I believe that you are correct and this is being done and that it is not a coincidence that BTC peaked in December at the exact same time that the Futures Market came into existence. @johnarb is correct that there is a huge OTC (off exchange) market and large transactions are conducted there. That said Whales can and do sell on the exchanges and they can move the price considerably when they do. A few weeks ago there was a $50 Million sale four days in a row. It is my personal belief that BTC is currently in a manipulated price movement downward to force capitulation by even the most ardent supporters of Bitcoin. Once their mission has been accomplished and they have robbed all the "unsuspecting mom and pops". Then the new bull in BTC will begin. I fully expect the Dec, 2017 high to be tested and possibly exceeded by the end of 2018.
If we remove all these small accounts (adresses) to do what you tell, and only take adresses with at least 1-10 bitcoins, we have the following results: number of adresses goes from 22 million to about 705K. Down 97%. Capitalization goes from 122 billion to 117 billion. Down only 4%. 91% of capitalization is then controlled by 21 % of adresses. So not much difference from what I wrote. As you told yourself many people will have severeal adresses, especially the big whales. So the 21% adresses are probably held by far less whales. Small investors will not use a lot of different adresses. So the 21% adresses will probably be controlled by less then 10% of people. 2 adresses per person is very pessimistic for million dollar adresses. They will probably have even more. All this will reduce the number of persons that are controlling over 90% of capitalization.
You still ignore the fact that the largest addresses are exchanges which are made up of the sum total of small retail investors who choose to leave their holdings at the exchange in cold storage. In your list that you posted the top 5 address holdings are identified as exchanges. Since you are either intentional misusing your own data or you are so uninformed that you do not recognize an exchange address even when it is clearly identified, I see no point in continuing this conversation.
I never took out the section above .1 btc Bitcoin is a global asset and in fact much bigger in Asia than the US. To some other folks, $700 is a lot of money (I guess even here in the US), so they could represent individual bitcoin owners. As Illini Trader has mentioned, the biggest wallets are exchanges and consider that now, those wallets represent millions of individual bitcoin owners as you cannot have more than one account. Well, you can, but you risk the exchange confiscating your coins. They're already starting to do that to force KYC/AML (US exchanges). As always have been told, not your private keys, not your coins, but people are stubborn So, how many users are in these exchanges holding billions of $? Coinbase has more users than Charles Schwab. 13 Million users Binance has more users than the whole population of Hong Kong, over 7 Million users Poloniex? Bittrex? Bitfinex? Kraken? Cryptopia? Kucoin? Bithumb? <-- largest Korean Exchange, so can't forget that as Korea has a much higher cryptos adoption than the US estimated at 25% of adults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase https://www.financemagnates.com/cry...-users-than-the-population-of-its-home-state/
shows you that doom and gloom really sells to a lot of people.... dollar will collapse, sea level will rise... better go hide in a bunker with some bitcoins in hand.
to @schweiz: I re-read my post #1695 and I was quite rude to you. That is not my style and I apologize to you for that. I do thank you for posting the website that you did. There is a lot of good information there as I scrolled down and the list of addresses and their BTC quantity goes on indefinitely. I got down to addresses that hold less than 200 Bitcoins and it was still going from there.
1. I think it sold off because price went vertical, the future exchange opening was just coincidence. I predicted the 60% sell off right here in this very journal and I didn't base it on exchanges. 2. A big sale is also a big buy. Otherwise there is no transaction. 3. I like a good conspiracy, but if I am a whale, I manipulate for profits, not for some kind of evil plan. And when the price goes up it is never manipulation for fanboys. The only problem with the strategy described when the whales manipulate at the same time in different directions, canceling the effect out. Better to be together....
the futures opening is no coincidence... this is another example of Wall Street gaming main street. https://www.dailyfx.com/sentiment I posted the above several times... look how short the house is... certain death sentence with lots of sheep already trapped.