That contradiction is exactly what I do not understand.

If adoption is supposedly growing, why does it also seem that there are more whales, more people getting trapped, and more players trying to profit from manipulation?

If I were a whale and had hundreds of millions or billions tied directly or indirectly to crypto, my priority would be to get Bitcoin into the hands of hundreds of millions of people

The contradiction is only in your head!

Basically, you want others to follow what you desire, and you want to purposely exclude some others from Bitcoin.
You want to reinvent the laws of economics, and you want to insist on laws that apply only to some and not to others.
You want people to gain wealth but you want to prevent wealth accumulation. With every single line you keep adding to this non-ending rant, you sound more and more like a non-coiner angry at people who have coins but don't behave like you would if you had the coins

If you consider yourself a whale, then let me ask you something directly.

I can understand that in Bitcoin’s early years, when the market was tiny, illiquid and basically made up of a handful of large holders and a few early adopters, price movements could be extreme. Back then, with so little liquidity, a small number of large players could move the market very easily.

Fine.

But Bitcoin is not in that stage anymore.

Crypto is known worldwide. Bitcoin is known worldwide. Institutions, companies, funds and millions of retail investors know what it is.

And yet sometimes it still feels as if instead of “two whales and four monkeys,” we now simply have “five whales and seven monkeys.”

At some point, the explanation of “market cycles” and “market psychology” stops being enough for me.

Are we seriously supposed to believe that Bitcoin must behave like this forever?

That every few years we just accept another huge boom, another collapse, another wave of liquidations, another 50%, 60% or 70% drawdown, and then call it “the cycle”?

How long do you think ordinary people are going to tolerate that?

Because if Bitcoin really wants mass adoption, this matters.

Someone who knows nothing about crypto is not going to look at an asset that can rise 30% and then lose 50% or 70% shortly afterwards and think:

“Yes, this is where I want to put my savings.”

There is a huge difference between a healthy uptrend with corrections and an asset reaching an all-time high and then collapsing by more than half shortly afterwards.

Who is going to trust that?

Who is going to use that as a serious long-term store of value if they believe a small number of extremely powerful market participants can keep pushing it around?

At some point, Bitcoin has to mature.

At some point, the obsession with extreme volatility, liquidations, speculation and these supposedly inevitable “cycles” has to give way to something bigger:

Mass adoption.

Stability.

Trust.

A deeper and broader market.

More participants.

More liquidity.

More people willing to hold Bitcoin because they believe in it, not because they are trying to survive the next violent cycle.

That is what I think many whales still do not understand.

You may understand the cycles perfectly.

You may know how to profit from them perfectly.

But if the end result is that ordinary people look at Bitcoin and decide it is too manipulated, too volatile and too dangerous to touch, then what exactly have you achieved?

Another profitable cycle?

Great.

But Bitcoin was supposed to become much bigger than that.

There is nothing new in crypto market that does not exist in other market, people that are frustrated will just look at the bad side of it and say the things they want so they can get satisfied with their believe about the things they want to hear. It's even a nature of human to look for opportunities to take advantage of something, so whales looking for way to make money out of the market is not a new thing, even in 10 years to come they will remain here.

If you want to win, you just have to stop complaining and buy the ones you think you can afford to lose. It's better  you avoid the complaints of the market and look other into how you can benefit from the market the more. This is why you don't see people with large bank of Bitcoin talk or discuss about the price, you can never see a person with 10 Btc complain about whales or how traders manipulate the market, they prefer to focus on the macro economics and adoption.

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