What is Happening to Bitcoin?

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So Bitcoin's price is down by over 30% in a matter of 2 weeks. The cause is supposed to be the Chinese government's new policies regarding ICO's and Bitcoin exchanges. The ICO clampdown should not be any problem for Bitcoin, as for closing the Chinese exchanges, I would guess most people who had Bitcoin in these exchanges be they Chinese or from other countries will have withdrawn all their coins from these exchanges.

Let's look at this from this perspective, who in China holds Bitcoin? Only the people who can afford it, better said the elite, because the great majority of the Chinese population lives on salaries, (even though increasingly higher in the last couple of decades and their quality of life has vastly improved), that while livable in China, as they are enough for basics, you know like food, transportation, housing, utilities, this income is not enough for these working people to be investing their money on something like Bitcoin.

The only working class people who can afford to buy or invest in Bitcoin are people living in first world countries, better said most of Europe, Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and probably South Korea and Taiwan. In any other country only people who are in the top 10% of earnings can invest in BTC. Of course Steem is different, I can get some Steem just by writing so I don't include Steem in this type of analysis.

So what I want to know is, if in reality the only Chinese who hold Bitcoin are affluent people, and Bitcoin is held in wallets that are supposed to be safe from prying and anyway only the owner of a wallet who holds the keys can touch this BTC, why would the Chinese be panic selling and doing it at such low prices that it has driven down the price of BTC this much? It doesn't make much sense does it?

So I think what we have are speculators and the huge whales moving the price according to their best interests, you might say how can lowering the price and therefore lowering the value of their holdings make any sense. Well it does make sense if you think like this, a few weeks back BTC was at 4,000 and going up I can imagine a lot of upper middle class people and even rich ones putting their money into this coin.

Now suppose someone made a loan for 900,000 USD and bought say 230 BTC, the price went up to 5,000 but these person after all the hype about BTC probably going up to 10 grand didn't sell expecting to make a killing, well when the price started going down they still didn't sell as it was just a temporary glitch, but maybe right now they have to pay back their loan or lose whatever collateral they put up for it.

A lot of people will probably be panic selling, and rightly so, because they are probably in a very tight situation, and it is better to lose 1 or 2 hundred grand than lose everything. So the huge whales are probably now buying a lot of BTC at a relatively low price and they will most probably be the ones making a killing. Because if you have a few spare million dollars you can do this otherwise you are in a difficult situation.

So, again, I see no difference between crypto currency and stocks or fiat currency, all are actually based on nothing and make people respond to the financial movement in a herd manner doing what everyone is doing except of course those who are in the know, no difference between the crypto world and the real world.

So again I say people who think crypto is a world saver and is going to change the whole financial world are not right, I don't think crypto is going to disappear, but I don't think it will be the game changer many people expect it to be. Now of course for my part I want it to succeed especially Steem, but I think it will be an ongoing effort for a long time.