The price will simply go up when the whales want it to, and go down when said whales want to cash out. Fees could go up or down, China could do X or Y, the Fed could regulate it or not, and the general opinions of the ecosystem don't matter whatsoever - price is fairly solely dictated by the whims of a few dozen elites nowadays.
In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in
the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
(The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
"looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution
look like that of a workers' paradise
Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
"RSA encryption")"
I can't find any more recent study specific to the Gini coefficient, however these[1] charts show an improvement over this snapshot[2] from May 2015.
[1]: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... [2]: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/1-bitcoin-community-controls...
If someone were to have monitored IP addresses in the swarm it may be possible to correlate attempts from single users hiding their funds across many wallets. Simply looking at the blockchain balances of single addresses will not necessarily indicate a single person controlling many addresses.
Or if they can, then given that it's in their interest for the price to keep rising long-term, why not hold and go along for the ride?
But I guess most whales are in competition against each other, rather than cooperating. And that would be a good thing.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....
Trading on attitude is not the best trading analysis strategy, I'm glad you sold before losing more money
I think you are looking at the wrong market fundamentals.
People getting into bitcoin right now, buy because it can double their money in 6 months. They do not understand anything about Segwit2x.
They see news about bitcoin, look at the price again, and say "Damn, why didn't I buy it already?", and buy. That's your market fundamental right now. That is the value of bitcoin right now: "double your money in half a year".
I'm not saying bitcoin doesn't have any other value, or that it is overvalued right now.
Even when the news were predictable or already known! Bitcoin has never been connected to any "market fundamentals", just hundreds of day traders trying to predict each others reaction to random scraps of news as they come by.
As someone who was there and paid close attention, this is not true. E.g. silk road's closure didn't impact BTC for more than a few days, but everyone universally would've said it'd tank BTC's price.
Not really.
If you look at, say, the 2010 to 2013, the first two big bubbles then you get something that looks like
