I’ve been thinking about this very question for sometime now, most especially after I came across a thread(can’t specifically remember which board I saw the thread, but I tried searching an didn’t find it) where the op talked about how some big whales use some sort of techniques to create barriers for bitcoin price allowing them to accumulate more until the price of bitcoin reaches their desired price, then they allow it move freely again, just with the case of it moving smoothly from 90k+ to 100k+.
This kind of strategy is possible, if one party holds a tremendous amount of BTC or a huge capital, they can influence the market. From my years of experience watching the Bitcoin market, I also heard news about people or groups of people that have huge funding and Bitcoin holdings creating barriers on both sell and buy orders. This is more rampant in the earlier days of Bitcoin and on the altcoins that have low volume.
People will do whatever they can to manipulate the market to yield them profit.
Well, as much as I know that, the price of bitcoin is determined by supply and demand, I also had to see some reasons with that threads op as to the possibility of some people(whales) being able to manipulate these supply and demand and judging from how the price of bitcoin could easily be affected by a tweet from President Donald Trump, has given rise to some sort of curiosity in me to ask and know if truly that some group of people can actually determine the price of bitcoin by altering the demand and supply of the coin?
People can also create and artificial shortage or influx of coins. This is also a normal strategy in normal trades of commodities. Someone hoard the supply creating an artificial shortage in supply making the price increase then eventually release their holdings once their target price is reached. Same goes with the influx of coins, the dump a huge amount of BTC crashing the price after sometime of Fudding the market. Once the market sentiment is affected, crashing the market can easily give them an opportunity to rebuy the BTC they dump to crash the market at a very low price.