Am I the only person who finds this endless "whale" stuff both boring and paranoid? Nobody ever gives a plausible explanation as to who these whales are supposed to be or how they are able to manipulate prices to their advantage. All you ever get is arm-waving, ranting and metaphors. It's all very conspiracy-nuttish and unpersuasive.
Time and time again, in all areas ranging from geo-politics right down to personal relationships, things come out into the public domain that make it clear that all was not as it seemed nor as it was supposed to be.
If you don't find the way the way that Bitcoin has been traded recently a little 'peculiar', then that is your prerogative not to do so. Perhaps the numerous shit coin ramps were all straight down the line and innocent as well? Move along, nothing to see here?
You stick with your 'everything in the world is at it says on the tin' understanding of how the world works and I shall stick to suspecting that powerful people conspire to manipulate events and occurrences to suit their own agendas/desires (duh).
For the reasons I describe in my opening post, this bullish cup n handle formation has come about in a very strange and inorganic fashion. Even permabulls who were watching the action and were aware of the temporary swap rate hike on Bitfinex are smelling fish. Take away the price engineering from this market and we would most certainly correct from here, but probably, we are going to break to the upside. I feel sure that the market engineers will see to that, or perhaps already have seen to it since 90% of traders are bot algorithms........give em the price data they, need, they will do the rest in due course.