As Bitcoin becomes a tool of institutions and governments, the time to get rich in crypto is over - true or false?

People tend to look at previous bull runs to predict the current bull run. And going by that logic, we are only at the beginning. BTC should at least go to 150k, ETH has been far below expectations and alt season is nowhere to be found. That's why everyone believes that the big gains are still to come.

But what if something significant happened since 2020? Something that makes this bull run and every future bull run very different from the previous ones?

I can't pin-point it and I don't have the evidence. But I think there has been a major shift between 2020 and 2025. It feels like in every previous bull run, it was mostly private individuals that were investing and fighting against each other to time the best point to take profits and get out. But ever since 2020, the richest people and institutions in the world have started to take crypto seriously, because they saw how much money one can make, and that it does happen repeatedly in cycles.

This might change the dynamic of how the entire crypto market works. The crypto market swings in whichever direction BTC goes, and the people who can influence BTC the most are the ones with the most money and the most insider knowledge. Yes, this has always been the case. But I feel like the big new investors (which are literally the most powerful forces on the planet) have these resources available to such an amount, that it dwarfs even the other conventional whales.

If such investors and institutions have the power to manipulate the BTC course at will, why do you still think that another BTC rise to 150k - 180k will come? They can just dump BTC by 10k and make you FUD out, then buy your lost coins, pump it till you are optimistic enough to invest again, and repeat this spiel indefinitely.

No more super crashes that make you pull out entirely. Just regular dumps that just keep you on the edge of hoping that the next retrace will be different. And very slowly but steadily, more and more crypto will travel from the average joe's wallet to the richest.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but this feels nothing like 2020 or 2017. It feels like this time, crypto has become so influential that it attracted the institutions that are powerful enough to rig the system. What do you think?