Topic: Is there least effect of whale manipulation on bitcoin among all crypto coins ? (Read 530 times)

Whales may not have such a magnificent impact but the market can be manipulated through social media hypes. I have come across platform created just to gather investors across the world and promise huge cash back through pump. Though this is not so common with Bitcoin but we can agree that information about bitcoin on social media plays a significant role in impacting Bitcoin price to some extent.

To be fair, none of us have any concrete evidence that the market is being manipulated because no one is stupid enough to publicly admit that they are manipulating the market. But with what has been happening, we can see that bitcoin is very sensitive to news, just a small news like you mentioned is enough to make the market fluctuate. If that's not a sign of manipulation, then what is?

It would be naive to think that bitcoin has become so big that it cannot be manipulated, bitcoin is just bigger than altcoins, it is not as big as we think. It is nothing compared to other financial markets like gold, stocks, forex.

Just one negative news can cause the stock market to evaporate trillions of dollars, and that number is many times larger than the total capitalization of bitcoin and the total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market. That shows how small bitcoin is.



https://www.straitstimes.com/business/85-trillion-wiped-out-from-global-stock-markets-but-are-recession-fears-premature

Bitcoin is a decentralized currency but most of the trading volume and liquidity happens on centralized exchanges. So it cannot be said that it is not manipulated because it is decentralized, whales manipulate the price of Bitcoin to make profit but they do not manipulate the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin's capitalization is 3 times larger than ETH and hundreds of times larger than other altcoins, but compared to assets like gold or stock companies, it is nothing. Manipulating it may seem difficult to us, but for institutions, whales who manage hundreds of billions of dollars, it is not so difficult. Also Bitcoin is very sensitive to news and they can manipulate it with news, it doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to manipulate.

I like your opinion, whales will not be easy to manipulate Bitcoin because the price of Bitcoin is already very expensive so if they want to manipulate the price of Bitcoin then whales must have billions of dollars in capital to manipulate the market price.
Unlike Altcoins whose prices are much cheaper than Bitcoin so whales find it easier to control Altcoins in the crypto market, but buying Altcoins is very risky because most Altcoins can only survive on the exchange for a few years.

The higher the capitalization of the coin (token), the more powerful and richer the manipulators (whales). There are legal entities and individuals who have had a great influence on the price of Bitcoin at different stages of its development.

For example, we can recall the cryptocurrency company Bitfinex and its powerful friends and partners (in 2017). Or adventurers Roger Ver and Jihan Wu (in the fall of 2017). Or Wall Street dealers who introduced Bitcoin futures and declared that Bitcoin would now be under their complete control (2017 - 2018).

Whales - manipulators are trying to influence the price of Bitcoin. But this is not easy, since the coin is decentralized and has a large capitalization.

At present, we can assume that such whales - manipulators are spot ETFs - funds on Bitcoin.

You are wrong for saying there is no least manipulation on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not like other cryptocurrency that gets manipulated easily and this is why Bitcoin is the most dependable cryptocurrency. Bitcoin also gets manipulated but there is a difference. Manipulating Bitcoin has to be expensive therefore not every whale will want to do that but there are some that tries and do not succeed. I saw a news that an address that mined Bitcoin during the days of Satoshi still being active just move some Bitcoin from the address for the first time, what this news means is the whale is thinking of selling his Bitcoin and this can create panic among other retail investors and they begin to sell causing the price of Bitcoin to fall, this is manipulation because they have cause a reaction that is making people to want to sell.

For this to answer, I will have to break it down for you:

- Whale: someone who is big enough to attack small fishes
- Bitcoin Whale: someone who holds a large amount of Bitcoins

If I remember correctly, there are only 1 Million Bitcoins left on exchanges. If suddenly, someone sell 10% of that which is 100k BTC on an exchange, the price will surely go down. But the chance of someone having 100k BTC is very rare. You can consider Microstrategy a whale as they own 252,220 BTCs as of today. But the chances of them selling it are zero to none.

No, there is never least effect of whale manipulation on bitcoin among all crypto coins. The " whale " is  a new and strange thing in business world. Suddenly, the crypto market went to a very high level. Or come down too fast. No other market or business has this much up and down. And whale is perhaps the beauty and the infrastructure of this business. Because all altcoins are descendants of Bitcoin. Therefore, the vale affects all altcoins. As bitcoin rise all altcoin rise up but as bitcoin come down allialtcoin goes down

Even though bitcoin manipulation is a bit harder than altcoins, but I think whales still prefer to manipulate bitcoin over any altcoin because bitcoin has better liquidity and manipulation is harder to detect. Not to mention, the entire crypto market is still moving with bitcoin, so whales just need to find a way to manipulate bitcoin to be able to manipulate the entire crypto market.

