If not, can you explain why?
first because people are only talking about this topic and calling it as Mt Gox 2 when price reached the ATH and stopped (slowed down and there was a correction). nobody said a word when price was rising for about a week.
second because the bitcoin of 2013 is not the same as bitcoin of 2017. back then nobody knew about bitcoin except those who were mining it and a small number of traders. now everyone knows about bitcoin. bitcoin has made the first page of biggest financial papers multiple times so far. multiple countries adopted bitcoin. a lot of growth has happened and this all means a big part of this rise is real not fake.
third, back in 2013 market was still very small and that small market was completely centralized in only 1 exchange and that was Mt Gox. no other exchange could even come close to the volume they had. it was more than 80% of the whole market. and the rest was so tiny or were reporting fake volumes to remain relevant. bitfinex in comparison is too small. it has less than 8% of the total volume and only if it is real vol not fake reports. you can not control a market price with that kind of portions!
finally I am not denying there is manipulation present in bitcoin market, but it is not so drastic and big as articles like what you shared are suggesting. it is much smaller than that. and since it is well spread among many exchanges, no one person/entity/group can ever control things on a large scale or for long. we saw this when whales on bitstamp were trying to keep bitcoin price down earlier this year when price was around $1200. we saw how they failed and lost a lot of money because of it. and that is when bitfinex was closed and bitstamp was like the next choice everyone went to.
