Hang with me on this. First a few axioms
Wall Streeters love Bitcoin provided they can disproportionately control it and act as the gate keeper so that they can create and sell high fee derivatives to the Joe Blow 80%.
Bitcoin is a retail price market. Contratry to the stock market there is nowhere a large investment house can go to to negotiate a discounted deal for large block of BTC. If the wall streeters want to buy BTC that have to compete with John Q. Public and they do not like that. They live by the old rule that you make the most money when you buy, not when you sell i.e.when you buy at the best price possible you extend the ability for returns when you sell.
Wall streeters are professional traders compared to the mass of Noobs in BTC. They are skilled at moving markets and leveraging weak hands.
Consequently Wall Streeters wold be incentivize to create market dynamics that drive the price as low as possible yet not drive it below $100B market cap ($6K BTC) where they could no long buy it as the market capitalization would be too low for them to participate.
I propose the Wall Streeters entered the market in Dec 2017 with the goal creating a pump across the board knowing they could create FOMO to draw in dumb money. At the peak they began dumping and pumping to perpetuate volatility and scare the dumb money to sell permitting them to substantially increase their BTC holdings at bargain prices. The goal was to drive prices to as close to $100B market cap ($6K BTC) as they could.
As evidence I note the following
There has been nothing but good new in the BTC technology new over the last month. Technically there was no reason to drop. The political news regarding BTC has been generally neutral. Yes there was FUD but the vast majority was dispelled with in hours of its release. Enough to cause a dip but not a crash like we have seen. Certainly the beginning the year is soft as people face the reality of the holiday bills but the market has seen this before usually establishing its low for the year but not crashing.
We bottomed at $100.1B. The drop below the predicted $7500 floor had little explanation. Every tech analyst I listened too said the next support was at $5k or lower. Nobody saw $6k as anything from the Tech analysis perspective.
During this drop I was watching the depth charts and they were behaving unusually. Sell orders would virtually disappear and the price would pump, then they would return en bloc dropping the price only to again disappear. It suggested that somebody was pumping and dumping , fueling the volatility to scare as many people out of the market as possible right down to the $100B market cap which we bounced off like a super ball.
For confirmation of this hypothesis, I am looking to see a rapid recovery to price levels that will again engage unit bias preference in the dumb money. Once the big boys have cornered the market psychologically, they will support more restrictive regulations on the public to get exchange accounts all the while offering high fee derivative products that are easy to access for these same people.