John 
Bitcoin is like any other commodity its price can rise and fall, it is a traded commodity. That simply means that when demand is high the price goes up and when demand is low the price goes down.
What has happened over the past year or so is the price has risen to astronomical amount per coin followed by a crash then a recovery, there has been three major Bitcoin crashes in the short life of bitcoin and three recoveries, the interesting point to note is the price at the bottom of the crash has always been higher than the starting point of the rise.
A new phenomena has been the interest of well know entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates in investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This has given the market a big kick, with investment companies getting involved in offering futures packages at of course a very high price.
At the end of 2017 Bitcoin was big public news, with TV programs, newspaper coverage, and of course social media driving this interest. If you are a Facebook user you could hardly miss it, it was everywhere.
This lead an awful lot of small investors, to have a dabble in the market, either for long term investment purposes or short selling, buying large amounts of a product in this case Bitcoin and selling them while the price was rising to make a profit.
There was such an interest from small investors that many of the coin exchanges were completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the surge in business, they were unable to cope with the demand which led to outages of service and some restrictions on buying and selling.
The small investor cannot hope to compete with the big players, it only takes a few of the larger ones to start selling in quantity to preempt a crash. Thats where the small guys gets burned.
Lots of the small investors maxed out their credit cards with the idea of holding on to their stake or selling to make a quick profit and when the price went south so did their profit leaving them with a big credit card bill to settle.
So who makes money with a price crash? Well, those selling at the top of the market, anyone investing near the peak price did not see the returns they expected. The further result was panic selling of small investors trying to minimise the loses that they could see coming as the prices went down.
Now all this goes to prove the old adage that you should never invest any more than you can afford to lose. If you invest carefully then Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are an excellent investment for the future but you need to use due diligence to determine what is the best strategy to use for your own investments.
