Give us your whale theories.

[European Central Bank]

Do they exist? How many are there? Who are they?

Are they still gonna be 'accumulating' in 2030? What happens when a new breed of whale accumulates from the old ones?

Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?

Hit us with your wildest thoughts.

[Shiroslullaby]

Well, personally, if I was a billionaire, I would have no problem investing a couple million in Bitcoin since its an interesting idea.
So I'm sure there are some people who have a couple to maybe 10 million dollars in BTC and don't care at all if they lose it.
Theres probably a few people like this and they would be able to buy and sell huge amounts.

Does anyone have records of some address moving a HUGE amount of coins?
How much work do you think these people would do to spread out the coins to different addresses and make it harder to determine if they were doing some kind of market manipulation?

[HatakeKakashi]

If I had around 10k BTC, I would sell all my Bitcoins when users were about to buy.
I would cause a drop in the BTC price by selling my coins and make other users worried. They would sell their BTC too. Then I would buy those BTC too at low cost. Then I would repeat. So simple

[Leonard2016]

Do they exist? How many are there? Who are they?

Are they still gonna be 'accumulating' in 2030? What happens when a new breed of whale accumulates from the old ones?

Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?

Hit us with your wildest thoughts.

these are all very interesting questions i will make sure to watch this topic to see what others have to say to this.

but i think it is not possible for us to tell these things because of bitcoin anonymity and the fact that they will not hold all their funds in one address so we can find them or have an estimate on how many whales there are.

and as for 2030 or in the future in general i think there will still be whales but they will be smaller becaue by that time i would expect a lot more people in bitcoin and the more investors means more spread so whales can have less amount and less power.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

If I had around 10k BTC, I would sell all my Bitcoins when users were about to buy.
I would cause a drop in the BTC price by selling my coins and make other users worried. They would sell their BTC too. Then I would buy those BTC too at low cost. Then I would repeat. So simple

That's along the lines of what they do, very simple yet very effective. I suppose the danger is they get badly burnt one day & some big news causes the price to moon after they've sold meaning they can't afford to buy back what they've sold.

[pearl11]

If I had around 10k BTC, I would sell all my Bitcoins when users were about to buy.
I would cause a drop in the BTC price by selling my coins and make other users worried. They would sell their BTC too. Then I would buy those BTC too at low cost. Then I would repeat. So simple

Youre right,that is so simple and the most common way to have an easy profit. Just go with the flow.
By doing this everyday you can be a millionare someday.

[Kellor]

A few days ago, the combined Ethereum ETH + ECT volume was over 200,000 bitcoin. So whales have move there.

[European Central Bank]

that's true but I reckon it's very hard to imagine that any of these guys are playing with eth to get more eth. they're in it for the bitcoin. so that still makes them bitcoin whales and those types of volumes make the big ones bigger than ever.

[Herbert2020]

Do they exist? How many are there? Who are they?
Are they still gonna be 'accumulating' in 2030? What happens when a new breed of whale accumulates from the old ones?
Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?
Hit us with your wildest thoughts.

of course they exist. bitcoin has been an excellent way for them to make huge amounts of money. i can't say about the future especially far future like in 2030 but they are here to stay and accumulate as much bitcoin as they can while it is cheap and nobody else knows about it.

[d5000]

Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?

I was particularly curious about this question.

I don't think whales have a "big red button". A cryptocurrency is not a penny stock. Well, I actually don't know if this statement is bullish or bearish.

- If it's bearish: Crypto-nerds would continue to use Bitcoin. They would have "got out" a couple of days before the big crash. But then they would enter again. Remember: A cryptocurrency is what the community decides. If the community accepts that it's a valid substitute for regular fiat currencies, then it is. Period.
- If it's bullish: At a first glance, it would seem like it's easy to make Bitcoin a massive success for the public. But it's not. It will take time, because there are many services that must be more user-friendly. Bitcoin is still not ready for the masses. That doesn't mean it won't. But YOU (service providers) must make it ready for it.

[MatTheCat]

Do they exist? How many are there? Who are they?

Are they still gonna be 'accumulating' in 2030? What happens when a new breed of whale accumulates from the old ones?

Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?

Hit us with your wildest thoughts.

Biggest most active whales are those behind the Chinese mining scene. China by now owns Bitcoin and runs the market as it's own personal cash cow, and as Bitcoin continues to grow and the network resource demand becomes increasingly bloated, miner politics are posing a grave danger to the future viability of the whole project, which in turn renders Bitcoin increasingly unappealing for Western based whales.

A Western based whale can own as many Bitcoins as he likes, but with 80% of mining capacity in China, he is invested in phenomena that is fully at the mercy of a culture that Western finance simply does not trust to act honourably nor reliably (towards outsiders).

[belmonty]

Do they exist? How many are there? Who are they?

Are they still gonna be 'accumulating' in 2030? What happens when a new breed of whale accumulates from the old ones?

Do they have a big red button that releases bitcoin when they're ready?

Hit us with your wildest thoughts.

Biggest most active whales are those behind the Chinese mining scene. China by now owns Bitcoin and runs the market as it's own personal cash cow, and as Bitcoin continues to grow and the network resource demand becomes increasingly bloated, miner politics are posing a grave danger to the future viability of the whole project, which in turn renders Bitcoin increasingly unappealing for Western based whales.

A Western based whale can own as many Bitcoins as he likes, but with 80% of mining capacity in China, he is invested in phenomena that is fully at the mercy of a culture that Western finance simply does not trust to act honourably nor reliably (towards outsiders).

There are addresses containing massive numbers of coins that haven't showed any activity for years. The coins in them are so old that they were probably acquired by Westerners. China might have 80% of mining capacity now, but it didn't in the early days when there were more Bitcoins in rewards. I don't think China has all the biggest whales, the West probably has the biggest and oldest whales.

[European Central Bank]

There are addresses containing massive numbers of coins that haven't showed any activity for years. The coins in them are so old that they were probably acquired by Westerners.

you can't be much of a whale if you don't make any use of your coins. I was talking about the people who actively play around with the market.

I agree that overall the number of coins is maybe evenly spread globally, but it's the Chinese who are actively producing them now and they know what they're worth. the little guy who filled his garage with cpu and gpus and mined tons of them might have deleted them or gone crazy so he's not relevant.

[Kellor]

At the moment, somebody has 100,000 bitcoins can manipulate the market. In the future, nobody will have more than 100,000 bitcoins.