the bitcoin rise was fuelled by the alt bubble past a certain point. the alt bubble was the biggest and the emptiest yet. none of them got within a million miles of earning their valuations
I cannot support this view
And I guess I know what made you come to this erroneous conclusion (i.e. that "Bitcoin rise was fueled by the alt bubble"). I think you looked at the total market cap figures of altcoins and got tricked into thinking that there was something real behind this rise, i.e. real money. As to me, this was nowhere near the case. These market cap figures were bullshit, since the amount of fiat that it took to pump this seeming bubble was miserable (in Bitcoin terms). In other words, it is Bitcoin that got pumped with the bulk of money which made it rise, and only some dust ended up in altcoins. But since altcoins are dwarfs beside Bitcoin even this dust was sufficient to inflate the altocoin bubble and make it look enormous and intimidating
While I agree with you that the market cap figures are a bad metric, I still wouldn't dismiss the impact of alt coin speculation on the Bitcoin price. The volume of ETH, XRP, LTC and ETC show that there's indeed quite a lot of trading going on. Sure, a lot of the volume is driven by pumps and herd mentality, but it's still nothing to scoff at, especially for such a young market
Trading volumes are even less relevant to the matter discussed
They basically show how many times a certain number of coins changed hands at trading but this itself tells us nothing about the absolute amount of money that a coin received within a certain period of time. If you sold and bought 1 coin worth 1 dollar 1 million times, you would get 1 million dollar trading volume (actually, 2 million dollars), while in reality you have been trading just 1 dollar, and the same 1 dollar at that. To really see the amount of cash invested, we should know the number of coins being traded (i.e. not the volume of trades) and the change in price. For example, if there is 1M litecoins actively traded (the number is entirely random), and we want to raise the price from 20 dollars to 30 dollars per coin, then it would require us, say, 10M dollars to make this rise possible. This is a very rough estimate, of course (it would require more than that), but it shows the logic behind the correct reasoning