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"A whale put 30,000 BTC up for sale at $300 each and the market eventually bought them all. Years later, BearWhale explained what happened (they fell victim to FUD)".

I came across this interesting story on twitter and i followed it to the main source, links include.
So this guy practically dump 30k btc base on FUD he claimed he read on social media like reddit and bitcointalk.org Which includes:-

*The block size limit of 1MB was a threat to bitcoin’s future
*“Satoshi’s vision” was unlimited block sizes
*Gavin was ousted by a cabal of self-interested engineers, a.k.a. “Blockstream”
*Blockstream took control of bitcoin’s source code repository
*Theymos colluded with Blockstream to censor block size increase discussions
*The subreddit r/bitcoin heavily censored block size increase discussions
*Blockstream wanted the block size low to promote its proprietary Lightning Network
*Gregory Maxwell was a bad actor and Luke-Jr was a religious nut
*The market agreed with the above, leading to the then-decline in price towards $300.

And what is more surprising according to the article is he didn't sell during the MtGox saga. However could not resist to sell after reading all kinds of FUD post about btc.

The point is - everyday btc battles all kinds of fud from haters or bad intent people but never allow such fud to lead you to sell your coins. I believe this Bearwhale is seriously regretting his action after seeing the performance of btc price long after he sold.

I highlighted the Theymos part because am not aware of such post.

Find the complete full story in the below reddit link
 Reddit Link (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2tp1/i_am_the_bearwhale_uasf_now/?rdt=57911)
Twitter Link (https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1710292353607516240?t=sToGeI2oKD8eer6FbZ-qww&s=19)

Please do share your thoughts...

A whale was played out by a FUD, unbelievable, I mean, we all are humans and make mistakes, but I never heard this story and it is totally new for me. I never heard any relevant story as well, where a whale fell prey to FUD sentiment and sold that much amount of BTC. That's a huge amount.

He might not be in contact with other whales, I mean with experienced ones, it's like a whale abandoned from its group and now facing the difficulties of the market.

Well, those 30 BTC are almost equal to 839,509,089.43 dollars. hohoho. I don't have words to explain the feelings of a person who would have 839 Mil in dollars right now but he lost them just due to the FUD.

Quite interesting story to read, but no matter how many reasons he could give, it was always about him selling in the end. I mean nobody hacked into his account just to sell his coins, it was his own decision to sell them and that doesn't really turn that well into something else, there is no reason that is valid enough to sell due to someone else. I would understand if he sold for some emergency, people do that and it makes sense, but he sold because he was afraid of the FUD? Thats really not the point, that can't be a reason to sell and if it is then the whole blame goes to him. In the end he joined back in, which means that he is still in profit and he should be doing fine in the end, if he is back in during all that time, then it means he must be in big profit currently, so he is still doing fine.

The whale was so stupid how he came into the fears and in the wrong misguidance related to Bitcoin. My belief is that whales are so experienced, well knowledge, have future plans, and are very good observers but now i am liking losing this belief. If he was added by the FUDS then why he was not looking at the price history of bitcoin? From almost zero to $300 at that time, why did he not take the lesson that Bitcoin is going up like it was increased price from zero to 300 similarly it will go up and up but maybe he was not so much experienced. He has a lot of money and he invested all in bitcoins fear and selling it clearly shows that he knows little about bitcoins. But this story looks unrealistic about how a whale sells all his own bitcoin at that time, Whales have long vissions, and if he has bitcoin then how is it possible that he does not have access to this forūm? But somehow we need to take lessons from it and need to be very attentive. For the newbie, Fuds is the strategy that is used by the scammers of other whales or persons against the whole market. They start spreading rumors about a specific currency and it's the most powerful strategy to set the fear in the hearts of others.

I'm not even surprised by the quantity sold. Many who started early in Bitcoin managed to collect many coins, and many also sold them over time.

What really surprises me is that a whale took this action because of the FUD about block sizes. There are many more credible FUDs about the possible downfall of Bitcoin than block sizes.

Either way, he can obtain a good financial return. And if he used it correctly, he had money for the rest of his life.

This news is very old, and there was less attention at that time, but still, you made a valid point, and I also have the same thoughts that whales are the ones who have the resources and knowledge to dump the market and fill their own bags with BTC in both scenarios, like by selling to dip the market and buying at the dip. But this whale might be a new one, and I don't have much experience with the BTC market.

