Which means that end 2017 they had a big profit, and as of today that profit is roughly 10k per bitcoin lower. This shows that the profit no longer is a profit, but probably a big loss. Only when closing the position you are sure about the result. 'mark to market' is not equal to "profit that can not turn in a loss anymore". It is just a valuation at a certain moment and can be completely different from the final result. Each bubble we see thousands of people who experience painfully what the difference is between 'mark to market' and the final result. Don't sell the skin till you have caught the bear.
Maybe not the exact number, but it could be 10% of people holding 85%. Would that be much better? Anyway, BTC reached worldwide saturation with its 20K price. Unless hedge funds jump in big, there is just not enough new money to push the price up that high. Also, the higher the price, the more money it needs to just keep it up. Assuming that most of the new coins enter the market fairly quick, 1800 coins need to be bought every day. Multiply that with 20K, and you get 36 million bucks new dollars needed, EVERYDAY. How long can get last???
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html 3.19% of adresses control 95.93% of all bitcoins. 1 person can have more then 1 adress, so the number of people can even be smaller. 96.8% OF ALL ADRESSES HAVE LESS THAN 1 BITCOIN.
I applaud @johnarb for being so nice to you. You proved our point exactly. 19,666,000 addresses contain zero to less than .1 Bitcoin which is what we are trying to tell you that most addresses are done and finished. An even more important point is that the addresses with the largest BTC are exchanges and they are by definition retail, so that really upsets your applecart.
ok lets give some wiggle room, say 10% owns 90%... or 20% owns 80%? in any case the price action is telling that the whales have the market cornered enough to make it go up/down 10% in a matter of hours. I have another thread - proof of work is proof of ponzi.
It's not so simple as there are several factors at play. So, let's say per the graph that ~88% of all bitcoin addresses that were ever created that contained any amount of btc and currently contain less than .1btc currently are change addresses or even go so far as addresses containing "dust" amounts ( a term used for unspendable/insignificant amount of btc), so they are not counted as an individual bitcoin owner. Now, we have a universe of addresses where you (falsely) assume are individually owned. How so? Because bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous and any address cannot be attributed to any person unless the person is careless or doesn't care, the address can be traced to him or her. In addition, a bitcoin owner can have not just one, but many addresses, and in fact is encouraged to have many wallets and many addresses per wallet. I don't claim to know if the whales are still in-control of most of the bitcoins in existence, or if they have cashed out a portion, or some, or most of their holdings, at a price of $100, $1000, $10,000 per bitcoin. When bitcoin first hit $1,200 in 2013, many bitcoin enthusiasts quit their jobs and falsely thought they could live off their bitcoin holdings, only to be awaken to the 2 year bear market and had to go back to work and sell most of their bitcoins in order to survive as the bitcoin bottomed at $165 each. What we do know, as bitcoin is a public ledger, is that Satoshi's bitcoins have not moved. If you wish to go down the rabbit hole, look into the concept of bitcoin days destroyed (not as bad as it sounds) which mathematically tries to explain the velocity (of money) or movement of bitcoin from address to address. So there you have it, my attempt at trying to dispel the myth, but neither claiming it's the truth, but more of a logical argument. No one should be claiming to know unless they can prove it mathematically. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.10287.pdf Bitcoin Average Dormancy: A Measure of Turnover and Trading Activity
I hear you.. but you didn't reply on the volatility part... to me that is a tell tale sign of a cornered market... or markets, as all of them move like this.
I will tell you a story in regards to volatility but I cannot offer you a proof. If you are a wealthy (deca or deci Millionaire) perhaps you can reach out to your connected friends in the Fintech industry and confirm or reject the notion. Most of the big-value (Circle will only deal with trades above $250K blocks, and some other dealers only deal with $5M+ block) trades happen in OTC. Supposedly, these trades are negotiated above current market prices (GDAX shows last trade price $7408). Why then does the price on GDAX crashes or goes up, this is what the US DOJ is looking into, there's manipulation in that retail section of the bitcoin market. Mt. Gox trustee should not be using the retail markets to dump the bitcoins as that is not the best price that can be negotiated, but for whatever reason, the trustee seems to be doing it, probably doesn't care whether the price of bitcoin crashes. When the US confiscated bitcoins were sold at auction, they sold for higher prices than the market. There's an OTC bitcoin market being driven by wealthy guys (or girls) that are trying to hedge their fiat wealth due to the massive printing by central banks worldwide (all assets are being inflated, junk bonds issued by bankrupt countries are being snatched by printed fiat). Take it for what it's worth unless you're one of the extremely wealth guys that can reach out to some insider contacts/dealers...
If whales are so afraid of moving the price with large buys/sells (I have to assume they are right) why don't they just play the market back and forth? Now with futures existing, a simple strategy: You have X cash. Buy futures for X/2, then start to buy BTC. When price increases once you run out of cash, sell all your futures with profit. Then short sell futures. As the end of the strategy start to sell your acquired BTCs and when you run out of them price should have dropped and then you cover your futures. Now you have 1.3 X cash (or whatever the profit was) Repeat it ad nauseum... I mean if it is so easy to move the price AND futures are not really connected to BTC's price (meaning with large future buys/sells you can not effect the price of BTC) there has to be someone playing this no brainer strategy????