I've given this a (small) bit of thought. With regard to the whales, it occurred to me that if one (or two, or more) of them all decided to sell at the same time and crash the price, the effect would be to disperse all those coins amongst the "non-whales".

And then the question is, well, is the coin more or less valuable when it is held by more people? It seems to me that it would be more valuable, since there would be more people using it.

So even if the immediate effect of the whales cashing out was to lower the price (to something above absolute zero, assuming there will still be buyers), the long-term effect would be more adoption, and increased value.

I'm sure there are holes somewhere in that logic, feel free to point them out.

Yes, if they do it, it may end this way. But if they do nothing (or not a whole lot) you can never be sure if and when they are going to start to dump their "wealth". So you can't really accept Doge as a significant payment because you always have to fear that the next moment someone ist going to crash it "for teh lulz".

If they dump their coins the price will certainly be going down to 0. Is there any historical data on these wallets you're aware of? I'm curious how many people have sold off their holdings. it seems odd to me that so many holders haven't sold yet.