Maybe he was just a spoilt rich kid who had money but no education.  ;D

You are right; he must have less experience or education in the market. But I hope he must have learned a good lesson for this because the amount of BTC is 30k. I mean, that is so huge. He would have hundreds of millions of dollars now, even at the current price tag. He might be having stress attacks when the price of BTC was around $69k. But let's just not rub salt on others' wounds.

Means anybody can be affected by FUD, not just people like me who are investing the little we can. The higher the BTC owned, I think the higher the Fear, uncertainty and doubt that will be faced because nobody likes to loss plenty money. This is a good story to learn from, actions must be taken after thinking, not taken first and later thought about. The whale acted too quickly without thinking about his actions and also without consulting any other person he knew was having bitcoins too. Talking to another investor in bitcoin then who was more strong willed to keep their coins would have helped him.

Block wars and the lightning network weren't a thing 9 years ago, so at some point this story doesn't make sense. The former began in mid 2015 and lightning in 2017. As for "Satoshi's vision" being "unlimited block size" or theymos colluding with blockstream to censor discussions, just LOL.  ::)

Anyway, so the tl;dr is that there was a whale with weak hands. Not surprising given the time this happened. Try finding that now.

In the signed message there is no mention of 9 years, OP has added that, in the original, it only mentions the price
https://pastebin.com/Lp5Djs5R
and that of a little over 300 does make sense for the drama around the 2015 clash, but at that time it was about XT, not casH or SV.
The dates do correlate with the events, including the bitcointalk censorship (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1148654.0) drama.

Besides, that address had in 2014 34k coins (https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/159SCycgn8weAy2XGUEhD6V1RTFni7E3iq) which he sent to Bitstamp, so he's not just trolling.

PS
this ain't FUD, it's a 1001% proven beyond-a-doubt fact!

If that whale had hold his Bitcoin ATH of 2021 then he would have made at least 1.9 Billion USD, but he sold his Bitcoin for $300 a coin and made over $9 million USD only. The BearWhale fall into the trap of the FUD and sold his Bitcoin for way cheaper rate. A lesson we can learn is that HOLD your Bitcoin and don't fall in the trap of social media because if you hold for a decade or two then you'll make a lot more if you sell it early due to fear. Everyone should learn a lesson from that guy and hold their Bitcoin for longer to earn better profits. Just HODL!!!

Regardless, I believe that whale sold at a profit.  During those times, only a few foresee that Bitcoin price will reach this height.  That is not the only event that happen when whales sold out their stash and was nibbled by the Bitcoin community.  The FUD reason, IMO is just a reason to justify his action, probably he sold his stash to invest in what he believes is more profitable venture than just holding BTC.

While he is probably regretting his decisions now, you can't deny the fact that way back then this means serious trouble for bitcoin, block size wars was a full on issue that no one couldn't ignore. Names are being dragged, shits being thrown back and forth like we're some sort of monkeys only for the whole fiasco to die down eventually. While I wasn't exactly a part of it, I've taken a lot of reading regarding the issue and I must say, if a similar event happened now and not before, it could very well lead to the death of bitcoin from the sheer amount of distrust it created within the whole ecosystem.

Years from now we're laughing about it, 9 years ago this is literally what could've been the Armageddon of bitcoin, let that sink in.

The market was in bear phase, that's the only reason why the price was going down. People were thinking that the drama was impacting the price, but it's just a case of "correlation does not mean causation". The blocksize drama was going on in 2016-17 when the bull market started.

Similarly, people cherry-pick positive news during bull markets and think that they are responsible for the growth, even though it makes no sense for Bitcoin to double in price just because Elon Musk's company bought some.

Yeah I remeber when this happened. Many people at first assumed this offer was fake and to scare the market into selling. However as price approached it looked like a real seller.

If you go on YouTube there is a video of exactly when this wall get broken and I don’t think price ever again touched $300.

I always think of Trendon Shavers as the original whale. I remember when he was moving the market with all the BTC he controlled to try and earn 1% per day of gains. It worked well until it didn’t. I believe in that case it was the guys at bitpay that ended up being the bigger whale and causing trendon to take massive losses.

