WannaCry caused the price to drop, rather sharply. If anything, the purpose would be to buy cheap Bitcoins and hope the price later corrects back upwards after the news has blown over.
I suspect the price drop is due to some trading algorithms using sentiment analysis. They see all the negative press around these ransomware, see the included word Bitcoin, assume the negative article is about Bitcoin, and automatically sell.
But that's just my theory, since I have a hard time imagining human traders seeing news like this and selling because of it.
>But that's just my theory, since I have a hard time imagining human traders seeing news like this and selling because of it.
Sure they might; the more Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is associated with cybercrime, the more likely it is to be banned (sending the price to ~0 in the affected countries).
It would certainly have a cascading effect, however, because the news soon follows about Bitcoin/all crypto dropping and both bots and watchful traders take their profits out and either get scared out of the market, or hope to capitalize on the dip.
I doubt wannacry was the reason for the price drop. Rather extensive media coverage about bitcoin hitting $3k which probably woke up some people who realised that it might be the time to cash in.
This was long before $3k. The price tanked immediately on May 12th and remained depressed until the 17th which was shortly after the initial outbreak was halted by the domain registration.
