What do you think is happening?

Is people hoding less their coins?

Is there more manipulation by big whales, speculators or big institutional investors trying to profit the flavour of the moment?

I feel that there are big players "pumping and dumping" in order to manipulate the market to stabilize price and "control" in a certain way the price fluctuation.

Obviously bitcoin is very dangerous for our old corrupted economy, don't you think that in acertain way there's an unusual stop of the past few months trend?
After reaching $20k there's a correction to $17k and then price stabilizes at 11-12k with mini-dips that last seconds before going uptrend...

In my opinion the key factor could be also that if bitcoin reaches $30-50k then it will be very difficult for newcomers to buy bitcoin for buying altcoins in the exchanges.

So that stabilizing the price to an affordable $10k for a while could be a way to engage more people to bitcoinworld.

Or maybe it's all ok, there's no manipuation, it is a stanby before the big run to $50k-100k. Then newcomers will start buying and trading in Ethereum or Litecoin, because at the moment there aren't exchanges accepting fiat money, you have to enter and buy your altcoins directly with cryptocurrencies...

Which in your opinion are the main reasons?