Big fish always eat small fish, that's the law of nature - but small fish always find ways to survive. Whales can do whatever they want, they have learned that profit can be taken practically every day, why wait 10 years?
Because they don't want small fishes to become bigger and eat any of their profits by selling out, this is repeating behavior for years now.
They pump the price up so people buy in FOMO then dump it all and wait few years, then repeat at higher levels with the money they have obtained to get more
people fish on board.
It's practically a legal scam to pump and dump, manipulate the market as they like by colluding with other sharks on their meetings.
You can call it a conspiracy theory but I've seen it first hand in different markets.
They don't care about Bitcoin, all they want is to eat small fishes who think they can make it - and most of them can't because life is full of surprises.
Of course, something completely unexpected can always happen, but considering that I've been involved in all this for about 10 years, I've learned some things
This sharks have been doing this type of manipulations long before we were alive, 10 years is nothing.
Their knowledge and techniques are far more sophisticated that you can imagine and compared to them we're nothing more than wishful gamblers and we can't do nothing about it, just watch the show and hope for the best.
The technology behind Bitcoin is pure and honest but the big money and some people involved in it are very dirty, evil to the bone and clever.
tl;dr; Just holding is the best option but not everyone can afford another 10, 15 years and due to the gambling nature of the space some people will try to time the market and that's where they will lose.