There are thousands of whales of various sizes in the market and not all whales make a profit and become prey to other whales. If you are a whale, you can eat smaller fish but there are still bigger fish waiting to eat you. The financial market is extremely harsh. I've never heard this story either, but I'm not surprised.

This reminds me of the downfall of FTX and aAlameda Research, they were really big elephants that manipulated and dumped the coins they invested in. But in the end they had to pay the price and were defeated by bigger hands.
The total capitalization of the market is worth trillions of dollars and someone owning billions of dollars is really big for us but for the market, it's just a grain of salt in a big tank.

The safest thing is, to be free to all the news about Bitcoin and take the risks and become more stable stop looking for news, because you are granted in bitcoin knowledge, such news and fun no matter the level won't have anything to do with your mindset, because after all, you are not searching for them anyways and what you doing is concentrate on the price of bitcoin at whatever time and depend on your judgement on them, this is why as bitcoin investors you have to make a long term commitment to it, although the individual who dumped bitcoin at that price of $300 way back then may have bought those 30,000 Bitcoins when the price was very low may be around 100-50 dollar then, so he is still in profits.


But for someone who bought at a higher price than the sell amount what that means is that the individual has actually played dump to the various market sentiments and also made an attempt to misconception the entire market and what the long term is with Bitcoin.

That's thanks to Mike Hearn for writing FUD in his blog, and wrote it with authority like it was the truth.


I would have also believed that that was possible if I didn't learn the hard way, thanks to the forum's disinformationists, charlatans, and FUDsters.



Wear your tin-foil hats on, only the very stupid will believe Roger Ver and the BCash community's rhetoric.


The Core Developers are the rightful stewards of the network because they make design-decisions for what's good for the network. Plus they're the smartest people in the room, and if you have technical questions, or just questions about Bitcoin in general, try to communicate with them. I personally have some replies, and I have to say that many things that were said in the forum are simply untrue and/or disinformation that are made by charlatans.

That man luckily bought bitcoins with his savings when the price of one coin was 8 dollars. I predict he wasn't rich and either way he didn't want to become poor and after all the fud and negative campaigns run by Roger Ver, he decided to take 9 million dollars and leave the game.
There is a big difference between the guy who holded 30K bitcoins in 2015 and there is a huge difference between guy who holds 30K bitcoin today. The one that ownes 30K bitcoin today is no ordinary guy.

I remember back in 2016 how one guy lost 20 bitcoin on dice in 5 bets. I had possibility to chat with him and he just said that he is a early adopter and has enough coins not to worry about 20 bitcoins.

I have tried to be there since then and I have sold a number of bitcoins that I had about 9 years ago in 2021. With an expression that is far from surprised I would say, that person is very stupid for selling such a large amount of bitcoin without can analyze that it is FUD.

Selling bitcoin out of FUD and feeling regret can ultimately become regret. If the defrauded person selling out of FUD is still alive today, he has already accumulated a lot of bitcoins and is comfortable with the bitcoins he hold.
This story is interesting and can be a valuable lesson. When we start to know how valuable bitcoin is, various kinds of news that corner bitcoin will not give rise to panic and selling.

Unfortunately, I am a latecomer among people who knew Bitcoin first and fortunately I was late because I got to know Bitcoin when I was able to understand the value of Bitcoin.

How can you say, he bought those BTC when the price was around $8 per coin, I mean is this information is officially made by that whale or what? Well, if he bought those 30k BTC at the price of $8 (Which might not be real news) the amount becomes around $240,000 which in my opinion doesn't make a man poor. (As you said he wasn't rich).

Well, I did some research from my side and did not find any news saying, that Whale bought 30k BTC at the rate of $8 per coin. But if you have something then please share.

And the amount he made is equal to 9 Million and that is huge, well, I even found out that, that whale might not sold his BTC due to the negative campaigns of the Ver instead he might be interested in booking all the profit or there might be any possibility. I mean is there any official confirmation by the whale that could prove that he made that choice of selling 30k BTC just because of the FUD created by Ver. And to be honest, I don't think that it was a FUD.

Because the things he pointed out were legit and that points led to the creation of BCH (2017).

Selling that much BTC at $300 per coin means getting 9 million dollars out of that deal. While it's a low price per coin, it's still a huge ton of money, a lot more than the vast majority will ever get their hands on. And I'm happy for those who purchased BTC from that deal, of course.
There's always this or that uncertainty, but what's one person's panic selling is another person's great opportunity. As for not falling victims to FUD, I think it's important to be patient and to make financial decisions in a calm state of mind, not based on emotions.

