> "Things that go up for no apparent reason can come down for no apparent reason."

Many of the previous sharp increases do have explanations, e.g. the $150 to $1,500 rise was largely due to manipulation by the Willy and Markus bots[0], the $10,000 to $20,000 rise was largely due to manipulation by Tether and Bitfinex[1]. Will probably take a while for the dust to settle to see if any manipulation was responsible for the recent rises.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/news/bots-drove-bitcoins-150to1...

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/research-tether-bitfinex-mani...

It is all a scam. Buy when it's low for a few months, sell after a big run for a few months going down. Only suckers believe in it

How is this different from fiat currencies and stocks? Those go up and down all the time for no reason, or at least for irrational reasons. There's no reason why Bitcoin and other coins couldn't mature into a more stable up/down cycle to mirror those.

Fiat has central banks to keep them somewhat stable.

Stocks have companies who are producing actual value.

> Fiat has central banks to keep them somewhat stable.

That's part of my point. Fiat had decades to stabilise, digital currencies are basically newborns so it's not fair to expect them to pop out already matured and stable.

> Stocks have companies who are producing actual value.

Unless they don't (or their value is decoupled from meme/insider manipulation that artificially controls their prices), like GME or Tesla.

Crypto is designed to not have a central bank. But that has its consequences. Maturity has nothing to do with it.

In this particular case, the no apparent reason is certain person known to speculate with cryptocurrencies suddenly decided he'd go on to publicly bash the thing he pumped in the past "for no apparent reason". I mean, we couldall speculate the price was a bit high for his taste and wanted a discount, or maybe he really believes what he said.

That said, I agree that bitcoin price is kind of a bubble, and something that is pumped and dumped by people with a lot of money to the detriment of those who saw it as a miracle savings investment (usually people with little financial education) or those who truly believed in it (I think those became a small % of the users a long time ago).

My point is nobody has an answer to "Why did people bid up Bitcoin 5x from September 2020 to mid-Feb 2021?"

Maybe Elon is the trigger for the 30% drop over the last few days... but remember he didn't announce his initial holdings until mid-February 2021, which was after the 5x surge. If anything his timing was awful.

Everything in hindsight is pure speculation and rationalization. Nobody has a clue, markets are complex, volatile and full of irrational actors.

They are also full of whales/market makers who dance to their own tune and can manipulate the price. All this Elon Tesla talk is just a side show to entertain the public.

There is no doubt hedge funds are playing in this space with lots of money and skills to extract maximum value from the joe shmoes

In this particular case I don't think the market is all that complex. People were valuing bitcoin on the assumption that other people would keep buying it at higher prices before they sell.

People didn't cut nearly half a trillion dollars from the value of bitcoin on the word of a person known for blurting out impulsive and weird things. He didn't reveal any deep new insights into this thing. What Musk said just spooked the herd, that's all.

It would be interesting to figure out how much $USD has been paid for all the coins currently held, rather than looking at just market cap.

Shame it can't be calculated.

I think the exchanges would be the ones that could answer that question... But I don't think it's in their interests to do so.

The guy has built and is managing multiple multi billion dollar companies at the same time. Tesla buying bitcoin and profiting from it led to Musk meeting one of the requirements for being awarded options worth billions.

China did recently make some negative announcements on Bitcoin.

https://www.ft.com/content/c4c29bb3-c8ee-454c-a2dd-eac9f6440...

IMO it's quite following the same trends as the stock market. Elon Musk makes statements on Twitter about how Bitcoin is an environmental disaster and rolls back on accepting Bitcoin in payments for Teslas. Bitcoin goes down.

Single stocks perhaps, not the broad stock market.