There are two competing theories of investment/speculation: "fundamental value theory" and "greater fool theory."

I can't remember which scion of finance it was, but one of 'em said "know what kind of investor you are." I am a fundamentalist through and through. This is why I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the "fundamental value" of cryptocurrency:

However: fundamentals investors represent a vanishingly small proportion of the market. It's pretty much those of us who bought in the beginning and saw no reason to sell. Everyone else is trying to figure out how much they can sell their holdings to other people for, or figuring out just how cheap it'll go so they don't pay too much. Flocking is something you can study algorithmically; the entirety of BEAM robotics replaces complex programming and algorithmic difficulty with the maxim that many individual points following simple behavior lead to a cloud of complexity. Really, this is also where laminar flow becomes turbulence in fluid mechanics.

So right now you could point to:

- A paper out of the University of Tulsa indicating that one actor drove prices on Mt.Gox from $150 to $1000 through manipulation

- News that China is attempting to produce an orderly shutdown of crypto mining because it burns coal

- A former Wells Fargo exec calling crypto a "pyramid scheme

But really? Sometimes a bird lands on a wire and the other birds move over. Sometimes a bird lands on a wire and the flock takes to the skies. These are deeply, heartbreakingly unsophisticated investors we're talking about, and they're operating in a market that is opaque, rudimentary, shallow and rife with manipulation and exploitation.

Pigeons gotta pigeon, man.