That may be lot of money, but relatively speaking, it's just a mere fraction of its TRUE value at the current fair market price, AND it's going to be higher during the next bull cycle.


If the FUDsters were playing 4D Chess, then they would probably have bought what he sold and front-ran him when the the next bullish cycle came. That's also probably the same with and why the "Bitcoin is dead" phases are the best time to purchase Bitcoin.

Well, this goes to prove that anybody with a big amount of BTC can be a whale and that a whale is human too...subject to emotions and wrong choices based on factors a person can considered to be facts - sadly many of them can turn out to be false. Like so many sad stories of people who held Bitcoin, it never ceased to amaze me how they let go of something that is now so valuable. There are many big lessons that we can learn here, indeed.

I think he tried to manipulate the Bitcoin price and it failed..... he dumped a lot of coins on a single exchange and he wanted the price to drop, so that he can buy it back at a lower price... but something happened and the price did not drop significantly.

Yes, there was a lot of FUD back then and people were hashing it out on social media platforms, but he is just using that as an excuse now. I reckon he lost a lot of money, but he got back in and shrugged off those losses.  :P

9 years ago means 2014. I've joined the Bitcoin world in the summer of 2015, so I don't remember anything about this FUD drama.
I do remember that the Bitcoin price was a little bit above 300 USD in the summer of 2015 and it increased to 425 USD by the end of 2015.
I wasn't paying close attention to all the drama around the Bitcoin/crypto community, because I was a total noob and I didn't knew anything about blocksize and all the conflicts around it.
This BearWhale guy is one of the many people, who sold BTC at the wrong time. Who knew back then that the BTC price will hit 20K USD after two years and 59K USD after six years?

Between 2011 to 2013 i have join a website that giving Bitcoins for referring there I collect more than 12 btc but now i can't remember website name can anyone tell me which websites giving Bitcoins for referring between 2011 to 2013 year

I won't call them as a whale, the person who panicked and sold but whales are actually in the other side who manipulate and make the retail investors shake off so this person still made around 9 million for $300 perBTC now he simply regrets what will be the value now. :D

We can find hundreds of similar stories where people sold their BTC in that period simply because still they made a lot of returns and tried the exit way there is nothing to regret by comparing it with the current value.

30,000 BTC x $300 =$9.000.000.

Almost f@cking 10 million dollars. Why should he be sorry? I wouldn't mind regretting having $10 mln. available either. :)


You probably meant to say 30.000 BTC and not 30 BTC, right?

And in 10 years will discuss this story and gossip that:

Is it like this? :) So we can speculate endlessly using infinite numbers.

The correct amount is $9.000.000. BearWhale received $9 mln., and didn't lose $839,509,089.43, $300,000,000,000,000 dollars or whatever.

We never saw the price go down that low ever since then because no one but those stile people ever believed any FUD about bitcoins again because it already established a concrete trust to the people due to its past history of success till now. nevertheless, the price of bitcoins is staying high due to the fact that no matter how bad the situation in the crypto market in the past few months, investors never allowed themselves to believe that bitcoin price will be worthless in the future like how that whale felt 9 years ago. whenever the bitcoin price gets low, all you need to do is wait and it will recover again for sure like how it recovered in the past.

That's sad on his end looking at what happened next. That's why those that even with the little amounts shouldn't let themselves feel affected by FUD that's being scattered through articles and social medias. I almost fell for that but didn't do the same thing.
Today, that's a lot of money and even not going to that quantity and just a couple of it would make it valuable. I do understand how it feels when someone was able to hit by a FUD and reacted with exaggeration. I just hope that he's fine and was able to move on.

The bearwhale seriously had no idea how the market would turn out to be. I don't blame him, because as at the time, it seemed like the best decision, rather than to loose all.
Tales like this stresses on the need to be able to identify any FUD that may arise when there's a signal speculating suchlike, hence how the popularity of the DCA strategy gained one more believer in the long term strategy against all odds.

