Bitcoin Crests 10K As Unknown Whale Adds 41000 Coins ($400 Mil) @ ~$8400/BTC to 96000 Total! Must Be A Hodl'er.

Bitcoin is maintaining the psychologically-significant $10,000 level tonight, much to the crypto-market's relief. We may spend some time here rebuilding a base before we start to make a move up towards the $12k area. An investigation of how Bitcoin recovered from the recent dip to $6k presents an interesting answer.

20k->10k chart pending. It will be a straight line down and a comment that "January suckles."

It would seem that one very large whale, who already controlled 55,000 BTC, bought 41,000 more from 2/8 to 2/13, at a rough cost basis of $8400. That brings "their" total holdings to 96,000 BTC, or approximately $960,000,00, or just shy of $1 Billion US. Though barely a half percent of the "advertised" market cap of Bitcoin (the true full market clearing price would be much lower), this still represents a rather large whale who has just doubled down on their investment hard. Let's all hope he is correct in his attempt to make a bottom call.

Here you can see his wallet increasnig to 96,000 coins. Impressive.

Positive implications for price aside, this is certainly an alarming amount of (wallet) centralization for a coin as large and systemically important as Bitcoin. I have no doubt that this trader could move markets substantially on his own if he chose to. Whether he could profit from pumping and dumping his own coins would be a matter of market and order-book conditions, but it's certainly a concern for anyone trading these markets. There's a good reason that a wider distribution is almost always considered an element of a healthier cryptocurrency.

Regular readers will know I'm not a huge fan of Bitcoin's fundamentals at this point. I want it to succeed for the rest of the market, but frankly, it's transaction times, fees, and security all leave much to be desired and those characteristics (save perhaps security) all seem actively prevented from evolving properly as described in the whitepaper by the Core team itself, who appear to be likely to profit off the status quo being maintained for now. Without traffic, one can not charge for toll roads. Diversify accordingly and do your due diligence on everything you own, even Bitcoin.

As a reminder from BitInfoCharts, here is the current distribution of Bitcoin among all network addresses:

Note the 60% of coins in the top 3 categories.

In completely unrelated news, I spotted this candle on the Livecoin exchange where Bitcoin either went to 12k briefly last night, or their exchange bugged out. Either way, I record it here for the record:

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Sources: ZeroHedge, Livecoin, Google, Cryptowatch, Bitfinex, BitInfoCharts
Copyright: LiveCoin, Zero Hedge, Cryptowatch, Visual Capitalist