Eight years ago today, the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $330 per unit. An anonymous Bitstamp trader placed an order to sell 30,000 Bitcoins. The trader, now known as “Bear Whale,” put extreme pressure on the burgeoning Bitcoin market by selling the coin at $300 per unit. This is barely a month after two other Bitcoin whale incidents.
A Look at the October 2014 Bitcoin’ Bear Whale Incident’
With Bitcoin (BTC) trading at just under $20,000, bitcoin traders faced the infamous “bear whale” nearly eight years ago today. On October 6, 2014, an anonymous trader decided to sell his 30,000 BTC at $300 per coin in his single trade.
Traders were hoping to get $9 million from the sale. Today these Bitcoins are worth about $603 million. The cryptocurrency community went wild when the event took place. They even garnered the attention of the mainstream media.
Bitcoin’s price was around $330 just before Bear Whale’s infamous dump. The trader’s giant $300 sell wall was devoured by market traders that day.
Bear Whale posted on Reddit five years back claiming it was his address that sold bitcoin. He said he bought bitcoin for $8. He also mentioned that he set up his 30,000 BTC trade in a hurry that day because he wanted to get away from his desktop.
These were Bear Whales’ exact sentiments;
“I could have gotten a better price if I spent more time working the order, I guess,” Bear Whale said to the r/bitcoin Reddit community at the time. “I put up the wall because I didn’t want to just sit in front of the computer all day.”
Shortly after the sale by an anonymous Bitstamp trader, the cryptocurrency community created a meme about the notorious Bitcoin seller. They called the seller the Bear Whale. Bear Whale’s name is a tribute to JP Morgan, his Chase trader, and the infamous London whale who lost his $6.2 billion in an erroneous trade. A Bitcoin enthusiast mythologized the incident, with the community saying he “killed” a formidable beast on October 6, 2014.
The community thought it was a battle of market power. Bear Whale said in a Reddit post that he had lost faith in the then-leading digital currency. Bear whale revealed his identity by arguing over scaling, and he later said, “Bitcoin was I decided to go all-in again.”
Lessons from Bitcoin Bears in 2022
The lesson from the Bear Whale story is that giant whales can lose faith in BTC. They can also dump billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin at the right price. But the market is much more resilient than in 2014, when he averaged about $29 million in daily volume.
The current global 24-hour BTC trading volume is around $32.63 billion. This increased by 112,425% compared to the daily BTC trading volume in 2014. Eight years ago, Second market CEO Brendan O’Connor told his CNBC that the move was “a very ‘muddy’ way to liquidate this number of coins.”
O’Connor goes on to mention that it ruined his Sunday
“Let me tell you. It makes absolutely no sense from a commercial point of view. It’s the last way you want to liquidate such a large position,” O’Connor told a news reporter on October 9, 2014.
