Can someone explain the true story behind Bitcoin and the price? I can't help but shake the feeling that someone is playing an exquisitely long game.
Money laundering and drug trade. China has export controls to prevent USD from fleeing the country and weakening RMB. Instead, people buy mining equipment and export their wealth as Bitcoin. Many of the institutions within the cryptocurrency world are also transparent money-laundering schemes. For example Nicehash is a system that lets people "earn money mining cryptocurrency" by "renting their hardware to bidders",…
Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that this supposed money laundering scheme is the price driver, because if the intention is to launder money by buying/renting CPU power, then the fiat coming in would not have any upward pressure on the price (as it goes into hardware to mine coins) while at the same time the coins mined in such operation would actually push the price of BTC down.
Finally, I really can't see the connection behind Asians moving assets into real-estate in Canada and Australia and cryptocurrencies, unless such transaction are being paid for in crypto. I haven't heard/read of such cases.
My 2 cents: it's a classic bubble. Bunch of people made incredible nominal returns (think 100x or 1.000x) by having bought really early, and then price being driven up on relatively small volumes by new people increasingly piling in. This created an impressive social proof, and the masses started to pile in.
I'm sure we're in a bubble right now, and that it's going to burst/deflate. The question is when, and what's going to be the trigger. Judging from the recent events, heavy-handed regulation is a possible candidate for a trigger. There's so much bullshit ICO's, and that may be a red rag that sets the regulators on a crackdown.
That being said, I'm long term bullish on BTC and ETH, but there's likely going to be a massive extinction among the altcoins during the next bear period.