What caused altcoin price inflation in early 2017?

[Nebell]

It can't be the mining craze as it started when altcoins went up a lot. Was it Ethereum? But I don't think that either as Ethereum is a platform for ICOs.
What happened?

[starblocks]

Lots of new investors coming on board is my guess - and far more media coverage as bitcoin went over $1,000 and then continued to climb it gained more awareness and along with that the top 50 or so alts

[Charloz24]

Yes indeed Bitcoin is starting to become known outside crypto world. This year I heard about Bitcoin on the news 2 times, first one was a BTC ATM that was vandalized. I is always funny how news reporter explain what is Bitcoin  (hum some kind of virtual money). The other time was when the hackers that wanted BTC as ransom.

[AbsoluteT]

Ethereum was getting a lot of attention and everyone wants the next  ethereum
the 2017 alt coin bubble was one of the most insane bubbles ive ever seen some coins went up  over 1000x

[talkbitcoin]

it is an annual thing, it happens almost every year at nearly the same time. the whales get to work on it and start pumping everything and make a lot of money. this year because of bitcoin things got bigger.

first was the fact that bitcoin got a lot of attention with things like Japan legally adopting it. so it attracted a lot of money to this market and some of it robbed off on altcoins.

second was the fact that bitcoin started performing badly and that pushed some people to invest in altcoins and the advertisement that altcoin pumpers did attracted more of them.

finally as bitcoin started fixing the drama and started rising up smoothly again, altcoins got dumped and things went back to normal with bitcoin rising and one or two alts only get pumped once in a while...

[noictib]

It can't be the mining craze as it started when altcoins went up a lot. Was it Ethereum? But I don't think that either as Ethereum is a platform for ICOs.
What happened?

In my opinion , In the last of 2016 year we seen many big big sites that ran away and everyone became sure that investment in the sites are ponzi ways to make money and also they are big source to loss own money .
Here i myself lost much money in the investment , So i made a network of the worldwide bitcoiners and everyone  was making discussion in the last of year 2016 that everything is scam and better way to make money is trading , so everyone get into trading ( few of them excited because of less profit ) But most of them like me entred in the trading and making much profit , and i think here the same thing also happened with other most Bitcoiners because every successful Bitcoiners is saying that trading is only a way to make money .
So here due to this decision huge amount of the money is flowing in the market of cryptocurrency to make buy of altcoins and making big investment in altcoins field .

[Seansky]

It can't be the mining craze as it started when altcoins went up a lot. Was it Ethereum? But I don't think that either as Ethereum is a platform for ICOs.
What happened?

Probably the hype that are on going made altcoins go up so high. Besides hype, many investors have gone in into crypto and for them altcoins are one grounds to earn money so demand have grown in the past few months. ICO's somewhat also attracted big shots to invest on crypto and affected not just btc market but also altcoin market.