Bitcoin Forum

Those whales getting poorer in the title of this news article is only an exaggeration. The whales are only slightly poorer as mentioned hehe.

In any case, this might be the setting that everyone is waiting for before the big pump.

https://i.ibb.co/dpRdqJK/54-FB3-B91-A844-4-BC1-8-B6-A-A7114-B4900-C8.png

For the first time since 2016, the number of Bitcoin whales—large holders who own at least 1,000 Bitcoin (over $9 million worth of the cryptocurrency)—is increasing. (OK, so maybe just less rich than before is more appropriate.)

The report added that the amount of Bitcoin held by whales was on the decline for the past five years, dropping over 22% from 6.7 million to 5.2 million, but more whales have entered the market this year and therefore it has started to increase.

And the dominance whales have in the market is also seeing its largest sustained increase since 2011.

Read in full https://decrypt.co/34162/bitcoin-whales-multiplying-also-getting-poorer-report

there has never been any method to count how many whales there are and how much bitcoin they own ever. and this has not changed over the past decade. that is just how bitcoin works, all those who keep trying to measure whales size and count, like this article, prove how little they understand bitcoin!

bitcoin is not like a bank account where you could call the [centralized] bank and ask them how much money each "account" (that represents an individual) has. there are chain analyzers that are doing a pretty poor job trying to come up with estimates.
on top of that a whale who owns millions of dollars worth of bitcoin cares about their privacy a lot more than a regular users who has 20 bucks worth of bitcoin which makes all the estimations even less reliable.

I believe this "could be" a more reliable indicator. The total amount of dormant coins since 2017, https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-dormant_3y-bitcoin-addresses.html

The strong hands are replacing the weak. 8)

So to be precise, the number of Bitcoin whales is increasing but the amount that they each hold per wallet is decreasing, right? The HODLERS above 1000, let's say has 1001 Bitcoins and spent the 1 Bitcoin in a different asset, causing a decrease in wallet value. Lol.

Possibly they are investing in different assets during the current global situation, don't you guys think so? Or accumulating more in the sidelines, putting it in another wallet.

@bbc.reporter the author used a clickbait title, and further he calls the whales poor which is really funny because for all we know they could be holding it since 2009 or later years, and it’s clear that he has absolutely no idea of their base price and yet he decided to terms them as poor which made me realise that he’s a newbie in the field of crypto’s. @pooya87 I agree with you as authors like these just like to take a wild guess, and they combine it with a clickbait title as that helps them get traffic and that’s all they care about.

The fewer people with thousands of coins the better, it lessens the likelihood of frequent manipulation. Hopefully we lost a lot of whales during the last bull-run, I guess there’s a chance uber early adopters could have said thank you very much & converted to fiat, effectively leaving crypto.

Not poorer, less fat.

And just because there are fewer wallets holding individually smaller balances doesn't mean whales are losing wealth. I bet you over the years, as price goes up, whales are increasingly aware of the attention they're drawing to themselves.

So what do they do? Split their holdings into several other wallets. Spread the risk, spread the scrutiny.

@buwaytress. There are more whales today, however slightly poorer in amount of bitcoins held. However, very much richer in amount counted in fiat than the whales of 2016 hehehe.

What if huge whales just divide their BTC to more small 1000 BTC wallets? I am sure they practice that and dont hold everything or most under same private key. If value of Bitcoin grow we will see more and more of whale wallet diversifying.

I'm not sure how correct this could be. Bigger number of whales but with smaller amount of Bitcoins. If their amount falls below certain level then they wouldn't be called whales anymore. That doesn't make much sense to me.
It might be true that they diversify their assets or possibly split their funds into multiple wallets. Generaly I don't believe that the number of whales has significantly increased.

there are more whales today, i can see that but i don't see any way for us to know whether the whales that existed before actually lost bitcoin or not as a group. individual whales have obviously lost bitcoin for example a lot of them lost a lot of bitcoin during 2017 trying to go against the market or manipulate it and were dumpstered.

BTC is becoming increasingly distributed, its already the best blockchain in comparison in that regard.   Seems quite bullish to have the many involved rather then the few, the greatest growth comes from the smallest entities so less reliance on large holders to accumulate BTC would be a good thing and move us towards sustainable trends that grow over years rather people doubling their position only to try and dump it into the market all at once.     The ideal for me is millions with quite modest wallets who between own large amounts of BTC but do not feel any pressure to sell BTC that is quite useful to them as an online product not subject to the same loss or risk that FIAT increasingly suffers from.
   I immediately disbelieve any story that starts off the whales bought BTC so price had to go higher, whales sold so market must go down now, its just another perception of puppet masters that control everything and its nothing to with the ordinary person.   If we really believed the largest entity has this much control why would you leave dollar, the FED will solve every problem and produce infinite wealth so BTC has far less point to it.   Or actually the FED has screwed this up so badly, theres no chance this situation does not unwind and fall apart badly and its vital BTC has its legs by then.

