The pump in December and the crash now in January were provoked by banksters.
January crash would happen anyway, it happens every year, but the sharp way it did was only possible because of Wall Street manipulation.
To win the short contracts, they had to buy lots of bitcoins, in a small window time, hence the pump in December. They also pumped ripple, to be able to buy bitcoins from noobs. With enough supply in the exchanges, they just shorted it.
The lack of available supply in cryptospace did not prevent their plans, as a single dump sparked the panic. The rest was done by noobs selling their positions, finally dropping the price to what was "predicted".
If they will repeat it? Sure they will, they did it with gold and silver, and see now who controls PM supply. As more and more noobs get traumatized by such dumps, more will be out of cryptospace, ensuring market dominance by those sharks. Bitcoin will not turn into a currency, but a market asset.
Every time there is a 10% and 20% price change there must be some mastermind behind it.
Evil bankers, Illuminati, reptilians all the conspiracy fauna in the universe.
What is wrong with you people these days?
You really think there is a "they"? Who are they? What is this entity?
They all got together in a secret bunker and then they said, let's manipulate the bitcoin price, let's risk billions in this to make a few millions.
And they choose to pump and dump, rather than buying coins propping up the value to 25 k and then slowly dumping it and making billions clean and safe. Don't you have the impression that this lame tactic you present is more the result of a 10 yo than the tactic some organisation smart enough to control the world finances would chose?