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?
Well, define stable. In the first place, it is only january. In the second, I dont believe the price is stable right now, there are fluctuations of over $1000 per week, which means a lot of money if you think on those who have a significant number of them, or if you attend to the big picture here, I mean, the market current value of BTC itself.
If you take a look of the whole history of BTC, you will see it was stable for years (from july, 2013 to approximate the spring of 2017). Since there, it has been going up and down, and I think thats precisely the reason we see it now as surprisingly stable.
Look at the graphic below. The whole history of BTC versus the last year. It has been crazy from the last 11 months.
So, what I mean, is: stable or not, it depends only on your own perspective and on what do you compare the current situation.
Thinking on the future, I believe it is going get up and down all 2018 until, at least, it reaches a stable price. It depends directly on how it is going to be use, if as a current coin (for instance, for payments in Amazon, or so), or as it has been use, principally from the last year: as an investment on speculation market.
Yes, the trend has changed during the las days, it has been more or less the same during january and now is going to the bottom gaining more volatility as in the last months.
Talking about stability, I don't think bitcoin will reach a stable price, I like to imagne bitcoin variations (in therms of $) ever stronger when we'll reach 2/3 trillions market cap, but we will get used to.
The revolution wll be so strong that bitcoin will be influenced more and more by geopolitical events, reaching a new sphere of dominance and position in the global economical system.
The game is fascinating me every day more, I am very curious to see how community will react now, because the situation is very different from past years. Now there are millions of people holding their own bitcoins (or fractions of it) and if we all understand that holding is the key to make bitcoin great, bitcoin price will rise target that we even imagine during 2018.