BTC did not move up much with gold's move up to $1117. Gold paused and BTC made a lower low (relative to recent). It appears BTC does not want to rally with gold. Thus is looking very weak.
Satoshi even spoke out on Aug 15 about the danger of GavinCoin. (Either the real Satoshi posted or someone with enough hacking skills or influence posted from his former email account, thus either way someone is expending precious resource to make a point about how serious this is)
I am not sure what to make of all this, except that overall gold and BTC are correlated and that both are headed for extreme lows by Spring 2016 (based on Armstrong's gold low prediction).
I see support and people ready to catch the falling knife but I struggle to see big money willing to buy at 300+.
The previous bubbles happened without the advanced trading products (margin, futures, options etc) that enabled since almost 1.5 years now the market to mature into a real one (and not a pump & crash type of investment).
It will be VERY difficult to see the kind of rallies we were used to.
Add to this the obvious technological limitations of Bitcoin (fundamental analysis) that are now obvious to every well educated investor and I think that the 'Moon' crowd will get smaller & smaller with time.
It's only hope IMO is (as you say) TPTB deliberataly making it the new tool for mass surveilance & control mechanism, thus exploding it's price so everyone will 'bite'...
I see too a double bottom (165$) or lower at spring 2016.
Explain please!