I find that this is quite amazing the regularity of the charts. Do anyone have a clue about this phenomenon ? Maybe some big players/exchanges playing again and again with the same scheme ?
Well there are definitely factors that seem to come into play during each major price increase; for example, the initial run to $32 was likely a result of interest taken after the Gawker article on Silk Road. The run to $256 occured after the first reward halving and possibly due to the interest in the Cypress bank bail-ins. The $1200 peak occurred when interest from the Chinese was first beginning to peak, and seemed to get implicit approval from their government. However, while these things almost certainly played into the price rises, it's hard to say for certain whether any particular event actually
caused the rises. People like to point to every price increase or decrease as occurring because of a specific reason, but sometimes I think that's just fabricating a reason.
This would also not explain the extended relatively flat periods in 2012 and 2015 and the downturns in 2011 and 2014. This is where I think it's the underlying human tendencies that are affecting things. People's attention changes, and it happen en masse.
A good example is the selfie chart posted recently in this thread; as interest in something spikes initially everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Then after a while interest begins to fade and people move onto the next thing. After a certain cooling off period interest can be renewed in the initial phenomenon if people are still talking about it. That is what I believe happens here, where phase 1 of each cycle reflects initial interest or pent up demand, and then phase 2 reflects a rebound of an interest that hasn't yet run it's course. By the time phase 3 happens people are losing interest or are distracted or disillusioned, and price reflects that. It then takes a year or two before things are ready to start again.
As another example of interest cycles, look at fashion and societal trends. It takes about 20 years for those cycles to repeat, which is why in the 90s we saw a resurgence of interest of the 70s (fashion, hair, nostalgia, music), then the 2000's saw a "flashback" to what was popular in the 80s, and now in the 2010s there has been more interest in the 90s again (and to a lesser degree the 70s).
Without a general sentiment in the market (generally bear or bull), individual events won't have a large lasting impacts. Large buys or sells have more impact when they happen in the direction the market is moving anyway than when they move against it. Same for news events.
