Fluctuations in the market inevitable. But clever traders can take advantage of these swings. For example, if an individual can guess the top, sell their bitcoins at that mark, wait for the values to fall, and then buy back at the bottom, they will gain a lot more coins. Such is what happened with the 100 richest BTC addresses, as reported by Bitinfocharts.com. During this 65% dip, the big players or the “bitcoin whales” didn’t lose any money, in fact, their BTC gain was exponential.
A good example, of one such bitcoin whale, the wallet currently(at the time of writing) holds 167,000 BTC. The address made its first deposit of $840 USD worth of BTC two years ago. And then, with every drop and rise in BTC value, this address has been selling and buying so methodically, that the address now owns $1.4 billion USD worth BTC.
During spikes and dumps in BTC values, many forum posts and Twitter feeds discuss these affluent bitcoin holders. There are even speculations that these individuals, can even contact each other and discuss strategies. A problem, if true, can have an enormous effect on BTC market movements.
Many people, as well as the media, is of the opinion that there are about 1000 of these big whales who encompasses about 40% of the market. However, this is not a scientific model and according to research, there aren’t many quality distribution models that can depict the current market.
The Bambou Club team, however, has revealed some of their data as well, estimating that there are about 25 million bitcoin owners in the present market. Furthermore, one only needs 0.153 BTC to get on the list of the 30% affluent bitcoin owners and a mere 15 BTC to come in the ranks of top 1%.
Currently, it is still ambiguous on whether or not this top 1% or 1000 affluent BTC owners are impacting the market. But we do know, that these whales are becoming larger and larger as the days pass.