Bitcoin Forum

...how many bitcoins do you need to possess? Just curious what people's thoughts are.

five figures. 10,000 btc+ or ~ 3.7 million USD

Starting from 1000 coins in my opinion.

With 50 BTC you can already do quite some movement on the market.
But to be a whale, I'd say that you need at least 200 BTC.

I think with 5-6k bitcoin you will become a "whale" and start to manipulate some altcoin easily and make the pump/dump scheme. However also with 1'000 bitcoin we are able to be a whale.

in altcoin scene some 100's or even less is enough to play the pump and dump game as protagonist.

In BTC scene some millions.

More or less millions depending where you wanna play

1000 coins is nothing in the grand scheme of things. You would need at least solid 6 figures to create a small trend then hope people follow.

To become a whale ...

You just need to believe in yourself, formulate a plan, and follow through with it.  If you believe you can do something you can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0cosKhRdbA

Faith alone is not enough. And to become real player you will have to obtain more than 10.000 BTC. With less you are hardly doing enough to influence market even on small level. So I would say 10k is enough to be a whale.

I would say that someone with >1000 bitcoins is a whale.
With 4 figures it is noticeable on exchanges when they are all parked at a certain price. With a global supply of 14mil coins it is 1/14,000th of the total money supply, that is a big lump of a currency.

10,000btc is a super whale in my opinion, I doubt there are too many people out there with 10k coins that are hot stored.

It depends of which altcoin are you talking about, maybe with the shitcoin it is needed a few bitcoin something like 5-10 btc for manipulate the price; but for the big altcoins you need at least 100-200 btc as you said.

However I am sure (as said before) for become a bitcoin whale you need at least 5000 bitcoins.

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

OP its too late to become a whale anyway, only if you were an early early adopter you could become a whale without being Bill Gates.

I never claimed to be a whale or that I was trying to become one...just wondered what people thought since that term is used so often on here.

I'd say the equivalent in BTC of $5-10M.

At least equivalent to $1 million USD, currently about 3,700 BTC. You could set up a nice wall with $1 million, but now even walls of that size can get eaten up pretty quick during a strong run.  Five figures of coins, would be pretty solid and have the ability to manipulate the market a bit.

1000 BTC as of today is a whale.



But one day it will be 10,000 BTC...

not now, maybe before with 1200 in price

i also think around 10k coin, but without being too precisely, we can say that 5k would make you a whale already

Math is weird, that assumes $370 a bit coin today which it isn't, but WE...

So that is today.

In ten years that means being a "whale" will be to own only 3.7 btc.

To become a BTC whale it would be hard to guess but i would go with 10,000 - 50,000 that is a lot of dollar to have rapped up in a volatile investment. imo of course.

But.. If you want to be a whale with alt coins that can be done for much less like just 100 btc will move most coins..

That is a good one.

On a sidenote 5000-10000 btc makes you definitely a serious player :)

From all the answers that's the good one, really?

The thing is it does not answer the question so how is that a good one exactly?

OP never asks how many because he wants to be one,(Just curious what people's thoughts are.) is what was said..

in some small exchanges some 100's of BTC is more than enough, or even less.

If you can leverage you can play whale with fewer money too

Thank you Bralex! Damn. Some of you people are rude and probably don't even have as many bitcoins as me. In my opinion, I'd say at least 10,000 bitcoins. If I remember right, someone dumped 26,000 bitcoins last fall and it only crashed the market by like $20 bucks.

To be a whale, you'd need 5 digit sums of BTC at least... But also lots of time and patience (to handle bigger whales than you) :D

First you would need to SELL your BTC on the Private market -- turn your BTC to cash ( Cant buy BTC with BTC ) and then Buy at market price and hope others follow,, you get the first coins cheap .. then when it hits the top you do a market sell..

I would say about a thousand or more coins. However the number gets smaller and smaller as the price goes higher and higher.

A better question is what are the total holdings of a whale in bitcoinland?  Or do you think that they play with every satoshi they have?  Maybe only use half.........

To me it depends which market we are talking about.
Any altcoin market, probably with 3 digit amount of BTC you may consider yourself as a whale.
In the bitcoin market, this is probably two orders of magnitude more.

Seriously? You think it'll only get easier to acquire 1-9k BTC? Hmm... 100k here I come  8)


It takes a little more finesse than sticking a wall near the current bottom (at the time) of an overextended panic spike to manipulate the market. He could have done a lot more damage had he come up with a better system/style/method. It works in the other direction too. You can't buy the price up 20% and place a wall to hold it there. It simply won't work. It will be dumped into, probably faster than the 30k ask was bought at $300.

If you're a whale with 10k+ coins you still need to be able to read the market like a pro and know when the herd will follow you, or else you'll probably lose it real quick.

If we are talking about a true whales at current point in time, i believe the same as most, about 10 000 BTC, but
its important to state how this amount get proportionaly smaller with passing timeframe, so the amount to bring the market under some kind of influence will
allways correspond to its countervalue in fiat, asuming the price will go forward as we all generaly think, if not there will be a reverse situation.

cheers

IMO 5k+ of BTC makes you a whale. Most of these whales most of them are composed of institutions such as Hedge Funds and Bitcoin Investment Funds.

