Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is popular among huge population all over the world while the demand  for altcoins is limited. Does this mean there is least effect of whale manipulation on bitcoin among all crypto coins ?

The more the marketcap in relation to the more the people that are buying and selling, the less the manipulation. Yes, there is least of whales manipulation if it is about bitcoin. I do not think bitcoin market can easily be manipulated unlike most altcoins that just few whales can control their market prices.

I would say the opposite than your saying. Bitcoin has biggest marketcap and dominate the cryptocurrency market but I believe there are more people who don't use Bitcoin but use altcoins or invest in altcoins. They don't actually make good decisions because altcoins are more risky for either trading or investment. Holding altcoins in a bear market in one market cycle, which lasts about 2 years is very terrible.

Bitcoin can have 70% or 80% correction from its all time high but altcoins have deeper corrections, 90% or 99%. Many of altcoin projects die in bear market because altcoin developers are more easily to abandon their projects, and wait for new trends to create new projects.

Yes the amount for a whales to actually manipulate bitcoin will probably be huge very huge amount that a single whale cannot have. According to CoinMarketCap the market cap for bitcoin is around $1.14T, so imagine the amount needed to move the bitcoin market by a single while. According to reports you can’t have a single whale or institution holding at least 5% of Bitcoin circulating supply. In Altcoins most especially those that uses POS you have a validators who are mostly big whales and this are people that in real sense can manipulate the market. So the market cap for Altcoins and number of holders which is relatively small compared to bitcoin sets them up easily to be manipulated than bitcoin.


I can’t say for sure but with 80% certainty I can tell your that almost everyone who holds  actually uses hold a fraction of bitcoin for security purposes, except those that are gambling on some low cap memecoins. Reason why OP said many people use bitcoin than Altcoins is the fact the Altcoins are many and not a single entity like bitcoin. Some can be holding Solana and never holds ETH or some ETH holders can never hold BNB which is different from Bitcoin.

As for correction we all see the effect of bitcoin on all other Altcoins, bitcoin can never go as low as 70% if you ask me, a move down to that point definitely killing almost all the Altcoins available.

I maintain an opinion that whale manipulations are more of a conspiracy theory than proven reality with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a huge market capitalization, too big for major manipulations. Certain announcements or events that involve the movement of large amounts of money (billions of dollars) can have a short-term impact on the price, but those are not coordinated attacks. For instance, the price fell down significantly when the pandemic was announced in 2020, but that wasn't a whale manipulation. Similarly, the price went down recently amidst announcements of Mt Gox repayments, but no manipulation here either.
I believe that altcoins with low market capitalization are susceptible to manipulations, but Bitcoin is not like that and I agree that it's the least manipulated coin (in a sense that manipulating its price is almost impossible in practice).

That’s probably true. I mean bitcoin has many whales who can pump and dump the markets but the situation is much worse with the altcoins where only a few guys control the whole market. btc and altcoin price volatility supports my arguments too. Bitcoin is much much less volatile compared to alts. It is because many more people hold btc. The supply is spread over many more people and makes it harder to manipulate the prices. When btc goes down ~8%, alts go ~20%. It is an asset with a trillion use market cap in the end. When it goes down 10%, 100 billion dollars evaporate. Crazy.

The most important metric when it comes to market manipulation is trading volume. Bitcoin currently has a 24 hour trading volume of over $28 billion, to be able to manipulate the market you'll need an amount closer to that figure, even if several whales were able to pool $1 billion together to try and tank the market, it will easily absorb the impact of such trades with minimal effect on the price.

Another important factor in market manipulation is the general sentiment about the currency. If there's an attempt to manipulate a coin which is not trusted by its holders, they will very quickly dump it at the slightest FUD. Bitcoin is a more trusted network and will still be trusted by many at the face of FUD.

When Bitcoin price increase, altcoins price increase more.
When Bitcoin price decrease, altcoins price decrease more.

So, if the whale manipulating Bitcoin market, it also affect altcoins price too. The demand of altcoins could be higher than Bitcoin if they're hype, but hype won't last long and it will not affect Bitcoin price.

Maybe, sort of.
But you know what when the price of Bitcoin goes that much, we're all saying that there's no manipulation and the increase is due to good news. And when the market is going down hill, we're all looking to blame for something and one of it is about the manipulation that comes from the whales. I'm not sure about the least effect of it, but it seems to be transferable from one coin to another and goes back to Bitcoin.

