am trying with such amount. If thing goes ok, hope to have more than you. Much more. ;)

my opinion  Satoshi nakamoto
founder and trader

I consider somewhere a whale if he can move the market for at least 1-3% at any time.
Someone with BTC1k can be considered as a whale.

I would say around 1000btc is a whale

But don't think that would be enough to move the market

I think you'll need at least around the 100k to be able to do that

I would say more than 1000 BTC, much more. 1000 is nothing since a daily volume on just 1 exchange like bitfinex is over 50k. To really manipulate the market you'd need at least 5-10k.

Is there a certain clarification what a typical Bitcoin whale is?
But you're right that a whale, as many here would define it, is somebody who has more than enough coins to move a medium sized exchange in one or the other direction.

1000 BTC is quite clear. TBH i think you have to have way more. Closer to 10k. That is just enough to shake a market on a bitcoin exchanged (an average one).

I am not one of those whales...yet ;P

I, personally am not a whale, I only hold l hold 21 bitcoin. I know some people personally who have over 1000 bitcoin. They basically gambled their life savings on bitcoin. I'm not that ballsy.

If you hold 21 bitcoin, you are already in the 1 million club. No more than 1 million people in the world can have more bitcoin than you.

 I think 1000 BTC is a whale now he can buy a private island property. bitcoin keeps on pumping and it's unstoppable we can't stop bitcoin because major adoption is happening around the globe. banks right now are emerging in blockchains

they're the one who is early investors in bitcoin the one who has a thousand of bitcoin and now a millionaire after a couple years. If I'm just not broke at that time I'm sure that I can make a millions too right now.

The term "whale" is used frequently to describe the big bucks of Bitcoin players who show their hands on the Bitcoin market. The sea is suitable as a metaphor for the market, since it can extend to include a large fish and small fish; Only sharks; Rally as lean food; Wave to market; And so forth.