Everyone says bitcoin is hard to manipulate but I think the opposite. Whales and market makers take advantage of bitcoin's high volatility, and they don't even have to put much effort into manipulating it. Sometimes it just takes spreading rumors or positive news like the US government moving most of the bitcoins, Mt.gox selling bitcoins or someone secretly buying bitcoins in large amounts...Just news like that can change things very quickly because they know that the market is very sensitive to news.
Cryptocurrency is a very small market with little regulation, so manipulation occurs more frequently than in other financial markets. But many people still stubbornly believe that bitcoin cannot be manipulated because it is decentralized  .

The whale can manipulated but that will be difficult. The situation was different than in a few years ago whereas Bitcoin price is not in a high price so people who has many Bitcoin can moves the price. But now, with the Bitcoin price is at a high price, not many people can move the price. Maybe only those who have a large Bitcoin amount can shake the price but I don't think they will want to do that. But if the whale see a way to manipulate the price, maybe they will do that for their benefit so when they achieve the goals, they will let the market make a decision where to moves. The news plays a big effect that happen in the market so we can see many bad news can effect the market situation and makes many people panic with the bad news.

Although Bitcoin is currently the most used cryptocurrency, whales can still manipulate it. Indeed, recent estimates show that huge investor whales of Bitcoin continue to move markets. For instance, in August 2024, a huge sell order of about 12,000 Bitcoins raised fears over the possibility of market manipulation since large trades can result in huge swings in price.

Large holders of Bitcoin have been gathering large sums of it, and whale activity has gone up in recent times. Based on that event, I think I can take some conclusion that whales can still manipulate the price of Bitcoin. Even though it is true that Bitcoin is less vulnerable to whale manipulation compared to altcoins, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin is 100% invulnerable to be manipulated.

Whales manipulate the market more when there's fear in the market and the price of Bitcoin is declining, as the market has seen a dip most whales will use this chance to push for fud that'll see the market fall further so they can buy when everybody is panicking to sell. All cryptocurrency gets manipulated by whales but there's less manipulation because of the marketcap of Bitcoin. Whales know that there are many investors waiting for the dip to buy hence their manipulation will be favouring others and not only their own self which isn't what they want because whales are greedy and what to make the most profits from the market through manipulation. To see the whales in full action is to observe some altcoins like newly created altcoins and you can see them manipulating the price. When whales are manipulating the price, don't fall into their trap and be panicking like most people in the market do that don't have experience will be panicking but be buying.

It is not least effect but high effect of whales participating in bitcoin more than altcoins. The demand and supply of bitcoin is high and for altcoin is low. The demand of altcoins whole have high but because high transaction fee couple with the congestion made many investors to leave altcoins. And they have loss enough investors. And from onset many people don't like to invest altcoins because of the nature they portray in the cryptocurrency world. So many investors of cryptocurrency see altcoins as shitcoins. And if you look at the cryptocurrency market cap, you will discover that, many investors in altcoin since last year have not gotten any profit and now that the market is decreasing or going down, they are losing again.

Gold's market capitalization is $17 trillion, the US stock market capitalization is $50 trillion, and the global market capitalization is $109 trillion, while bitcoin's market capitalization is just over $1 trillion and has a liquidity of $30 billion/day. Based on this simple data, do you think Bitcoin's liquidity is has already left behind other traditional markets? 

A market capitalization of $1 trillion sounds huge when compared to the GDP of 3rd world countries or small financial institutions. But when compared to other assets or financial markets in the world, bitcoin is very small and even nothing. So it would be naive to say that it cannot be manipulated or is too big to be manipulated. But the advantage of the small cap market is that the growth potential is huge and that means we still have plenty of opportunities to make big profits from bitcoin.

Considering it's market cap and the numbers of investors involved, whales manipulation might be a difficult thing to say when it comes to Bitcoin. But we can't overlook the effect of news and rumors. Bitcoin just went below $54K some minutes ago, with no clear information on what happened or who is selling. This is a clear opportunity for few individuals(not sure of who they are) to start passing rumors inorder to push others into selling, so they can buy the dip for themselves.

