The thing I always seem to hear from people is "Look at the past, Bitcoin has always crashed hard but it always came back stronger than ever."
This ignores the fact that in 2009-2017 there was no futures market. Post 2017, there was a futures market. And as at 2021, it is now 10x as big as spot (for every $1 traded on spot exchanges, $10 is traded in futures) and the trend seems to be increasing. We are seeing a bigger and bigger paper market. And this makes price suppression a real threat. We know the banks don't like bitcoin. All the bitcoin maxis are like "there's nothing the banks can do to stop bitcoin". I reckon they can. They can use the futures market.
What changed then? I mean yeah between 2009-2017 there were no futures market and we grew a lot, sure that part is true, but what changed? Didn't we increased a ton since 2017 as well? The start of 2017 was 700 dollars, and peak of 2017 was nearly 20k dollars, where are we now? We are over 40k and we have went over 60k as well. So all in all I would say that even with the futures market we are doing fine, there is nothing that we should be sad about the futures market.
I understand that it is not really that much of a problem but at the end of the day it does give incentives to drop the price, that part is much true. I mean that doesn't mean that it is all bad, but I would say there are bad parts about it, I agree to that.