Hello everyone, I watch #BTC pretty close these days as ALT coins have always excited me. The market is in a tizzy and has been for several day, and this I will explain in this post based on what I have seen in the market changes as well as what I have known from personal experience, news reports, as well as fellow friends who have invested in BTC and been up to date on the world events involved around Cryptocurrencies.

Thank you to @karenmckersie for your post asking questions.
Check out and upvote that post HERE

(photo credit: www.geek.com)

As everyone knows by now, BTC rose to just over $1100 at the first of the 2017 year. A lot of people didn't understand why but as you will soon see. I am about to explain a great deal about what effects the markets of Cryptocurrencies, as well as the HUGE price fluctuations as you can see.

Let us take a look at Coinbase.com first, and go into a little explaining about what happens over there, as well as how you can keep up to date on the price of alt coins, and the market the are always a part of.

This picture (above) shows, the dashboard of my personal accout on www.coinbase.com with it comes the market graph of the past 30 days of BTC, this is one graph that I watch daily as coin base is the BIGGEST online alt trading websites.

As you many of you already know this, I will only state that the price BTC is traded at, greatly affects the market fluctuation. It also has to do with how much BTC is traded, but I will jump into that a little more in a minute. First, I want to continue on with something else.

This graph, as you can now see have been changed to show you all the market drops, rises, and overall price of BTC from the start of the currency to the finish or the now (current live price). So what causes these fluctuations? We already talked about the trade price, and how different prices, over different amounts of time, affect the overall average, and market value of Alt Coins, and BTC is in that mix as well as STEEM.

The New Year & Christmas

&

The Chinese New Year

Many many different times we see HUGE public events sway all kinds of different markets, kind of like we see gas prices cange with the seasons. We also see different holiday's or collection of holidays influence all types of markets.

Alt coins, are affected just as everything else.

With Christmas comes money troubles, as in many parts of the world we see many people buying gifts and items for those they love and care about. To buy these items, many investors will sell things they invest in, many online investors have different alt coins to sell and so we usually see around the end of every year a fall in alt coins price, due to the sell off from many different places around the world.

This year, the Alt Coin price Soared...

... but why?

If we look at the understanding of the above information, would you not wait for the end of the year to buy buy buy?

That is exactly what happened, many investors jumped on the falling prices to starve the economy and then many people decided to hold their BTC. Yes, there is always tons of people selling BTC on the market, but for the most part a lot of the big sell offs that we see, they didn't happen. As many people held onto their coins for the rising prices we saw BTC gain world wide news coverage as the price continued to soar.
Source for Volume and pricing: https://btc-e.com/exchange

As the Holidays are now over, the Chinese new year has begun. With that, we already have seen the fire sale from china as people there scramble to buy things and sell off some of their BTC, I mean of course this process started when BTC was around $1100 as everyone knew the market would soon drop, yet even as I am writing this I am watching BTC fall by $10 an hour roughly, it is shocking to watch the market in such a tail spin.

Pic showing market drop in past few hours (Compared to last screen grab of market graph)

As you can see, and self predicted the market bottomed out at $830 today around 5:30am. With the Chinese New Year Fire Sale started several days ago, we watch BTC drastically fluctuate, and now it is already back on the rise.

Good luck out there everyone!
Thank you once again for being a part of my Steemit Experience!
This is my 4th 100% power up post.

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~Timbo