This is the first bear market (drop of 20% from a recent peak in broad-based index) Bitcoin or the crypto-currency market has ever seen, 'traditional' or not, so it's really uncharted territory.
To me it seems much more likely the large exchanges just dumped in order to make a killing off the leveraged longs.
So in short people did actually believe in it as a shore of wealth and exchanges manipulated this belief in order to selfishly profit.
This isn’t something that was easy to predict, my comment is obviously a reflection of what happened today but I think it’s the most logical explanation.