the whales probably have millions in cash and other assets so theyre probably the last ones who will panic
millionaires are unlikely to keep 100% of their wealth in btc alone
if anyone panic it would be the small fry that make their crumbs spreading FUD and shorting btc
People keep thinking that the 'bitcoin whales' are living these high lifestyles in multimillion dollar mansions, spending money fast, needing huge incomes to keep their lifestyles up, and judging from the few I know, it isn't that way.
I know five different people any one of whom own enough Bitcoin to cause a panic if they should try to sell out in a single day. Two of them are college students living in dorm rooms. To them their bitcoin holdings mean they can take as many semesters of college as they damn well want without worrying about graduation, getting a job, etc. But they're feeling no need to live any higher on the tree than a dorm room that's paid for.
Three don't own cars and one of the others has an old
used car. He says he was channeling Sam Walton when he bought it - "with as much money as I have, I can have any car I want.... Well, exactly. With this much money I no longer have to care what anyone else thinks of my car. I can just buy the one I want."
One guy cashed out enough to buy his current house (which aside from a nice location in San Francisco is nothin' special - just an ordinary 2 bedroom 1 bathroom house), and two of them have used bitcoin money to buy cars.
One of them (the biggest holder) says he's never going to sell any more. Ever. Because it would be bad for the bitcoin economy. Maybe when he passes on, his granddaughter might. And she might not. She's never going to know about it until she inherits anyway, and even then it'll be a trust - she's not going to get more than 5% of his holdings per year.
To the extent they've sold bitcoin, yes, they've banked a few million, but they've done so mainly just to redistribute assets for a more reasonable investment risk profile. Aside from their accountants and maybe a few other serious early-days people, nobody really has any idea how much they've got. Or how much more they used to have.
And I'm eating crow every time I talk to these guys because I'm the guy who said, Naw, CryptoCash has been tried before and it's ALWAYS crashed or been a scam or failed or gotten shut down by the SEC or whatever. So even though I was there at the very beginning and *could* have made stupid money from CPU mining like they did, I didn't buy in until three years later.
Anyhow, these are your whales, guys. They're just people. Mostly cryptographers, whether amateur or professional, but only because that's where the thing popped up first. And to be honest most of them don't give a rat's ass about being rich, aside from it making their life more convenient or making them free to work on what they WANT to work on. They're a very different group from people like the Winklevii who came in for NO OTHER PURPOSE besides getting rich as fast as possible.
