"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."
I disagree with both reasons.
the first one because buyers have not gone anywhere and it has nothing to do with bravery. it is about the fact that a large sell off from certain parties in the market was capable of decreasing the price even though the market was filled with buyers!
as for regulations, they have always been around and not much has changed about them. if anything it has become better considering the changes.
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.
unless it is some weird country with a weird dictatorship oriented government, the exchanges aren't going to be shut down for no reason!!! and as long as they don't do anything illegal like money laundering they will never be shut down.
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?
it is not possible simply because trading bitcoin requires fiat (don't confuse it with trading altcoins which is crypto versus crypto trade and can easily be decentralized). and since fiat requires banks and similar methods and all of them are easy to be faked it becomes impossible to have a decentralized market where people trade bitcoin-fiat.
for example you can not prevent credit card thieves from using it to buy bitcoin unless the market is a centralized exchange.