The buy wall was a load of steps out of nowhere. There wasn't ANY attempt at hiding this by the person(s) involved.
Agree. Financially, bitcoin is still a little toy. And I think the manipulator(s) are not trying to make money directly from BTC. They supress it to prevent adoption. And they have a lot of money and power.
The good news: They can only do it to a certain level. When bitcoin hits rock bottom (maybe we did?), it will perform better than other currencies. Because the supply is limited. "Volatility" is not the problem for a currency. "Going down" is the problem. ("Going up" could technically be called volatility, but I don't think people would mind their savings increase in value.)