Bitcoin Drops by $200 – Was it Whales or Regulation?
Sales of large amounts of Bitcoin coincide with a letter from the New York Attorney General.
Bitcoin whales
Below you can see a wallet balance dropping by 6,500 bitcoins, which at current prices is worth just over $50 million. The owner of the wallet is not known.
In addition to that, another anonymous trader who purchased $400 million dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency in February 2018 sold off 6,600 bitcoins on Monday.
The cryptocurrency community is very sensitive to the behaviour of what they call Bitcoin whales, which are wallets that hold very large amounts of Bitcoin. There are approximately 1,000 individuals who own about 40 percent of the entire market, according to Bloomberg.
One example of a Bitcoin whale is Nobuaki Kobayashi, trustee of a once dominant and now defunct Bitcoin exchange, who owns about 1.9 billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. On the 5th of February he sold 18,000 bitcoins and caused the price to crash to its lowest in 3 months.
Such is the sensitivity to the issue, that last month there was a lot of buzz over a sale which didn’t even happen in the end; a CNBC employee was offered 200,000 bitcoins, published a post on T