Bitcoin is tiny as currencies go or as industries go. What is it $100 billion "market cap"?

> Whales are not gods.

Sure. But in such a tiny volume entity like bitcoin, any large player can easily move markets.

It doesn't even have market makers or any real rules yet.

Blatantly false -- you clearly don't monitor crypto exchange order books full time (I do). Even most small-cap altcoins have active market makers running 24/7 for ALT/BTC, ALT/ETH and ALT/USD (where supported).

> But in such a tiny volume entity like bitcoin, any large player can easily move markets.

Do you know from experience? There are some extremely low market cap altcoins -- you should give it a try. I do not think manipulating markets for any length of time is as easy as sideline commenters seem to believe, and it certainly is difficult to make it profitable.

Also note that many of the highest market share Bitcoin investors were early crypto enthusiasts or wealthy venture-cap-type investors, not professional/active traders. If and when there is concerted market manipulation with hundreds of millions behind it, these early adopters are certainly taking heavy losses.

Ripple (XRP): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203894

But small enough to have miner pools controlling 50% of the hash rate.

And even then, most pools are largely decentralized and heterogeneous -- controversial political/technical changes by the pool owner would absolutely trigger an exodus of hashrate from the pool. (As happened during the BTC/BCH fork.)