If you compare the manipulation of bitcoin with altcoins, it is absolutely true, simply put, the larger the market capitalization, the harder it is to manipulate.

But if you compare bitcoin with other financial markets, bitcoin manipulation is the largest because bitcoin's capitalization is still very small compared to gold or stocks. In addition, the market still does not have too many regulations, cryptocurrency is still a free market, so manipulation will be easier than in other financial markets. But once involved in the financial market, it is difficult to avoid manipulation, manipulation is part of this game, IMO.

Popularity and manipulation has no correlation. Bitcoin is difficult to manipulate because the user base is huge. It's easier for whales to manipulate the altcoin market as it's smaller in size. To manipulate Bitcoin market, I huge amount of Bitcoin holding is needed and only corporate have such kind of money. It's rare for individual whales to have such kind of Bitcoins which will allow them to manipulate the market.

Memecoins are the easiest to manipulate. Rather majority of the memecoins are hugely manipulated to give benefits to the creators.

More than 50% of BTC is in the hands of individuals. WHales can manipulate the market, but the influence is not too huge.

Let it not surprise you that most of the population that is into crypto currency, which is speculated to be a large number of people, might just know about bitcoin, but a lot of them don't have any single volume of bitcoin in their crypto holdings; it's all filled with altcoins. 
 
The demand for Altcoin is limited depending on what the person going into crypto currency has in mind in the first place. If it's just for them to chase a large profit, then Bitcoin might not be an option for them, but if it's for privacy and something they want to hold for a long time, they will definitely have some Bitcoins in their portfolio.

I think the OP might have used the word “popular” to describe the user base of bitcoin, the diversity of bitcoin as a digital asset is what set it apart in terms of manipulation or even any potential risk as more people run nodes which is part of its security. In terms of manipulation is it as you have pointed out, the amount needed for any manipulation is definitely not an amount that even if a corporation will never wants to give out.

Memcoins are just those shitcoins that one person can hold upto 30 percent of the coin and once they liquidate the coin the entire coin feels it and goes dust, same for the low market cap coins.


Exactly the movement of some supply sometimes aren’t that much to cause problem to bitcoin price rather it is the media most at times exaggerating everything and thereby causing FUD among the holders or investors. The large diversity is what set bitcoin apart.

Totally correct !!

The amount of money needed to manipulate Bitcoin when we consider the marketcap of BTC is in the trillions, and who in the right mind would want to risk this much just to paint markets in their liking of which there is risk of losing or being liquidated should things go against you... honestly it's not just worth it!

But on the contrary, the most manipulated coins/tokens are usually the Altcoins because marketcap for these is usually small and with a couple of dollars a whale can easily pump or dump the coin with a simple buy/sell.

Whales can only manipulate what they have, they can't do that to the Bitcoin. What they do to manipulate the price of Bitcoin is they bought the altcoins they want to pump at less price and this reduce the circulating supply from the holders and few other traders and then they buy back the available coins continuesly until the meet their target before they offload their bag in the market. They don't have the money to buy all the Bitcoin from other trader because it's too expensive to manipulate the price.

If you sum up the total circulating supply of Bitcoin that are in exchanges, they are far less than the Bitcoin that can be found outside exchange wallet and for this, it will be difficult to manipulate the price of Bitcoin as less supply is deposited in the centralized exchanges and this numbers can't be manipulated to play the price of Bitcoin but when you compare and contrast the supply of altcoins in exchanges and external wallets, you will know why it's easy to control altcoins.

As for Altcoins, I don't think it's impossible for marketcap manipulation to occur, but with Bitcoin I haven't found a strong reason that can confirm that Bitcoin can be manipulated. The repeated sentence is not none, but a little.
You can do the rest yourself. The level of difficulty whales have in manipulating the altcoin market is different when they try to do it on the Bitcoin market.
Altcoin marketcap who is willing to pay more.

It's bigger than you think because of leverage. People who use leverage hurt themselves, but the urge to gamble is often too strong.

When a whale sells a large amount of bitcoin, levered traders are the first to go down. Bitcoin would be much less volatile if leveraged trading was allowed only to a certain amount like 5x, but that's wishful thinking.

Yes, bro, there are less possible means of manipulating the price of Bitcoin compared to how other altcoins prices can easily be manipulated by the owners of the project themselves. There are some project owners that can even list their tokens on an exchange, where they can easily manipulate the price, but the price of Bitcoin cannot just be easily manipulated because it is decentralized. There are also some commonly known facts that can cause the price to rise or drop. 

