I'm thinking there's a cabal of benevolent bitcoin zillionnaires behind this. One of the criticisms of bitcoin has been its extreme volatility. This can intimidate individual buyers, and more importantly businesses. So what does the Satoshi Nakamoto troika do? It starts putting up buy AND sell walls to keep the price at this level for as long as possible. This builds up confidence, gets more adoption, and basically sets the snowball rolling...
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I think this is spot on. Bitcoin whales aren't wallstreet whales, from what I understand they haven't cashed out, despite being worth hundreds of millions, and the initial paper released by Satoshi reads to me more like a technical manifesto.

All this trading and speculation, although fun, really does hurt Bitcoin as a payment system. The number one objection (after the illicit market dropping out) by consumers and vendors is the volatility. I might be mistaken, but price right now is controlled by the exchanges. The exchanges are easily manipulated by smaller users and by natural market forces.  Not to mention there are so many posts suspecting the exchanges themselves being deceitful.

Until we have a few solid exchanges we have complete trust in, which have 50-100k coins on both sides where we can reliably withdraw our fiat. I think this is a great move and will only help Bitcoin.

Being a miner, I want to see stable growth in the market. And anyone who things that someone with 100k coins, when total buy/sell options total 15k on either side is lying to themselves lol...