All these in cryptocurrency can be termed as market manipulations, but do you now know the beauty part of this, there is no one single whale in the crypto market, if one is doing the market manipulation, then the impact is affecting another whale over there massively and going on loss, this makes it more of being in an equal equilibrium position, whereby any of our actions towards the investment or crypto market will yield to a negative experience on other investors and same from theirs, when they acted, it also affected us in some ways, but we should never forget that this same power or influence is not vested on a particular entity or group of people, everyone can just get into it and play safe as he can, because the network will always remain being decentralized.

firstly, look into the NYA clan of economic nodes in 2017 and look at their block rejecting blackmail message and which path of which protocol they broadcast to, accept blocks of...

secondly in regards to the ETF.. share holders have NO ownership claim of btc.. yes blackrock(the company) has the claim of coin held by coinbase and thus have some sway in regards to coinbase, yet if you read the terms and conditions of blackroacks ETF filings(they will follow certain economic majority protocol) and then read coinbases commitment as a custodian where they dont have to inform blackrock of all security procedures and decisions.. it becomes more enlightening that coinbase can actually make more decisions than blackrock can
yes blackrock and other whales can log into coinbase and sell the BTC for fiat/altcoin and then stable coin it to another exchange and then vault it up with someone else, but that in itself is another SEC filing requirement and also a due diligence test on the other exchange and requirement of the other exchange to meet certain SEC regulations.. so its not a simple one day event of withdrawal and deposit of funds. so again this can give coinbase more ammo to change things and people just end up following blindly as its the least hassle path..

much the same as how many peoples human/constitutional/basic rights are being weakened and eroded based on peoples preference for a easier/less hassle life. when defending your rights becomes a burden, they would rather let their rights get weakened if it meant carrying on without the extra burden to protect their right

The point is that decentralization doesn't eradicate the possibility of manipulation. Someone owning a large share would be able to move the market up or down by using the share they have to dictate the price temporarily, but that doesn't mean the asset in question isn't decentralized. The concept of decentralization isn't directly connected with the price of an asset; it has a direct connection with transactions and blocks, which are decentralized; no one has any control over the network, even the whales having a large share of the total circulating supply.

Whales can manipulate Bitcoin's price, but its decentralization stays intact because having a significant share doesn't give them the right to have access to the blockchain but only to the market.

I think you made a typo error here because no one can own 30 million coins since it's more than the market cap.
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I think you made a typo, too, because 21 Million is the total supply of Bitcoin and not its market cap. 

This scenario wouldn't play out like this. We don't have a globally functioning equally applying legal framework because harmonization across boarders has turned out to be impossible on a global scale. There are too many different types of governments like democracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, communism, etc. And with every different type comes a different set of incentives that gets actors to choose a different course of action. The same applies to either whales or as lined out in the example, to various governments holding a lot of Bitcoin. Let's say all the whales combined hold 7,000,000 Bitcoin.

- How would they coordinate the sell-off without harming each other?
- How would they mobilize the masses to support the fork without making their decision public, thereby causing the masses to panic, sell-off their Bitcoin in no time and harm the current holdings of the whales?
- How would whales secretly sell off their holdings if those represent a lion share of Bitcoin holdings, now flooding the market with supply?
- How would Russia and China react in response to the USA and Europe?
- Since when can entire networks be forked? I know that blockchains can be forked, but not the people behind it.
- Can't someone fork Bitcoin, introduce the privacy feature in the fork and then see whether people make their own decision and support the fork with either 10%, 20%,... 100% of their investment dedicated to Bitcoin?
- Would pure speculation on the "original" fork spur a counter effect such that FOMO begins right after an initial sell-off?

If whales hold a lion share of the Bitcoin supply, I am sure they would be very careful about announcing their stance that could potentially lead to a panic sell-off among the retail investors. By the way, they could do it regardless, enjoy the sell-off in order to gobble up even more supply of the branch that out of a sudden they now decide to support.

There is so much game theory involved and since Bitcoin is not a regional or national thing, a coordinated sell-off threat won't happen and if it does, any losses in either trust or financially will outweigh any gains. Bitcoin is too big to be manipulated this way and in any other way. From an investor's point of view it doesn't matter whether Russia or the USA give additional value to whatever Bitcoin version and if one country prohibits something that the majority of people desires, an opportunity opens up for another country. It will forever be like that.

