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.
What evidence do you have that the whales are cashing out? If many real whales were cashing out then the hurt bitcoin would feel would be much greater, maybe some people holding decent holdings, 50-100 BTC might be cashing out but the true whales I don't think so.
The whales know how to do this. They don't just put up 50.000BTC for sale in one big dump. They do it small pieces at a time, keeping the price artificially propped up as long as they can.