Bitcoin Forum

Like people who own tons of Bitcoin or crypto but bought them without KYC? Either before KYC was a thing, or bought them through methods that did not involve KYC?




And how many people do you think hold a lot of wealth, who did buy with KYC, but anonymized them for privacy. Not for committing crime, but just mixed or XMR converted their btc and back to get anonymous bitcoin and are whales. Moving markets but no one, not even the US government, knows who they are?

Well, the whole point of privacy is that such data is hard or impossible to obtain. Adresses that hold a lot of coins could belong to organizations and not a single owner. Individual whales could have dozens of addresses with moderate amounts of coins, instead of putting all eggs in one basket. There are attempts to count the Bitcoin whales, but I seriously question their accuracy.

So, this is a question that no one can give a good answer.

You'll never know any metrics or data about them since you're talking about privacy and anonymity.

No one will know who they are, they're anonymous for a reason and that's why for these questions that you've brought up. Maybe someone can bring up a data and statistics on it but it will be questioned for accuracy.

Most whales are anonymous, only attention seeking morons announce publicly how many bitcoin they have. I know people like Saylor are ‘out’ so to speak but I’m not talking about them. Any whale is not a public figure will remain anonymous. There are too many security risks with publicly announcing how filthy rich you are.

Smart people say gery little when it’s not required.

If you want a very rough estimation, check: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

Obviously some of the addresses that hold a lot of bitcoin are exchanges, and the fact that people can hold multiple bitcoin on multiple addresses, would end you up with an inaccurate idea, but at least you have a rough idea.

We will likely not getting the figures, maybe there could be rough estimates, but we will never know.

And maybe some of them haven't touch their BTC for many years, just sitting on their wallet, and when they are going to move it, they could used mixers to hide and keep their identity private.

And as far as XMR goes, as early as 2020, IRS has offered $625k to anyone who can crack XMR's and other privacy centric crypto.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-irs-offers-a-625-000-bounty-to-anyone-who-can-break-monero-and-lightning

That's why we called them "anonymous" because we can't identify them. It's really difficult, there are some whales who are using multiple wallets without trace or connection to different wallets but only 1 owner. This is power of decentralization, it's just amazing because you can do it without someone knowing or someone can control your funds.

The term anonymous itself represents that the whales can't be traced. If the whale formula is based on the volume of holding, we can count the number of wallets holding the specific volume of bitcoin. With that calculation it is possible to have the number of Whale wallets and that doesn't indicate the number of Whale holders, because a single Whale holder can have multiple wallets.

Well, we can only make a rough guess out of Bitcoin addresses and how much Bitcoin is in there, but it can never be accurate. After all, we cannot equate addresses with individual owners. It is very possible that addresses that have so much Bitcoin belong to crypto companies and not to individual whales.

We also can't accurately tell whether certain whales bought their Bitcoin with or without KYC. It is very possible that whales who have so much Bitcoin made the purchase through OTC or through brokers.

Even though they buy with KYC only the exchange knows who/whale bought/owns the BTC, it's very likely that the exchange won't open this data and is quite doubtful that whales will buy it through the exchange because they could buy through other methods.
Addresses detected as having a lot of BTC are mostly exchange addresses, so it is very difficult or impossible to reveal how many whales have BTC or how much they have because their decision to own btc is anonymity.

Your question is contradicting.
You are asking the number of whales out there but the fact that you added the word "anonymous" contradicts your question. That's why there is the word anonymous because you don't know who they are and that goes to the whales and in fact, nobody can give you an exact number here.

I don't know exact but "probably" those whales are those who are owning an exchanges, those institutions who are involved in cryptocurrencies and there are some rich people out there who are involved into crypto as well but they are silent.

It seems like more and more people are holding more crypto, but being honest with individuals or organizations that want to remain anonymous on this matter would also be a difficult thing to do. As I know, even hackers, underground government organizations, etc., are always curious about crypto assets. We all suspect they hold a lot but can't know exactly, so the answer to OP's problem is hard to describe.

And keeping in mind when I say anonymous. I dont mean only to the public, rather, also to the government.

Unless they then mix those coins, or use XMR to anonymize them, the government would still know where that money is going correct?

All whale investors always want to use crypto with their privacy coz of many Government issues and restrictions. But anonymity is not always possible. Because most centralized exchangers make KYC mandatory for exchanging large amount. but if someone use cex then it is possible to Exchange and hold a largest amount anonymously. that’s why every whale investors always like CEX.