Or better for the wealth inequality on bitcoin, I remember seeing one thread about it, Lol.

There could be high chance that old adopters or bag holders really did sell a lot during the scare of the Pandemic last March. And then new faces trying to scoop it up, making new whales but are pale in comparison to those early adopters.

But the title is really misleading, click bait, but nevertheless interesting.

But in our standards, owning 1000 BTC is not poorer,   ;D still a huge of money involved in accumulating it. Average joe's are just happy to have at least 1 BTC in their lifetime but those whales are just like, A-Ok with their investments as the numbers are really growing overtime. Perhaps there are more whales today because they really see the bitcoin investment will give you a good ROI overtime based on the early whales who have become millionaires or super millionaires or billionaires. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

In my opinion the amount of BTC held does not indicate whether the whales are poor or not. Who knows, those whales either sold bitcoin at high prices and held USDT or used that money to invest in potential stocks. just when they sense they can no longer control bitcoin well, they will split it up among organizations and unite, which is also a strategy to minimize the risk of fighting among whales.

That will depend on every whale because not all whales sell their bitcoin. Maybe some whales have still held their bitcoin because their target price is not reached, so they want to wait for more. If they sell their bitcoin right now, they will make a lot of money, but we don't know what they do now, and we only guess for something that we don't know. But if they already sell their bitcoin, they are waiting for another moment in which bitcoin price is down so that they can buy in a large amount.

If that really happened it is just great for our market because these whales always had the power to swing the market into bull or bearish run out of nowhere just by having the power to control the market by having insane amount of bitcoins. Now days even if a small crash happens there are potential reasons being mentioned on various articles but earlier it was not like that, the market would drop without any reason and then start to rise as the dump is finished by the whale(s).

On the contrary though I have a feeling like investors have become more and more smarter and they know people keep an eye on how much rich address hold so they might be saving under the sleeves by having huge bitcoins by split smartly among many wallets/addresses.

Spreading risk is a natural thing to do.
Multiple keys, gives multiple lines of defense.

This is really good news though because whales are losing their manipulating power compared to previous years so hopefully at some point there won't be any manipulation in the crypto market.

You're crazy right? If you want markets that only are controlled by whales, then please go and find anything ranked below 100 in CMC or Coingecko. And then buy off the coins at your leisure and see what happens when the whales dump on you;)

I think this has something to do with the fact that some rich people realized that bitcoin managed to recover faster than everything else, so they got into bitcoin world after the big drop. That means whenever there is a big drop, they get into bitcoin, but eventually when it goes up, they sell and move to more traditional investments.

I do not care if they get in, I care if they stay, and I feel like maybe there is a reason why they didn't stay back in the day and maybe they will stay this time around? If that happens it would be great. All in all this number will not be anything important right now, it will be important in the long run, if we get to see them stay that will mean a lot, if they leave that means that this was for nothing and nothing to be excited about in the end.

There are also whales or large investors who are very smart and to save themselves from being highlighted and a possibility of being tracked they use a lot of addresses and keep small amounts in each of them. In fact this is very common too, no one keeps their coins in  single address so while you might think that the whales are decreasing and market is getting more and more stable you never know what whales might be doing.

There was a recent scam with some plus token and they used to hold so many bitcoins but not many people were aware that there exist a giant holder like them only when they scammed it was revealed and that also tells you how much bitcoins are being controlled by Chinese investors.

Oh...glassnode...
The same experts that thought (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5257498.msg54669608#msg54669608) the usual increase in blockchain transactions that happens every Monday is because of Paypal rumors?

What they are missing in their damn analysis is one thing every so-called expert should know before launching itself in an investigation that would lead nowhere, the number of BTC in circulation is not the same as in 2011!  Those coins have to go somewhere, you can't store two times more bitcoins in the same number of addresses with the same balance! Also, the number of exchanges is on the increase, it's no longer a time of gox, bitstamp and coinbase , there are hundreds out there. Why people try to see things in numbers and try to manipulate data like this, I will never understand.