The demand for altcoins is limited because their name is pretty self explanatory: alternative coins. Alternative to what? To bitcoin. If you really believe in cryptocurrencies bitcoin is the clear choice, is you want to take some risks then buy altcoins. Manipulating the bitcoin market is way more difficult today compared to years ago but, in my opinion, there still is manipulation.

Less liquidity than traditional financial markets ? I thought bitcoin has already left behind most of the stocks or offline companies in USA also.

Bitcoin's popularity and larger market cap do offer some protection against whale manipulation compared to smaller altcoins. However, whales can still influence Bitcoin's price due to its relatively low liquidity compared to traditional financial markets. It's less susceptible than many altcoins, but we shouldn't ignore the potential for large holders to impact the market

There are many whale investors of Bitcoin which contributes to every market price crash and pump however they cannot do it alone unlike with some altcoins wherein a single whale could bury a new coin. Factor I guess is its large market cap which represents how many people are having Bitcoin holdings. As long as demand and supply is concerned, big investors will always matter.They're most likely multiple groups or just a couple of numbers. I can't agree with Bitcoin's total immunity against price manipulation. Just check on the charts and simply look at long candles on shorter time frames, the answer is there already. However they're not solely responsible of the dumps; it's a combination of big and small investors alongside domino effect. Observe every uptrend; there will always be a consolidation at 'peak' prices because big investors are selling on those lines, and once small investors do the same thing, expect for a continuous decline. Not a new thing by the way.

I agree with what Catenaccio has just said and in addition to what he as said from my opinion, many people will buy BTC during the bear season while many will be skeptical to buying altcoins during bear season because the tendency of BTC price correction is higher than altcoins, hence, altcoins even depends on BTC rising price to also rise and when the timing is longer at bear season they may move to coin grave yard and cease existing.

There is no financial market that is not subject to manipulation, including the stock market or the gold market. The smaller the market, the easier it is to manipulate, and with a market without many regulations and freedom, manipulation will take place more easily. Bitcoin's capitalization is only 1.5 trillion and the entire market has a capitalization of 2.4 trillion, which is smaller than the GDP of a country like Germany or smaller than a technology company like Apple. Compared to the gold market capitalization of 15 trillion and the stock market of more than 100 trillion, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are nothing and still very small. So manipulation will be easier and more frequent.
Bitcoin is even very susceptible to manipulation by fake news spread on social networks, let alone that it will be immune to hidden forces from Wall Street.

I don’t think there is some secret cabal of whales that is holding meetings and deciding when to pump the price of Bitcoin and when to make it drop. Manipulation usually occurs at the small cap level, with newly launched pre-mined tokens. It is not necessarily whales manipulating the price, but sometimes it is developers working with social media influencers and minor celebrities.

Bitcoin is immune from these types of organized pump and dump campaigns, unless you believe the conspiracy theories about Tether printing fake money and creating artificial demand, but I have not seen any convincing evidence of this.

Not all altcoins, maybe only a few top altcoins have an impact on the increase or decrease in price.
Market behavior is different, but based on our experience in the market, Bitcoin always has an impact on altcoins even though it is only a top altcoin.

In terms of market behavior, altcoins can be manipulated such as market cap levels and ranks on the list, but it will be very difficult for Bitcoin because the number is fixed in the sense that it does not increase anymore.

The relation is there but it is not that simple.

Like when bitcoin price increases, it does not mean price of every altcoin will also increase. Some might decrease by good margin.
Same was we can see the behavior when bitcoin price decreases and altcoin behaves differently.

The thing is that bitcoin is the first in cryptocurrency to have dominance and I believe that any other coins is just copings bitcoin ways of method, so believe me that bitcoin is like father to other coins so that is why when is he a new coin that is being launched today many of them is being compete with Bitcoin so from my own understanding the demand of altcoin cannot be higher than the demand of Bitcoin mostly a particular altcoin why people love to go to altcoin it is because when you invest on it there is every possibilities that you will make a good profit, so therefore we should understand the basics things that has to do with bitcoin before we compare it together, so bitcoin investment is different from altcoins despite all is cryptocurrency

Bitcoin does have some whale manipulation, but not in price and yet in news. Meaning, whales do not buy or sell to manipulate the market, they can do that with altcoins, some of them with just less than 100k as well because they have low volume. Whereas in the bitcoin world we are talking about something that will take a while and I think it's quite easy to see that we are checking on something that is taking time, and bitcoin will not be moved like that with just buying and selling, would require billions.

Instead, they manipulate via news, meaning if they want it down, they put fear into the markets by sharing stuff that looks scary to retail investors, or if they want a good return they just share good news to make you hyped instead.

