The extreme escalation in transaction times is there to ensure the whales can cash out but that smaller investors cannot.
Whales can make large transactions, the fees do not mean as much to them.
At the same time the small investors cannot cash out because their investment is quite small compared to the fees.
The result is the following:
- Whales are cashing out, converting to fiat
- Newbies are buying from the whales in the hope of continues increases
- Existing smaller investors do not want to sell now (despite possible large profits) because of the high fees is you only have a small investment (Today another bitcoiner on this forum has to pay a 20$ fee for a 50$ transaction).
When the whales have completed the sell-off, smaller bitcoin investors can finally begin to sell and that will be the trigger for a complete collapse in the price.
Just because one of the so called co founder of bitcoin has been alleged to sell of his bitcoins it doesn't really means that every whales is just selling off. Maybe its just that its a very normal correction in btc price. Yes one has to accept that bitcoin is no longer the old bitcoin and the blockchain on which it works really stinks now due to a lot of congestion but still btc is not out of confidence.