Thanks for your post! I think this is the main question behind all the other questions.

My worries are mainly based on the discussions in 2017 about Segwit and big blocks. I think this scenario back then could have played out in a different direction if many of the original cypherpunks didn't warn against the danger of a decision to allow bigger and bigger blocks, which would have harmed decentralization a lot because the access to a full node would have been reduced to rich people and businesses (Solana is a real-world example with 128 to 256 GB RAM minimum).

If we look at the market capitalizations of Bitcoin and BCash today (around 20:1), then we could say that the decision pro Segwit was very clear. Back then, my impression was however that the community was far more divided. For example in the Spanish forum we had a mod supporting big blocks who now unfortunately left the forum it seems. I don't think we had a big blocker majority back then but it was perhaps 55:45 or at most 60:40 in favour of Segwit and small(ish) blocks.

This means that without the fight of the small blocker camp, the Bitcoin protocol could have "tipped" in either direction.

You are correct that it's difficult to coordinate a big set of whales and there are also "geopolitical" questions involved. But let's look at the question of privacy features specifically. The EU has set up the AMLR which restricts the possibilities for EU exchanges to offer accounts in privacy coins from 2027 on.

Now imagine that such a law/regulation, or similar laws in different countries (privacy coins are for example also restricted in other states like the UAE), could threaten to be applied to Bitcoin due to a new privacy feature. This could be opposed by a large amount of whales: Government whales, because they may support the anti-privacy stance, and private Saylor-style whales, because it could harm Bitcoin's price growth because there would be less exchanges offering it. If Ethereum for example stays "compliant", i.e. don't introduces privacy features, then these whales could fear a BTC->ETH flippening. Or to SOL or whatever "gov-restriction-friendly" coin.

We can imagine that the community, for exact the same reasons, would be also divided on the issue. The "anti-privacy" camp could be very close to 50%, because either they believe criminals could benefit from the feature, or because they fear a flippening to "compliant" altcoins.

In such a situation, we have a force of coordination which applies to most whales (the potentially lower ROI). So there is an extremely high probability that several whales will coordinate and invest in a propaganda campaign much bigger than the 2017 "big block campaign". They only need to achieve to surpass a "tipping point" against the support of the privacy feature. And if they win and the fork gets rejected, the "privacy fork", even with considerable support in the Bitcoin community, could see a bleak future, like BCash or also ETC today. The ETC case is also quite interesting because in this case it was the "original chain" which lost the battle.

In 2017 we had already a "fork of networks", not only of the blockchain, with one side clearly winning (and the other "fork" of the "network" losing a lot of support but still active, seer/btc for example), and this could repeat itself.

I don't say that this has to play out this way. However, the community should be aware of that possibility. The more Bitcoin is seen as a lucrative investment vehicle instead of an anti-censorship decentralization effort, and the less popular the "OG cypherpunks" are in the community, the more we have to fear that a manipulation attempt like described above could work in certain situations.


@franky1: You won't believe it but I mostly agree with your post, I have to look however into the details of the agreements between Coinbase and BlackRock.

Or better say that each things has their own advantages and disadvantages. Decentralization is the main feature of BTC. It allows people to be anonymous and free but its disadvantage would be is that there are lots of criminals involved here and once we got victimize like we get robbed, there is no way for us anymore to recover our money. In cryptos, it all started with decentralization and BTC is the coin that has this feature. Centralization in crypto have only come eventually. So it is a disrespect if we kicked out BTC only because there are more centralized cryptos out there. In fact, that makes it more unique and that gets it a good number of demand.

Definitely it would because when  power is given, nomatter how genuine an authorized entity would be, there must still be that perceive tendencies over their crowns to subject the industrial layout of the Bitcoin market on how they would be favoured in regards that every holders are aimed to make profits and increases their portfolios.
Then politics might be implied alongside.

There is every possiblities that the market volume can be manipulated to their favour as whalers maybe applying irregular halving event where they can buy bigger value of Bitcoin and then lobbies for an ETF to trigger the point of market increase where they would make hugely sufficient incomes in returns.

About the Blockchain security network, of course it would be tightened because they would either don't want to be catched up by a third parties.
Do not underestimate the power of authority because it central of attractions can be of selfish governance.

So therefore, it would be flawed to an extend as said but not extremely flawless.