Bitcoin Forum

What is a Bitcoin Whale? - The Answer is here --> http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-whale

Lately a lot of forum topics discussed possible Bitcoin Whales and that they are the reason why the price of BTC has dropped. Even though I did not see this on the blockchain and it was not widely reported, it could have happened in smaller chunks.

Interresting that they mentioned this --> "So, it’s not about that 1000 BTC order you see in the exchange orderbook, or the 50 BTC that went through Dell’s online retail store today." <---- Did he use it as a example, or were there a 50 BTC transaction on Dell today?

Would be nice, if Dell could report back to us, on how successful their entrance to the BTC market was sofar. Any press willing to approach them, to ask them this question?  ;)

Bitcoin whales existed long before institutional investors and hedge funds came into the picture. And I highly doubt any of them have integrated themselves into the Bitcoin ecosystem sufficiently enough to make any noticeable impact... yet. Bitcoin has always had whales - almost all of whom being early adopters who were lucky enough to jump onto the Bitcoin bandwagon when it was still largely unknown to the outside world. You can verify this by looking at the blockchain; a few addresses control a very large number of bitcoins.

The now-traditional definition of a whale being someone who has over 1,000 BTC makes sense because the definition of a whale is someone who has enough wealth that their actions cause a noticeable shift in the market. When someone sold 300,000 LTC all at once and crashed the price of Litecoin a few days ago, that was a whale (and not a particularly smart one either). 100 BTC would probably be enough to effect a change in the Bitcoin markets and a couple times that would produce a very noticeable spike or drop in prices, but most people don't play with their entire balance - hence the appropriateness of the 1,000 BTC limit.

Whale will go extinct for a healthy competitive market.

That is, if bitcoin is a healthy currency, the coin distribution will be more even.

Whales are there in all markets.
The 'London Whale' was in the news a year ago....

That is because FIAT currency is not competitive.

Whales used to be anybody who moved 10K BTC in any direction, now moving 300BTC on Stamp or BTCe is enough to get a panic buy or panic sell as everybody looks for opportunity.  Being able to time your wall breaking is what makes a whale a whale.

I cannot see that only 300 coins, can make such a big difference though. I will watch movement on the blockchain, and see if this is the case. If +/- 180 000 US $ worth of BTC have such a big impact on it's price, it's actually very vulnerable.

If someone spots this, please verify this, I would like to see this for myself.  ::)

And yes, if 300 coins have such a influence on the price, 1000 BTC would definitely have a huge impact, and those people, can easily be called a Whale, by your definition.  ;D

I think anyone with 1000 BTC (578000.00 USD) or more is a whale. If the price rises the amount of BTC to own to be considered to be a whale will be lower.

More than the price, what plays a role is market depth.
Imagine you place a buy order for 1000 BTC and the market is so liquid that the price doesn't change. Then you are not really a whale, are you?

I was about to post the same thing and your post resume it quite whale, just a small clarification as this thread is for new people, a Whale is not someone who holds a lot of a certain cryptocurrency in a said market, but it someone who has the ability to make a certain maket swift (it usually requires huge amount of said cryptocurrency, but it's not always true) and it's like bitsaurus said it's about the timing and the situation created by the whale that makes them whale

for me:

whale = someone with lots of coins and act actively on markets, therefore causing crysis and pumps.

dorment crypto lovecraftian sea creature = whoever has lots of coins, but just hold them, or only trade in volumes that won't crash or pump the market.


So to be a whale, one must have whale ammount of coins on exchanges.

If you ask me a whale is someone with deep pockets and able to cause swings in a market.  I think a real whale is someone who has was into Bitcoin at a very early stage.

Yeah, but how are you going to distribute the coin more evenly? You can force early luckadopters to distribute the coin more evenly. Also, having a lot of money makes you make more money with less effort. The more money you have the richer you get and the poorer you are the more you are a money repellent, pretty basic.

