The trigger for what happened to the market is still unclear.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2018/12/01/bitcoin-has-lost-most-of-its-value-this-year

"One popular theory is that the the supply of brave buyers willing to take a punt has now been exhausted.

Regulatory interest may be another reason."

"Technical faff, and the volatility that makes it attractive to speculators, means that it is hard to use bitcoin to actually buy things."

One thing is certain. Once everyone can easily use cryptocurrency to buy things without any chance of regulation, its value will inevitably increase.

We still have yet to be able to do this because we still have to use crypto exchanges to deal. These exchanges are still registered companies and can be shut down at government's whims.

Eliminate crypto exchanges and give people the ability to easily use crypto in everyday life and these problems go away!

A distributed exchange network complete with widespread use of a decentralized marketplace would fix the fundamental crypto issues we see today.

Thoughts?