Bitcoin does have some whale manipulation, but not in price and yet in news. Meaning, whales do not buy or sell to manipulate the market, they can do that with altcoins, some of them with just less than 100k as well because they have low volume. Whereas in the bitcoin world we are talking about something that will take a while and I think it's quite easy to see that we are checking on something that is taking time, and bitcoin will not be moved like that with just buying and selling, would require billions.

Instead, they manipulate via news, meaning if they want it down, they put fear into the markets by sharing stuff that looks scary to retail investors, or if they want a good return they just share good news to make you hyped instead.

The thing is that bitcoin is the first in cryptocurrency to have dominance and I believe that any other coins is just copings bitcoin ways of method, so believe me that bitcoin is like father to other coins so that is why when is he a new coin that is being launched today many of them is being compete with Bitcoin so from my own understanding the demand of altcoin cannot be higher than the demand of Bitcoin mostly a particular altcoin why people love to go to altcoin it is because when you invest on it there is every possibilities that you will make a good profit, so therefore we should understand the basics things that has to do with bitcoin before we compare it together, so bitcoin investment is different from altcoins despite all is cryptocurrency

The relation is there but it is not that simple.

Like when bitcoin price increases, it does not mean price of every altcoin will also increase. Some might decrease by good margin.
Same was we can see the behavior when bitcoin price decreases and altcoin behaves differently.

Not all altcoins, maybe only a few top altcoins have an impact on the increase or decrease in price.
Market behavior is different, but based on our experience in the market, Bitcoin always has an impact on altcoins even though it is only a top altcoin.

In terms of market behavior, altcoins can be manipulated such as market cap levels and ranks on the list, but it will be very difficult for Bitcoin because the number is fixed in the sense that it does not increase anymore.

I don’t think there is some secret cabal of whales that is holding meetings and deciding when to pump the price of Bitcoin and when to make it drop. Manipulation usually occurs at the small cap level, with newly launched pre-mined tokens. It is not necessarily whales manipulating the price, but sometimes it is developers working with social media influencers and minor celebrities.

Bitcoin is immune from these types of organized pump and dump campaigns, unless you believe the conspiracy theories about Tether printing fake money and creating artificial demand, but I have not seen any convincing evidence of this.

There is no financial market that is not subject to manipulation, including the stock market or the gold market. The smaller the market, the easier it is to manipulate, and with a market without many regulations and freedom, manipulation will take place more easily. Bitcoin's capitalization is only 1.5 trillion and the entire market has a capitalization of 2.4 trillion, which is smaller than the GDP of a country like Germany or smaller than a technology company like Apple. Compared to the gold market capitalization of 15 trillion and the stock market of more than 100 trillion, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are nothing and still very small. So manipulation will be easier and more frequent.
Bitcoin is even very susceptible to manipulation by fake news spread on social networks, let alone that it will be immune to hidden forces from Wall Street.

I agree with what Catenaccio has just said and in addition to what he as said from my opinion, many people will buy BTC during the bear season while many will be skeptical to buying altcoins during bear season because the tendency of BTC price correction is higher than altcoins, hence, altcoins even depends on BTC rising price to also rise and when the timing is longer at bear season they may move to coin grave yard and cease existing.

There are many whale investors of Bitcoin which contributes to every market price crash and pump however they cannot do it alone unlike with some altcoins wherein a single whale could bury a new coin. Factor I guess is its large market cap which represents how many people are having Bitcoin holdings. As long as demand and supply is concerned, big investors will always matter.They're most likely multiple groups or just a couple of numbers. I can't agree with Bitcoin's total immunity against price manipulation. Just check on the charts and simply look at long candles on shorter time frames, the answer is there already. However they're not solely responsible of the dumps; it's a combination of big and small investors alongside domino effect. Observe every uptrend; there will always be a consolidation at 'peak' prices because big investors are selling on those lines, and once small investors do the same thing, expect for a continuous decline. Not a new thing by the way.

Bitcoin's popularity and larger market cap do offer some protection against whale manipulation compared to smaller altcoins. However, whales can still influence Bitcoin's price due to its relatively low liquidity compared to traditional financial markets. It's less susceptible than many altcoins, but we shouldn't ignore the potential for large holders to impact the market