Watch the Wolf of Wall Street movie, you will see what is a whale and how they behave

Same as in gambling sites

Whale is anyone that can cause a 80% crash in a big sell, like our friend mr 102 from btc-e

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2014/02/BTC%20Flash%20Crash_1.jpg

OMG. This is certainly an example of a very big bitcoin whale, but I think there are many, many other smaller whales that can cause a major impact on the price of bitcoin.

I think that movie is a bit of an exaggeration. I don't think most people on Wall Street and who work in finance act like that.

By the way Mr 102 guy didn't need a lot of money to move to 102.  Most people weren't expecting that dump and nobody had orders in place so the hot knife sliced through butter.  The month after that everybody had orders in the 100s, 200s, 300s, 400s - of course most of those never filled and they have since pulled their orders since most people need their spare money.

Timing = whale, not amount (given the obvious that 0.1BTC is not going to move a market).

It may not be the norm, but I don't think it was an exaggeration.

How much BTC do you guys believe does it take to be considered a bitcoin-whale? In a few years this may have changed dramatically and a lot of smaller holders now will be bitcoin whales themselves then!

Am I understanding the graph correctly that someone has dumped over 4000 btc within one single minute?

It bothers me that whales keep doing this. A couple of weeks ago, a Litecoin whale crashed the price of LTC to $3 on an exchange despite the fact that it makes no sense to dump such a huge amount of BTC or LTC at once. It would make much more sense to slowly sell off fractions of a stash - making sure you don't completely demolish all the buy orders and taking pauses in between to see how the market moves and to let the orders fill up again. You would think that most whales would be smart with their money to get to where they are today, but for some bizarre reason, this doesn't seem to be the case.

???

the term whale is always used in finance as well - and its a general term to use also at a gambling table.

so not sure why people are surprised.

The primary motive of such behaviour could be market manipulation. Think of derivative markets. A whale could take a leveraged short position on an asset. Using derivatives his return will be magnified many times by a fall in the price of the asset. Sure, by dumping his asset he loses money, but the gains on the derivative front could dwarf this.

I believe they just made a mistake in entering the sale amount (like selling 4000 btc instead of 40 btc).
I see no reason in deliberately crashing bitcoin price to $100 or litecoin price to $3, as it will go back up within minutes, and the coin sellers will have a huge loss.



Is it possible to make such a huge leveraged position in bitcoin trading?

Total amount of coin dumped during that 102 drop was about 1300 BTC - the graph only shows the total volume traded on the candlestick and the color will be net result in price.  If he dumped 1300BTC there was also 1300BTC in buys - and some auto bot buying and selling which totals out to 4K.

It could have been a fat finger mistake or somebody trying to rock the boat.  A year earlier 4000 BTC would move the price $5 from $95 to $100  :D

Maybe not possible in bitcoin right now in established markets (which is why I used the general term assets).
But you could always have a private contract between 2 parties.
If I say "I am ready to bet that bitcoin will go down to $10 this year", I am sure there will be people who will give me very good odds. :)

Reasons:

1 - Failure when entering the values(I think every trade made it a least once, but with lower values)

2 - Need quick money to pay the mafia or some kidnapping

3 - Stolen coins( mr 102 was from Gox times)

4 - Failed try to cause a long-lasting downtrend, made by some whale mothership with 10's of coins

I don't know what to say, but 10k bitcoin? wow

At some point BTC was priced in cents.  ;D

I am not 100% sure what exactly happened here, however this looks like some kind of error on the exchange side. I think it would be unlikely that a whale actually caused this (it would have caused the prices on all exchanges to fall and likely not recover), however a whale is someone that could cause this kind of damage.

Nope, not an error.  That's just what happens when you have no market depth and there is a large sell or buy.  Sometimes 1K of BTC will move the price $1, sometimes it will move it $50.

Slippage http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/slippage.asp (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/slippage.asp)

Whale goes moooo like a cow ;D