If the whales are early adopters, they might not care for the price of Bitcoin as much as we do. The very fact that they were early adopters and yet didn't cash out could explain why they are still in the game. They are not waiting for the price to hit some certain level, they are obviously waiting when Bitcoin becomes a new global money and they themselves turn into a new wealthy elite.
I suppose I am an early adopter. I have been at it since 2010. Like many of the others I know, we are not interested in the price. I don't care about wealth, just economic freedom. That's what this is about for me and I have no intention of ever "cashing out". I have never sold a bitcoin because bitcoin is the cash I want. If I find myself sitting on a 100 million USD in BTC, I'll donate it somewhere.
So it looks like that I'm right about you, the early adopter guys. You are just waiting patiently when Bitcoin becomes the major money, and then you will be both liked and envied or even hated by smaller people like us, who were not that lucky to jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon in time. But if you don't transact what's the purpose of economic freedom to you then?
Not every early adopter believes that way. Some read the 2011 gawker article about this new money used to buy drugs online. It was instantly visible that this new "dark web" money was going to skyrocket in popularity and price. For me, it was like reading about a young Apple Corp or Microsoft and seeing dollar signs. It was only ever about profit for me. The first thing I did when visiting this forum is read the mining section,
learn how to mine and build a mini gpu farm. I knew I wanted to get my hands on as many Bitcoin as I could as fast as I could.
Methinks, we shouldn't count you as an early adopter. Those who used GPU mining were already at an advanced stage of Bitcoin development and adoption. It seems that only the ancient ones who mined first bitcoins on their desktop processors can be rightfully considered as true early adopters. You yourself say that you came into Bitcoin when it already got some notoriety for being used in dark markets. 2011 is nowhere near early, only 2010 makes it somewhat.
That's possible I guess. You've narrowed your band of people down to maybe
a thousand 2010 users, of which possibly a couple dozen still visit this forum. I guess that would also depend on what your definition of whale is too.
Yes, you hit it right where it hurts. In my view, we can count as whales, or super-whales, the first thousand or hundred top Bitcoin holders. We can do basically the same with regard to whales among early adopters. Because their number will be much lower than the number of simple whales for obvious reasons, we should count only the first hundred of them.
Satoshi is gone and not spending any of his. So you can rule him out. Many of the early miners wasted their coins buying shit like 20,000 coin pizzas, Allinvane had his stolen, tons of the early miners lost them at MtGox and so on.
I think there's way, way less than 100 early adopters that still have 20,000 coins or more.
Your using "early adopter" interchangeably with "whale" and those aren't the same. The Winklevoss twins have mountains of Bitcoin but you wouldn't consider them early adopters. They could sell half of their stash and crash the price to a penny. I've been mining and buying for six years and even I could probably move the price $100 alone when I sell all.