When it comes to being anonymous there, it is quite clear that it is not possible to know who they are and where they came from, because the word Anonymous itself has explained that this cannot be known and maybe only a few people are speculating there.
I think something like this is definitely a good move on their part because there's no way they would admit that they're a big-buying whale, unless what they really want is name and fame here.

Your topic title is its own answer!
If they are anonymous then you can't count them, even looking at addresses with certain balance is not the answer because an address with a large balance could belong to a service not an individual.
And if you could count individuals with certain amount of coins (like whales) then they would not be anonymous anymore.

As it was said there is no way to know that, but it is in the nature of Bitcoin that there are a lot of this whales. The reason is simple, in the beginning of Bitcoin there were only a few people involved even if at the same time there was a large supply of Bitcoin. Those people never did KYC but also not of them trade actively.

You can determine this by determining the number of whale holders before Exchange KYC is mandatory because those whales that only exist after the exchange KYC policy exist probably undergo on KYC for there holdings because they need to have a full report for there crypto assets due to the tax. There’s no tax filing requirements before for all crypto holdings so this is a good basis to get a number approximate whales that didn’t undergo KYC.

That perhaps they are anonymous, nobody knows them even if it was your friend, he won't tell you either of how much he holds.
And they are afraid to make it in public knowing that the government will after them for sake of taxes and oblige them to do it. They won't do any KYC, keeping their crypto assets remains anonymous and that is actually highly recommended just also to avoid any hacking interest.

I also do the same and keeping quiet seems to be normal in the crypto market.

I think aside from buying BTC without KYC, one should remember that there was a time when you could earn a significant amount because of how cheap Bitcoin was, as well as mine quite a lot. So being a whale without being identified seems pretty easy to me, as long as we're talking about early-ish adopters (I guess up to 2015-2016 it still very realistic). The question of how many people isn't easy, though. There are websites comprising lists of the richest Bitcoin addresses. Some of them are known to belong to crypto exchanges. As for others, they can also belong to companies and actually hold funds of many people, but they can also be personal addresses. And then, it's not so hard to imagine that several addresses can belong to one person. So I don't think it's easy to make any reasonable estimations, and there are also additional concerns, such as how much money is enough for us to consider a person a whale, and should we really count the 'whale' addresses whose funds haven't moves for, like, 10 years.

Usually whales are in a form of institution but if it's a single person, I think they buy bitcoin via OTC or over-the-counter. They find someone who sells bitcoin in their area then meet each other to do the trade.They don't go through to decentralized exchanges to buy because these DEXs' will definitely ask for some documents to withdraw that huge amount. It will also create a sudden pump on lower timeframes if they buy directly on those exchanges.

But there is a situation when very large volumes appear on the CEX for certain coins, is it not whales, ofcorse the exchange itself can to do this. I think there are different whales, someone prefers complete anonymity, someone can be verified and work openly. In my understanding, whales are the same people as us, just a little smarter, a little more discipline, someone is more fortunate, but otherwise we are all people.

Coinbase and Binance offers that kind of service. Meaning if you want to buy let's say 10 billion dollars worth, you can't just end up buying it right up, it would make the market go super high in a single moment and you can't have a decent buy averages at all. So, what do they offer? You just put your money there, give an OTC order, and if there is another OTC order on the other side, it meets you and handles your deal and gets a good deal.

Because, there are sellers who would like to sell a lot without hurting the market, and buyers who would like to buy without hurting the market and they meet each other on these platforms with help. That way billions change hand, but the market doesn't move at all.

This is as hard to count as it is to count how many actual millionaires there are in the world.  Many of them hide their wealth or their status from the public and it is extremely likely there are a ton of millionaires hiding this fact from their own Government.

With Bitcoin things get even worse because I can split up a thousand Bitcoins into as many addresses as I want.  I could in fact split it into 100,000 addresses worth 0.01 BTC each and you would never know I have this much wealth.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I don't understand why you mention Bitcoin is just like a bad tool to hide their wealth from public including government, there's no reason why we need to know how many whales out there and which person it is etc. I think that's a real whales since they're not flex their wealth to many people, only he and god know how much his money. Those kind people will live very comfortable, he have much money to buy anything he like and at the same time he doesn't need to worry for if poor people asking money or food or someone that will attack you in your home.

You might have misunderstood my post.  I meant it is harder to count how many Bitcoin whales there are than it is to count how many actual millionaires there are in the world.  I am definitely not the person to say Bitcoin is a tool to hide wealth from the Government, especially since it gets harder to hide it the more money you have and we are speaking about whales.  But the truth is, you can not really count accurately with how easy it is to split coins.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

Unless, you obtain the data from the exchanges themselves, you aren't going to know. So, to the vast majority of users here, most users are anonymous in terms of how much they are holding. However, if you're one of the companies which has access to this information from the exchanges, which by the way is a lot more than some of you think, you aren't going to know.