This thread nearly summarizes the lack of clarity for believers and the manipulation of information designed to degrade diamond hands back in that era. I suppose that this comes with the opportunity to become rich. Some think it was as easy as holding and that is all, but in reality you are facing a mental battle that is fed by all of the information flooding in rapidly. Only someone with true peace, zen and external financial security could have had the chance to comfortably hold. At least, it is all good precedent for holders of today to easily hold Bitcoin with confidence, and understand that media/fud is everywhere.

Do you all remember the days where almost everyone would believe anything that came from a "news sources' or from the radio/TV? It is still the case with some categories of people now but I am sure it's not as common as it once was, thankfully.

9 years ago when Bitcoin was not yet known globally, people never thought about if the price would increase and that person is a big example. It was not a mistake IMO because if we are also having Bitcoin at that time, we probably sell them cheaply. Just because of the current of Bitcoin, we could really say that was a big mistake and regrettable event that happened to his life and for sure, he couldn't imagine what he did as well. But it was 9 years ago and all of us have no idea what will happen next, and even now.

Selling at a profit that's gor sure but, you can rash have a rulings on the fact that, this wasn't there intent with the investment idea for the BearWhales but, banked on the idea of a possible dump based on the FUD that happened to have taken hold of the times and it seemed very reasonable at that, with the limited block size of 1MB.
Let's  have it that maybe by some means, they bought themselves back when they got the assurance that Bitcoin was going to be around for a longer time.

FUD has always been a part of the industry and would continue to be as by some means to eliminate weak hands and better set the phase/price of the currency. Its left for users to learn from history and do there best to recognise opportunities.

Today you can find lot's of well documented articles that lead to this, just by googling Blocksize Wars. Bearwhale wasn't the only one who falled for FUD back then.

Back then people were too triggered about this and at least if you were newbie and listened to wrong crowd, I see that i would have been easily fooled just by the technical jargon i wouldn't get.
Luckily i trusted the right people about bitcoin so this wasn't an issue for me. It was annoying and concerning to explain my friends that they shouldn't read wrong sites and fall for wrong "bitcoin".

The whole attitude was pretty chaotic. And not just because of the blocksize wars, but because we were on the bottom of the bear market, so lots of people had lost lots of money and all there was left was crazies and true believers. Connection to the "real world people" seemed quite severed for a while as they were just happy "i told you so" because rest of the world thought that bitcoin died. So i don't wonder people thought it was dead. I was kinda certain about it at some point too.

no one can predict the future, so whatever you did in the past, was pretty much acceptable. so long you feel satisfied and happy at the time of transaction, you are already winning.
what if the opposite situation happened, btc was just part of the history and no one is talking about this anymore? i bet you are very happy that you discard your coins before it goes to nothing.

yeah, I mistakenly wrote 30 BTC only while I wanted to write 30k BTC. Thanks for pointing out the mistake, We will gossip on this topic if we both will be alive after 10 years. I hope we will.
I did not mean to say, that he lost 9 Mil because at whatever rates that whale must have bought those 30k BTC, he must be in profit while booking $9 Mil. And at the time of writing my last reply, I was aware of this information, I was just trying to multiply the 30K BTC with the current market price, which IDK (I don't know) what it was at the time of my last reply. But when I multiplied it by that amount, it becomes --> 839,509,089.43 dollars, which means, at that time, (October 06, 2023, 03:44:50 PM) that whale would have 839 Million dollars if he would not fall prey to that FUD and sold his BTC. And to be honest, there is not solid proof that states that, That whale sold his BTC due to the FUD, I did read the points that were in the air at that time, and nothing from them is really so encouraging that would revoke the feeling in a Whale to sell 30k BTC.

IDK but I still doubt it.

No one would have predicted that if the price of Bitcoin reached $20k in the past, they could trade their Bitcoin in large quantities. But if they see what is happening to Bitcoin now, they will regret it but it has all happened. There is no point in regretting it but he can still collect more Bitcoins.

Maybe at that time, those who succeeded in selling large amounts of Bitcoin would be happy because their profits had doubled from when they bought Bitcoin first. And that's also how we felt when we sold Bitcoin at $60k some time ago. And when we see the price of Bitcoin reach 4-5 digits in the future, we might also regret it.

It is true that if Bitcoin cannot develop as it is now and instead disappears, those who have sold their Bitcoin too early will be happy because they have succeeded in making a profit by selling their Bitcoin. Well, that's life. No one will know what the future will be like.