One thing that I haven’t fully understood with BTC price fluctuations I am hoping someone might have some theories on.
So the price of BTC against the dollar seems to fluctuate during these climbs and dips by percentages of quite a large magnitude (sometimes greater than 50%!).
Would it be correct to assume that during its earlier periods it would have been easier to manipulate the price due to the fact that
A: fewer players were in the game and would have owned larger amounts of BTC and
B: the dollar price was lower making it easier to buy larger amounts of BTC.?
Now with further distribution of BTC can we not assume that more people have smaller stashes (BLB aside!)?
Shouldn’t this make larger dumps less frequent?
Also large buys are a lot harder since it would require much larger sums of dollars to move the price up?
Yet we still see massive swings in the price. Can someone tell me why/how?
I think the price stagnation and low TX activity means that there are no more coins for sale at this price. The weak hands are gone. It is just us here now. Everybody knows it is going back up at some point, the only question is when.
It's like we are in this Mexican standoff with Wall St. and everybody is like...WELL??
There are too many factors that contributed to the fluctuations in the last weeks. Most of them are not related to the price:
1.Altcoins massive pump.
Some "experts"on twitter expected this to happen in November, but it happened in Dec/ Jan 2018. Many noobs sold
BTC's to get rich quickly. Most of them ended with heavy bags of coins that are at least 50% cheaper now. The poor new bag holders will have to wait another 1,2 years (or never) to see their money back .
2. Chinas threat to ban internet access to the exchanges and the mining facilities shut down.
Let's not forget that most of the chinese traders are not internet savvy and are afraid that their access to the exchanges will be blocked. They know little of vpn's, localbitcoins, etc. and prefer to sell at 50% loss rather than holding and figuring out a back up plan if this threat really happens.
3. South Korea's threat to ban the exchanges that allow anonymous accounts.
I don't understand how a closed system with no arbitrage possible (unless you are a resident of SK) can affect the price, but the FUD news always brings drops in price.
4. Wall street playing with futures, etc.
Clearly, Gemini is easily manipuated because of its low volume. Even Gdax is much weaker thatn Bitfinex.
...............
Now, the situation is improving,
BTC is over sold, the support around 10-11K is getting stronger each day both on Bitfinex and Gdax, so I expect a slow and healthy recovery in February/March. We will have to wait and see what is the real price that can be supported with normal trading. I think that it is at least 15K.