I mean, this is also a good thing. You don't want people knowing how much you have, especially if it's a rather large amount. I feel like people know how important privacy is, but at times we actually forget that privacy is also a right of everyone else, and we shouldn't be digging into things to find out who owns what. Hence, why I'm pretty much against any data being collected, and distributed to other companies. Google are one of the worst for this sort of information being circulated, and I can almost guarantee that they have data on you, including Bitcoin related data.

Is there a possibility of anonymous popes, using the identity of relatives or stealing other people's data, in order to avoid taxes, what is not impossible is not done by anonymous, because what I know is that there are still some exchanges that do not implement KYC that do not use video. live, and only use identity data, or hold a piece of paper to ensure ownership of their assets, unfortunately not all exchanges use KYC like that, so it's very difficult to find out how many anonymous whales are worldwide.

Yeah there’s likely a pretty large amount of whales out there who remain completely anonymous being that they opened these wallets long before many required KYC, or they just did a good job of keeping their wallets and transactions relatively private. As for how many, who knows.

This is true approach. Many people think that they could manage to do something that is data backed, but in reality I could just have 100 address' with 10k in it and that would be a million dollars. So, we do not know how many whales there are. I still think that what makes you whale is depending on where you live and not the amount.

Someone with a million dollars in London is not the same as someone who has 1 billion dollars in Nigeria, so there are differences that we have to calculate and that is why I do not think that it would be fair to call them all the same thing. This is personal opinion of course, but there are more people who became rich in smaller nations for sure.

Most of the whales and/or people possessing big quantities of bitcoins are anonymous. We can find the address containing most bitcoin and this data is publicly available but do we know who is the owner behind these wallets? No.

KYC is required only by the centralized wallets while the majority of the crypto is stored in decentralized wallets.

there are a dozen whales out there i think on every country there is at least one or two whale.

and mostly they hide on private wallet not a centralized exchange and you can actually track it on whale alert twitter or telegram

Would rather believe they are in fact trying to AVOID getting every move of theirs tracked down.  A whale that wants to be on 'Whale Alert' kind of accounts is just an attention seeker and most whales want peace and privacy.  Would you like it knowing that any move of yours is going to mean a public announcement on a highly popular Twitter account?  I would not.  In fact, I would feel concerned.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I am sure that such people remain in the shadows and we most likely will not recognize the identity of many such whales, and also many addresses with huge amounts lie without a single transaction, perhaps waiting for their time...so no one will tell us publicly for their savings.

it would be difficult to answer this question. because if it's about the anonymous pope. be it an individual or an organization. then it will be difficult to trace it. for the popes must have been very conscientious and shrewd men. they could even be a genius. and most likely they will not keep their BTC in one wallet. they must have spread it across multiple wallets. so that people will not suspect that of the many wallets with quite a lot of bitcoin contents, each wallet is owned by the same party. but there must be such a whale. but it is difficult to say how many there are. because they are Anonymous.

If they have remained anonymous for so long then it is obvious they are not going to reveal their identities to anyone, however if anything it is surprising they can hold their coins for so long without touching them.

Because the huge amount of money they have can be converted into a huge amount of fiat, so this brings the question of whether or not they were already very wealthy when they first got in bitcoin or if they do not care at all about the fiat valuation of bitcoin and they are simply waiting for bitcoin to become more widely adopted to begin to use their coins.

Nowadays many prefer to hide their wealth due to various legal complications. When they have a large amount of crypto assets, they also try to figure out how to divide it into smaller parts. They will never KYC. As a result, it is not possible to determine the number of whales naturally.

maybe many of them don't want to be known because they think the safety of the money invested / transacted is safe. this is a lot of them making trust in crypto rather than financial institutions that regulate and keep privacy in full control. I think investors are very comfortable with this anonymity. I also really believe in this type of blockchain transaction. I think the trend without KYC is that most of them are comfortable with p2p or even easy access to other non-custodial wallets

Keeping them anonymous is the thing they are supposed to do and no one is urged to show up in the public. In fact, the creator of Bitcoin does first.
Many people hated KYC, not just because they are concerned about their security and privacy, but their main reason is to keep away from the corrupt government milking people by imposing huge taxes.
Keeping anonymous really matters for now as we don't know what is the plan of the other people.