i don't view it as that differently, but I am not a buy and hold crypto person. Buy and hold people, in general, are not keeping their BTC/ETH in a CEX, but in their own wallet. So setting up a stop loss sale is difficult from that perspective (or maybe i just don't know how to do it). Whales are highly manipulative (sometimes seemingly in conjunction with the CEXs) so it's hard to read the tea leaves and guess the direction of the market. Easier to buy and hold, but must have stomach for huge swings and you are counting on entire market going on a sustained run to lift a long period of DCA buys from the ATH.
Whales want to make money too. they still need to buy low and then move the market higher to sell. You cannot time the bottom and top, but lots try to draft the whales moving the market up. If you set areas to take profit and set SL to limit losses, it comes to resemble stock trading whether one sees any intrinsic value or not.
crypto can be easily traced. that's the point. if a gov agency wants to find out where money is going and who it is, they likely can. amateurs find and dox crypto scammers all the time by tracking how wallets interact to follow the crypto. tracking is not recovering though and obviously freezing like with a traditional bank is not happening, but they can keep an eye on suspect wallets and pounce when it's moved to fiat.