Current Bitcoin is barely hanging on to $8000 and from what I can see from the charts it's likely to go down to $7000 or even lower before reaching bottom. What happened to have Bitcoin go from $5000 to $14,000+ and then back to $6000-7000 in the same year? 

The Bitcoin price manipulation hypothesis

One hypothesis is that the markets are manipulated. This is possible due to front running on centralized exchanges, due to the low liquidity overall, and due to the impact of institutional money. We simply do not know if the impact of institutional money is positive or negative but from a trader perspective it is just as profitable to make money pumping the price up as it is profitable crashing the price. Rising Bitcoin dominance in my opinion is a clue hinting toward manipulation from professional traders rather than organic retail interest. I do not think a Bitcoin ETF would change the scenario here because  there are still many problems with fake volume on exchanges and extreme margin trading.

I think we are now in an era where crypto profits are no longer made from the buy and hold strategy. Traditionally people bought Bitcoin, held it, and hoped the price would reach $100,000 or even $1 million USD. This strategy was based on assumptions which held true as long as it wasn't possible for the masses to make just as much money shorting Bitcoin as longing Bitcoin. As the market developed the capability to short Bitcoin we have not actually seen Bitcoin in a sustained bull run. The mini bull run we saw this year has now been suppressed or converted into a bear market upon the launch of Bakkt.

What is the impact of Bakkt?

The main theme or chorus of the mini bull run of 2019 was that institutional investors would fuel the rise of Bitcoin to $100,000. People who bought and hold seemed to assume that these institutions would be the first movers to bring the Bitcoin price to all time highs. It turns out that Bitcoin is not going to be driven by institutional interest but is mainly driven by retail interest. The problem? There isn't a lot of retail interest right now in Bitcoin.

It is possible that the retail interest in Bitcoin will never come back. One of the problems is that retail investors or mainstream traders are not sophisticated enough to profit from shorting Bitcoin. This means we will see a lot of bull traps where unsophisticated retail investors buy Bitcoin to hold it for many years only to find that institutional and swing traders can continuously pump and dump to set up bull traps. A swing trader profits on the way up and on the way down, and so they don't have a reason to care about what the long term price of Bitcoin is because they profit from volatility.

My current thought that perhaps Bitcoin is holding crypto back

As much as many long term holders like Bitcoin and as much as many of us here (myself included) learned about Bitcoin first, we also have to consider that the market has changed. The Bitcoin from 2013 was the opportunity of a lifetime but the Bitcoin of 2019 just isn't the same kind of opportunity. You cannot make %10,000 form your investment now like you could in 2013 if you invest in Bitcoin.  Could Bitcoin go to $1 million USD? Anything is possible but why would Bitcoin go to $1 million USD when so many people (including Bill Gates) can make just as much money shorting it to make sure it never goes beyond a certain price? 

In my opinion Bitcoin from an investment point of view has seen it's best days. It likely will get to $20,000 at some point, and may even get to $50,000 post halving, but at this point due to Bakkt it is now possible that it can never get to $20,000 again because why not short Bitcoin down to it's actual price if you know it's over valued? And that is what I suspect is happening now, as the cost to produce a Bitcoin wasn't $9000 and is closer to $6000, and the demand for Bitcoin isn't increasing because now many tokens can act as a currency far better than Bitcoin (Tether, Steem Dollars, Dai, etc). So for people who want a currency Bitcoin aint right and for people who want a store of value Bitcoin is questionable here too.

In my opinion the best store of value tokens will be stable tokens which offer a very high yield. A stable token which can be like Dai or Steem Dollars with a fluctuating percentage yield based on how profitable the network is at any point in time. In other words Proof of Stake kind of rewards with a stable token is really much better than what Bitcoin or even Ethereum is now. Ethereum interestingly enough is going toward staking and stable tokens which in my opinion is smart but the problem is Bitcoin does not have the capability to offer a stablizing effect which means the holders of Bitcoin who buy at a high price of over $10,000 might lose in the end if institutional investors decide to short Bitcoin down to $5600 or perhaps even to the cost of production.

Could Bitcoin even be attacked if malicious institutional investors decide to short Bitcoin down to below the cost of mining it? I don't see any way for Bitcoin to avoid something like this by it's Proof of Work design which would mean if it's no longer profitable to mine then Bitcoin doesn't have much value anymore. Bitcoin isn't the best technology by a long shot so it does not have the technical value it had in 2013 or even 2016. Bitcoin at this point gets the attention mainly because it has a lot of hash power dedicated to it mainly because of the price of Bitcoin being able to support the hash power dedicated to it. This feedback loop can be attacked by institutional investors who decide to simply strategically short and suppress the price of Bitcoin in favor of competing tokens which they prefer to see the hash power flow toward. 

What is the solution? In my opinion if you are long crypto then you can see that it is at least possible that Bitcoin is holding the rest of crypto back. Retail investors may get excited about new projects and new crypto but the current problem is there are a lot of completely scam or worthless tokens floating around which aren't presenting new ideas or offering high utility or potentially high yield even. So at the moment retail investors cannot determine which tokens to buy and it all looks like some kind of lottery.  In my opinion now is the time to create the decentralized finance and more sophisticated economics which means projects will need to give much more thought to the economics of their projects.

Steem itself has been a victim to the mindset of not giving enough thought into how to keep the Steem token afloat. Too many seemed to assume that Steem just follows Bitcoin and that following Bitcoin is enough to keep the whole thing running. By now people can see that nothing is holding Bitcoin up, and if Steem is going to hold itself up then it needs to figure out how to generate some sort of profit whether monetary or in terms of social power, for those who hold the token. Steem Power right now doesn't increase the social power or the financial profit of the holder which in my opinion is the main problem.

Decoupling from Bitcoin requires:

• Decentralized finance protocols, possibly including decentralized exchanges and derivatives.
• Better economic strategies other than to offer investors "buy and hold" potential for ROI.
• Build a real economy where there is real utility. Steem started this but this is hard to get right.
• Rely on a stable token to store wealth, but also add staking or percentage yield for revenue sharing potential from the network.