I think it must be at least 6 figures and beyond to effective control and manipulate the market direction, something above BTC100000. Even with the amount, that only gives you close to about 30 million and if you consider the size of the bitcoin market cap, that is awfully a small number. Plus you also have to consider the on-spot buy/sell order at that time.

no.

Dump and Pump is :

- 200 BTC on kraken
- 2000 BTC on bitstamp
- 3000 BTC on bitfinex
- 4000 BTC on OKCoin

Being a whale does not mean being a manipulator. A whale is anyone who can't easily get in/out remotely close to spot without suffering massive slippage and making a noticeable wave in the chart. In most cases, 1000BTC will take a huge bite out of any orderbook. As Meuh6879 said above, exchanges with very low liquidity like Kraken will be a smaller stack, but then the argument arises that you couldn't whale around on the big exchanges with only 200 BTC, so I would disagree with that simply because it's not effective at ANY one exchange.

I would say 1000BTC is considered a whale. A small whale, but a whale none the less. Market makers are 10k+ and Manipulative whales need 20k+.

on kraken 200? i dont think so wouldnt people from other exchanges start dumping coins when someone pumps with only 200?

It heavily depends on what altcoin do you want to be a whale in. A couple of thousand btc can help you cause some movements in the btc market, but with only a couple hundred, you can manipulate the altcoin scene significantly.

A weenie whale, that is. :D With that amount of BTC, you can easily manipulate small exchanges but not on the big ones. Market manipulators really need to have a deep pocket in order to dictate the market movement.

Even a bear whale with 30000 coins can be slaughtered in couple of hours, anything less than 10000 coins can not be called a whale  8)

True. It's hard to control the markets without the proper knowledge about how it moves. If you want to lead the market in your direction, you must first make your herd believe in your movements before executing your plans.

Assuming an oceanographic distribution, with your average codfish of about 9kg representing your typical user with with 1 bitcoin.

Your average adult whale is around 190,000 kg. Which corresponds to just over 21,000 bitcoin. Thats coincidentally so close to being 1/1000th of the total coins so it might as well be 21k

10x what it takes to get in the vlad club... sounds whaley to me.

LOL sgbett! Very interesting approach, and results seem pretty accurate as well.

As liquidity at different exchanges increases, the benchmark for becoming a whale would increase.
A whale would really need to be able to move the market.

depending on the market, at low volume market , id say 200 btc can easily do a manipulation, but to be a whale on a current known exchanger, id say above 10k btc to manipulate, otherwise you cant do so, because less than that, will only get your wall to be slaughter

Best answer so far in this thread!
It also seems very accurate, indeed. Five digits holding is to be considered a whale, as a rule of thumb.

Even if you hold 5 figures you would need luck and certain rumors (possitive or negative depending on where you want to go) to make people follow you and gain a solid traction towards a mega bubble/mega crash.

for low market yes but for big one think that even 10k coin will be small amount for this.

I'd say 2-3k BTC is enough for a whale.  Dumps and pumps might not even work with bigger volumes because there's not enough liquidity to buy back that much.

(And with 3x margin that's 6-10k BTC) which is actually more than enough to move Finex.

Also people talking about needing more BTC in the future to be a whale but actually as the price goes up you need less BTC to be a whale. 

Is a whale someone who trades on the market or just someone who has bought in from the start and never sold.  Winklevoss claim they never sold any of the 100k.

Hahahaha this is hilarious :D
I like that people with one coin are codfish, they're big!

People with no bitcoin are mere krill ;D

Most Bitcoin whales were early adopters who had the luck or foresight to become involved in the Bitcoin community when it was still largely unknown to the outside world. This can be verified this by looking at the blockchain - i.e. a few addresses control a very large number of bitcoins.

The definition of a whale being someone who has over 1,000 BTC makes sense because a whale is someone who has enough coins that their actions can cause a noticeable shift in the markets. 100 BTC would probably be enough to effect a small change in the Bitcoin markets and several times that (e.g. 200-500 BTC) would produce a very noticeable spike or drop in prices, but most people don't play with their entire balance.


There are many dead, almost zero volume coins on exchanges with minimal volume. It would be possible to manipulate the prices of some coins with just 0.1 BTC.

odd 100 btc  :-[

Grab 10 BTC, put them safely in cold storage and wait a couple of years. Don't lose them, don't mess around with them. In 5 years or so you can manipulate the market with 5000 mBTC - which people will find mezmerizing.

Here is my analysis: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946938.0

You need about 800 coins.

To become a whale... Besides owning over 1000 coins, whales don't post in this forum

40BTC is nothing in bitcoinland. That's less than $12,000 and 40BTC trades get eaten as if they didn't even exist. Often 5,000BTC is enough to swing the price of bitcoin a fair amount, which is currently about 1.5 million dollars. I would just call that a shark/dolphin though. About 3 million dollars or 10,000BTC would be a whale in my book.

With just 10-50 BTC, you can be a whale on most alt coins which in turn, you could even become a bitcoin whale with your huge gains from altcoins.