OP seems to think that bitcoin whales will become a new power that can tip the scales. I don't agree. IMO the whales that used to be early adopters were mostly gone before 2022.

Think of it this way. If you had bitcoins bought at $100 or less and the price suddenly jumped to $20k, you probably sold most of it. People who owned a lot of BTC are now either dead, like Hal Finney, Mircea Popescu, or they lost their coins somehow, like James Howells, or they got hacked like Luke Dashjr...

There's much less OG bitcoin owners out there than you might think. These people aren't going to form any kind of independent state and won't have any power over the people pulling the strings like Blackrock.