PayPal started accepting Bitcoin, Square bought a lot of Bitcoin, some UK startup bought a ton, stuff like that.
Honestly, as a Bitcoin adopter very early on (2011ish), I'll say that Bitcoin's value is over. Ethereum too, or rather any decentralized currency. Governments don't like crypto, they don't like the anonymity it provides, so they'll find other ways to starve it. Making it a speculative investment is one such way. Shutting Down Silk Road was another. Shutting down the Dark Web sites might yet be another. Or (gasp!), creating their own legal cryptocurrency that is universal, mandated by banks to use for transactions, with some form of tracking, etc. As someone on another thread mentioned, there's nothing stopping a government from holding a gun to your head and demanding you to give away all of your crypto. Now one may suggest exchanging it for fiat, but that's a really long and cumbersome process, which will often come with significant scrutiny (as happened in my case).
"This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to the U.S. dollar, influenced Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 boom. Using algorithms to analyze blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. The flow is attributable to one entity, clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests insufficient Tether reserves before month‐ends. Rather than demand from cash investors, these patterns are most consistent with the supply‐based hypothesis of unbacked digital money inflating cryptocurrency prices."
It just needs (a) enough time since the last crash and (b) some kind of announcement to get the speculative ball rolling. In this case it was the PayPal announcements. And I think a third factor could be day traders getting bored with the dwindling growth of speculative stocks like TSLA, NIO, etc., and looking to speculate on greener pastures.
It's never just one thing. It's a bunch of things that have been kept dormant for a couple of years with the price not moving too much. Price will explode again due to built-up hype and FOMO, and then a year later it will be in free fall again and all the "smart people" will claim it will go to zero and be worthless....just like the last 20 times it did that. And on and on we go.
