As BTC started to go hyperbolic, Businessinsider.com was posting daily updates of its price. They also posted about its crash. Businessinsider, I would imagine, gets a lot of its web traffic from people in the business/finance world. The kind of people that love making money and invest/trade in equities. The founder of the site, Henry Blodget, used to be an equity research analyst on Wall Street during the tech bubble era many years ago. He even wrote an article about Bitcoin saying how a $1000 price target may happen one day and it may be worth the risk to invest.
My point is, a lot of speculators may have been exposed to Bitcoin for the first time by reading these articles on BI. I'm sure a lot of these speculators also use TA. As more and more people apply TA to BTC, TA will become more practical. It is kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy as people have said.
How big is BusinessInsider? IIRC, they are pretty damn fringe. I remember reading a lot of them back when I was an agorist a few years ago. The same people who I'd see posting BI articles were posting shit from Alex Jones, etc..... not really the finance crowd. More so the fringe anti-government crowd (more or less the niche that bitcoin already occupies). Obviously this is just anecdotal, though.
I also don't quite understand how conventional TA is applied to BTC.
Mainly because this is a relatively new market and most people factor out the continuously changing parameters and circumstances which you don't have in 'old' markets.
Can you elaborate as to how this would negate the effects of TA? Being a relatively new market does not mean that price movement cannot be analyzed. On the contrary, we are constantly seeing familiar retracements in the BTC market.
