There are too many factors to tease out what's going on at any given moment. There may be upward pressure from what's happening in equity markets and demand for bitcoin as a vehicle currency[1] to get ether, and there may be downward pressure because of a possible hard fork as well as the outage of a major exchange.
If you really knew what caused what with the bitcoin price, that'd be really special information and you'd be a very special person.
You can make your best guesses as to which forces will dominate. And you can be wrong.
I thought bitcoin went up on hype, down on fear. Opening up China markets, for example pushed the price up to over $1000. Then that hype died, along with MtGox and here we are.
> Opening up China markets, for example pushed the price up to over $1000.
I thought it was pretty established that (a) that was Willybot (b) there was no exchange you could actually get dollars out (so, not Mt. Gox) of where the price was over $1000.
(a) seems to be the generally accepted reason behind the runup to $1200 but (b) is patently false. I sold coins on coinbase and mtgox during this period and received deposits of USD within the week. The amounts were all below the six figure mark, so perhaps there were individuals with million dollar or more holdings that had issues finding instant liquidity. However, I imagine this is true of almost all assets of comparable size.
I am not talking about a temporary flashcrash. People used to think of Bitcoin as a safe heaven when else goes downhill. Just like gold. I don't think that's the case anymore.
> People used to think of Bitcoin as a safe heaven when else goes downhill
I don't really think this is true. There might be some bitcoin enthusiasts who hold this view, but I haven't seen any evidence of this belief in the wider finance community.
Silver and gold both seem to be dropping lower than they've been in years. Legend has it that when stocks go down, precious metals should go up. But what if gold, silver, and stocks were all in a bubble at once? They all kind of look bubbly by the long-term charts. Would that signify that we're finally reaching the end of the recession, or that we're beginning a new one?