Now bigger, smarter, girthier kids are providing the surprise buttsecs.
There is way more money in it for them to rally the price higher yet again than crashing the market into the floor. Hundreds of millions of VC money, infrastructure, rising user numbers, potential ETF to draw in investment capital. It's really a matter of when we go up. There is too much money to be made in this space for us not to mount another bubble or three. I still think this is all a distribution phase prior to the next run up. Unless we smash below the previous ATH on heavy volume, bitcoin days destroyed goes berzerk, or the black swan - the US comes out and bans bitcoin.
I don't see how one can make money with a pure pump-and-dump strategy (buying to increase the price, then selling at the higher price). Sounds like those old perpetual-motion machines where falling weights are supposed to pull other weights up. A successful pump-and-dump must include substantial misleading marketing as well.
Venture capital (which seems to grow 2--3x each time the original estimates are re-quoted
) has been going mostly into auxiliary services like exchanges, payment processors, fund management, gambling sites, etc. Those enterprises do not profit from BTC price increase, but from fees collected from BTC users. While increasing price and/or usage would increase their fees, the investment they would have to make in order to pump the price is much more than what they expect to profit from the resulting price increase.
There is no data on actual BTC usage for e-commerce. More shops accepting bitcoins may be just splitting the same market niche (owners of old coins who decide to cash in by shopping) over a larger merchant base. Ditto for the increasing numbers of payment processors, funds, gamblings sites etc..
