At this point, a lot depends on how the miners behave. If miners decide to sell BTC stocks (and among them there are certainly a few whales) this can cause big drops which will be a great time for price manipulators to lower the price even more. It looks like we might have one more big dump before halving.
isn't that
always the case? miners are just bitcoin investors/holders. you're basically just saying that you expect whales to dump.
the negative sentiment around here is tangible!
They will have to sell, to pay mining costs.
we actually don't know the extent to which this is true. we know that bitmain stockpiles their mining rewards for very long periods of time. poorly capitalized and/or leveraged mining operations need to sell to cover overheads, but the industry is becoming increasingly well-capitalized and industrial. so i don't know how useful these assumptions are.
The exchanges are to blame for this. If they had a consensus in putting limits to the price, such dumps would not happen.
i prefer free markets to collusion among exchanges.