Yes, bro, there are less possible means of manipulating the price of Bitcoin compared to how other altcoins prices can easily be manipulated by the owners of the project themselves. There are some project owners that can even list their tokens on an exchange, where they can easily manipulate the price, but the price of Bitcoin cannot just be easily manipulated because it is decentralized. There are also some commonly known facts that can cause the price to rise or drop. 

It's bigger than you think because of leverage. People who use leverage hurt themselves, but the urge to gamble is often too strong.

When a whale sells a large amount of bitcoin, levered traders are the first to go down. Bitcoin would be much less volatile if leveraged trading was allowed only to a certain amount like 5x, but that's wishful thinking.

As for Altcoins, I don't think it's impossible for marketcap manipulation to occur, but with Bitcoin I haven't found a strong reason that can confirm that Bitcoin can be manipulated. The repeated sentence is not none, but a little.
You can do the rest yourself. The level of difficulty whales have in manipulating the altcoin market is different when they try to do it on the Bitcoin market.
Altcoin marketcap who is willing to pay more.

Whales can only manipulate what they have, they can't do that to the Bitcoin. What they do to manipulate the price of Bitcoin is they bought the altcoins they want to pump at less price and this reduce the circulating supply from the holders and few other traders and then they buy back the available coins continuesly until the meet their target before they offload their bag in the market. They don't have the money to buy all the Bitcoin from other trader because it's too expensive to manipulate the price.

If you sum up the total circulating supply of Bitcoin that are in exchanges, they are far less than the Bitcoin that can be found outside exchange wallet and for this, it will be difficult to manipulate the price of Bitcoin as less supply is deposited in the centralized exchanges and this numbers can't be manipulated to play the price of Bitcoin but when you compare and contrast the supply of altcoins in exchanges and external wallets, you will know why it's easy to control altcoins.

Totally correct !!

The amount of money needed to manipulate Bitcoin when we consider the marketcap of BTC is in the trillions, and who in the right mind would want to risk this much just to paint markets in their liking of which there is risk of losing or being liquidated should things go against you... honestly it's not just worth it!

But on the contrary, the most manipulated coins/tokens are usually the Altcoins because marketcap for these is usually small and with a couple of dollars a whale can easily pump or dump the coin with a simple buy/sell.

I think the OP might have used the word “popular” to describe the user base of bitcoin, the diversity of bitcoin as a digital asset is what set it apart in terms of manipulation or even any potential risk as more people run nodes which is part of its security. In terms of manipulation is it as you have pointed out, the amount needed for any manipulation is definitely not an amount that even if a corporation will never wants to give out.

Memcoins are just those shitcoins that one person can hold upto 30 percent of the coin and once they liquidate the coin the entire coin feels it and goes dust, same for the low market cap coins.


Exactly the movement of some supply sometimes aren’t that much to cause problem to bitcoin price rather it is the media most at times exaggerating everything and thereby causing FUD among the holders or investors. The large diversity is what set bitcoin apart.

Let it not surprise you that most of the population that is into crypto currency, which is speculated to be a large number of people, might just know about bitcoin, but a lot of them don't have any single volume of bitcoin in their crypto holdings; it's all filled with altcoins. 
 
The demand for Altcoin is limited depending on what the person going into crypto currency has in mind in the first place. If it's just for them to chase a large profit, then Bitcoin might not be an option for them, but if it's for privacy and something they want to hold for a long time, they will definitely have some Bitcoins in their portfolio.

More than 50% of BTC is in the hands of individuals. WHales can manipulate the market, but the influence is not too huge.

Popularity and manipulation has no correlation. Bitcoin is difficult to manipulate because the user base is huge. It's easier for whales to manipulate the altcoin market as it's smaller in size. To manipulate Bitcoin market, I huge amount of Bitcoin holding is needed and only corporate have such kind of money. It's rare for individual whales to have such kind of Bitcoins which will allow them to manipulate the market.

Memecoins are the easiest to manipulate. Rather majority of the memecoins are hugely manipulated to give benefits to the creators.

If you compare the manipulation of bitcoin with altcoins, it is absolutely true, simply put, the larger the market capitalization, the harder it is to manipulate.

But if you compare bitcoin with other financial markets, bitcoin manipulation is the largest because bitcoin's capitalization is still very small compared to gold or stocks. In addition, the market still does not have too many regulations, cryptocurrency is still a free market, so manipulation will be easier than in other financial markets. But once involved in the financial market, it is difficult to avoid manipulation, manipulation is part of this game, IMO.

