My two cents of Dogecoin:
The good news surrounding bitcoin does not seem to advance the price.
Perhaps because those "good news" are not meanigful for people who are not into bitcoin already?
Perhaps because people who are already into bitcoin know that those "good news" are not that great, actually? (E.g. "another merchant acepts bitcoins" actually means "another merchant accepts cash through Bitpay or Coinbase".)
Any hint of bad news, FUD, seems to drop the price temporarily. Why?
Many people who have invested in bitcoins are not that confident about it. Presumably they rush to sell, before waiting for the news to be confirmed, because they fear being run over by a crash.
The China exchanges have been dead since before the ‘holidays’ and the price is mostly flat on the other exchanges. Does this indicate that the Chinese exchanges are the driver for price discovery?
I would think so. They seem to be the driver also for tarde volume. With or without holidays, they account for 70% or more of the total trade volume.
Bitstamp and BTC-e are effectively flat lined. When the bid or ask walls reach some level, an order hits and the price moves. Then a series of orders arrive which brings the price back to the previous level.
I think that I see the same thing at Huobi.
Could be arbitrage traders, pulling the price back towards the other exchanges. (Crashes and rallies seem to be much slower now than they used to; presumably it is the same cause.)
Why are things about bitcoin price so negative lately?
After the Dec/01 crash and the failure to recover in 2 months, many people realized that the success of Bitcoin is not as certain as it seemed before. The China actions showed that governments can stop bitcoin if they decide to do so. Then altcoins blasted a big hole in the arithmetic that "proved" million-dollar prices in a few years.
People are becoming aware that the price is set entirely by the market, and the market does not seem to see those astronomical prices any time soon.
Thrue believers, who would buy BTC at any price, apparently ran out of money. The exchanges apparently became the playground of speculators who only expect the price will rise enough for them to sell at a profit; or fall by a fair amount but then rebound to the current level. Thus they won't sell for less than X + 50 and won't buy for more than X - 50. And so the price stays at X.
The buying of bitcoins for use in commerce does not seem to be enough to affect the price, and should be offset by the sale of coins by miners and merchants.
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