Whales don't have to push the price up. The job of whales isn't signalling that they are a whale, but to make it seem they are not. In other words, they have their bots scooping up small amounts of coins on pretty much any level they are comfortable buying at, without affecting the market.
If you browse through the orderbooks of most larger exchanges, you see plenty of orders with similar amounts of coins, with some times very odd amounts as well. It's all bot activity.
What we could do to such high volatility and sudden dump? We are almost near to the bottom and yet the market seems likely to go down for more.
Precisely, they don't push the price up, they just let their orders continue to fill.
When we reach the real bottom there won't be many people left believing that bitcoin is going to recover any time soon. That could have been recently but a lot of people on this forum as still very bullish. Of course with that it's worthwhile considering that they may not be representative of all invested in to bitcoin.
Here on this forum are people that were here in 2013 and some even in 2011. It is easy to be a general after a battle. So super easy for them. In general public is not the same. For most people Bitcoin is already dead. It will be way more dead at start of 2019 when people will get clear % of how much Bitcoin lost in 2018.