Maybe, sort of.
But you know what when the price of Bitcoin goes that much, we're all saying that there's no manipulation and the increase is due to good news. And when the market is going down hill, we're all looking to blame for something and one of it is about the manipulation that comes from the whales. I'm not sure about the least effect of it, but it seems to be transferable from one coin to another and goes back to Bitcoin.

When Bitcoin price increase, altcoins price increase more.
When Bitcoin price decrease, altcoins price decrease more.

So, if the whale manipulating Bitcoin market, it also affect altcoins price too. The demand of altcoins could be higher than Bitcoin if they're hype, but hype won't last long and it will not affect Bitcoin price.

The most important metric when it comes to market manipulation is trading volume. Bitcoin currently has a 24 hour trading volume of over $28 billion, to be able to manipulate the market you'll need an amount closer to that figure, even if several whales were able to pool $1 billion together to try and tank the market, it will easily absorb the impact of such trades with minimal effect on the price.

Another important factor in market manipulation is the general sentiment about the currency. If there's an attempt to manipulate a coin which is not trusted by its holders, they will very quickly dump it at the slightest FUD. Bitcoin is a more trusted network and will still be trusted by many at the face of FUD.

That’s probably true. I mean bitcoin has many whales who can pump and dump the markets but the situation is much worse with the altcoins where only a few guys control the whole market. btc and altcoin price volatility supports my arguments too. Bitcoin is much much less volatile compared to alts. It is because many more people hold btc. The supply is spread over many more people and makes it harder to manipulate the prices. When btc goes down ~8%, alts go ~20%. It is an asset with a trillion use market cap in the end. When it goes down 10%, 100 billion dollars evaporate. Crazy.

I maintain an opinion that whale manipulations are more of a conspiracy theory than proven reality with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a huge market capitalization, too big for major manipulations. Certain announcements or events that involve the movement of large amounts of money (billions of dollars) can have a short-term impact on the price, but those are not coordinated attacks. For instance, the price fell down significantly when the pandemic was announced in 2020, but that wasn't a whale manipulation. Similarly, the price went down recently amidst announcements of Mt Gox repayments, but no manipulation here either.
I believe that altcoins with low market capitalization are susceptible to manipulations, but Bitcoin is not like that and I agree that it's the least manipulated coin (in a sense that manipulating its price is almost impossible in practice).

Yes the amount for a whales to actually manipulate bitcoin will probably be huge very huge amount that a single whale cannot have. According to CoinMarketCap the market cap for bitcoin is around $1.14T, so imagine the amount needed to move the bitcoin market by a single while. According to reports you can’t have a single whale or institution holding at least 5% of Bitcoin circulating supply. In Altcoins most especially those that uses POS you have a validators who are mostly big whales and this are people that in real sense can manipulate the market. So the market cap for Altcoins and number of holders which is relatively small compared to bitcoin sets them up easily to be manipulated than bitcoin.


I can’t say for sure but with 80% certainty I can tell your that almost everyone who holds  actually uses hold a fraction of bitcoin for security purposes, except those that are gambling on some low cap memecoins. Reason why OP said many people use bitcoin than Altcoins is the fact the Altcoins are many and not a single entity like bitcoin. Some can be holding Solana and never holds ETH or some ETH holders can never hold BNB which is different from Bitcoin.

As for correction we all see the effect of bitcoin on all other Altcoins, bitcoin can never go as low as 70% if you ask me, a move down to that point definitely killing almost all the Altcoins available.

I would say the opposite than your saying. Bitcoin has biggest marketcap and dominate the cryptocurrency market but I believe there are more people who don't use Bitcoin but use altcoins or invest in altcoins. They don't actually make good decisions because altcoins are more risky for either trading or investment. Holding altcoins in a bear market in one market cycle, which lasts about 2 years is very terrible.

Bitcoin can have 70% or 80% correction from its all time high but altcoins have deeper corrections, 90% or 99%. Many of altcoin projects die in bear market because altcoin developers are more easily to abandon their projects, and wait for new trends to create new projects.

The more the marketcap in relation to the more the people that are buying and selling, the less the manipulation. Yes, there is least of whales manipulation if it is about bitcoin. I do not think bitcoin market can easily be manipulated unlike most altcoins that just few whales can control their market prices.

Bitcoin is popular among huge population all over the world while the demand  for altcoins is limited. Does this mean there is least effect of whale manipulation on bitcoin among all crypto coins ?