I am new in bitcoin...I just want to know what are the reasons behind bitcoin or altcoin prices rising or falling?
As I understood from my time around cryptocurrency there are two main reasons -
1 - Supply and Demand
2 - Rumors , speculations and Market manipulation
1- supply and demand - As we all know the total supply of Bitcoin is 21 Million coins . In the current market there's about 16.78 Million coins in circulation. The word about cryptocurrency simply became a "trend" for the last few months.
It was here for over 8 years but everyone had different opinions about it, most people thought it's just a "bubble" that it will come and go , but after 8 years of being here and when completing it's 9th Year, whole cryptocurrency market has gone viral. Millionaires are being born and even Billionaires. And world famous entrepreneurs and investors like Warren Buffet , Bill gates, Chamath Palihapitiya , Started talking about bitcoin and started claiming that they have assets in their portfolios in the form of Bitcoin.
So these things started a huge DEMAND for bitcoin. but the with the current circulation and the very hardness of mining bitcoin (It was 3600 a day in 2016 , In July 2017 it was 2160 BTC per day release and in December it reduced to 1800 BTC per month) , so you can guess how hard it is to mine bitcoin. This is one of the main reasons for the price continuously go up.
In holiday seasons people tend to sell them , to get some cash, so as you probably saw on last month price can be little bit falling in the last month with there's a good supply and less buyers in those times.
There's almost a trend of ALT coins going down when bitcoin going up , same reason supply and demand, people tend to by BTC selling their ALT coins, This is the main reason for ALT coins to go down.
2 - Rumors speculations and market manipulation- This is another reason for price variables, time to time there are different kinds of news we can see. If a country started using bitcoin or a alt coin , demand for the coin will go very high, because people starts thinking "
if a government accept this, this should be a long term coin". and if some country releases a bad news about a crypto that will make panic and some people starts selling their coins.
The thing is most of these news are not true, there are some true news , but sometimes, Blogs , websites , youtube channels with influence create these rumors for their own gains. we mostly call this Market manipulations by WHALES.(people who hold large amounts of bitcoin or alt coins) , so that they can make a good profit, by buying the coins at low price and sell later, or if they have a stock of low valued coins with the price rising on panic demand they can make a good profit.
There can be many more factors for Bitcoin and ALT coins going up or down, but as my understanding these are the main two.