Yeah, it's a correction--or a dip. This is exactly what happens when any given market rises too high, too fast. I have not been following crypto for the past week and was actually very surprised that bitcoin hit $10k--and then I heard it touched $13k! The $13k level at least is unsustainable for now, and it indicates to me that there are a LOT of speculators in the market right now, and they're blowing bitcoin up past the point of rationality.
The same thing happened in 2017. A similar thing happened in 2014, although Mt. Gox had a hand in that debacle. Right now I just think there's too many people with too much money getting in and buying. IMO now is not a good time to be buying bitcoin. I'm just going to wait and see what happens.
I'd concur. Any rise needs a period of cooling off and relative stability, or it's unsustainable. Look at what happened in 2017. The markets rose continuously, and the result was that when they inevitably started to fall, no-one knew where they should fall to because there hadn't been any period of cooling off and price consolidation during the rise. The result being they kept falling until finally this February everyone reached a consensus that we had hit bottom. If the late 2017 rise had been more gradual and with new support levels established, it's likely we wouldn't have fallen so far or for so long.
As for why this current fall started - it had become clear that the rise was unsustainable, and when this happens it needs only a tiny trigger to start the huge sell-off. This time around it's likely it was the brief Coinbase outage.
