How to Explain the Price of Bitcoin?

Abstract

Bitcoin price is still a puzzle, despite the highly evolving literature on this topic. This paper tries to identify some variables to explain the evolution of bitcoin price. We show that macroeconomic variables and Google searches tend not to account for bitcoin price any more. We are therefore interested in variables specific to the crypto-assets ecosystem: volumes of ether, ripple and tether. The negative relationship between bitcoin price and these volumes shows that these crypto-assets are probably used for price manipulation or pump and dump activities on the bitcoin market.