I'm surprised no one has caught this yet. Paul, you've made a big error in your original post!

Four months ago Bitcoin almost touched the $20,000 milestone!

In fact, some people will say that it did cross that mark, because there's such variance across exchanges it's possible (likely, actually) that at least one exchange had the price cross that threshold for a short time.

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And in agreement with a few others here, market capitalization isn't a driver of price, it's a symptom or effect of price. Market capitalization is calculated by multiplying price per coin or share X the total number of coins or shares outstanding.

It's not the market cap that's sliding down, it's the price per coin that's sliding down. In fact, market cap slides more slowly than the price per coin because we are producing new coins every single day...which has an increasing affect on the market capitalization.