Hacker News Reader

China is cracking down on exchanges by forcing the state-owned banks to close their accounts. That is the speculative force that is driving down the price.

It is good that the price is going down since more people will buy Bitcoin now.

Apparently this is all supposed to sort itself out by the 18th of this month -- that's the deadline they've given for account closures.

"This is actually good news."

Personally I think its more a reversal of the "hype" valuation of bitcoin. For a while it was in the mainstream media all the time.

Also, probably more importantly, Mt. Gox was constantly pushing the prices higher because nobody could withdraw USD, so the only way to get out of Mt Gox was to use all your USD to buy bitcoins and then transfer them to another exchange.

China, and perhaps selling to pay 2013 capital-gains taxes.