[...] The consistent down pressure seems far higher long term than the emission and even if it was equal to the emission then I find it hard to believe all new coins are dumped. Every single time there is a breakout there is a dump, I just cannot figure out why anyone would want to intentionally suppress the price like that (especially if they have the coins to do it: it flies in the face of self interest) and I think it's fanciful to believe it's some other coins troll. [...]
Yup, I was just thinking the very same thing these last few days.
Whenever the market goes up even a few percent there's like a flood of sellers willing to market sell it back down. My only possible explanation to this is that whoever is accumulating (and has been since the last low around .0016) wants to dry all the supply at these levels before letting it go up. [...]
with minimal damage so when the opportunity arises they take it.
Other explanation could be that XMR is currently more coupled to the price in BTC than the dollar.
XMR/BTC is mostly hovering around 0.002, but the dollar value of BTC tripled over the last year. This forces some to rebalance their portfolio since their fiat exposure in Monero tripled, even though the value of their XMR did not increase much against bitcoin.
The above effect gets multiplied when the XMR/BTC ratio is increasing in favor of Monero.