You neglected to include this:
"The Great Bitcoin Lie"
When people see dollar signs in their eyes , truth is often discarded , but here's the hard truth nobody wants to hear , and is not included in any documentary history of bitcoin. From total obscurity and complete absence of use , bitcoin price was singlehandedly manipulated by 1 fraudulently operated exchange all the way from pennies to $1200 - by MtGox. I know , it's hard to hear and hard to believe , but it's the truth. The sad and true fact is , this was for years the only exchange where bitcoin was traded and where price was determined. From a valuation of pennies until it was being traded in the hundreds of dollars MtGox was the only exchange for the first several years of the history of bitcoin and it was being run as a fraudulent ponzi scheme based off of bitcoin. The entire price discovery period valuation of bitcoin from the very very beginning all the way to the very very top was entirely fraudulently accomplished using insider trading , customer deposits of fiat money , and entirely non-existent money - a house of cards which culminated in the outright theft of nearly 1 million bitcoins and collapse of the exchange. All of the merchant adoption , all of the asic mining arms race , all of the opening of new exchanges , all of the news attention , all of the real money put into it , all of it , everything , was predicated on an illegally fraudulently manipulated rising price of bitcoin.
Whether or not bitcoin itself was initially created with this express purpose in mind is debatable , but a distinct possibility exists that this was indeed the intent from the very beginning. Even if bitcoin was not created with the direct purpose of pulling off this con , the con was pulled all the same. Today , it is often argued that this shouldn't matter now , given the current infrastructure built for mining and the number of merchants now accepting bitcoin as payment , but the reality is the price as it exists today , the price as it has been valued , is the direct result of this one complete and total sham exchange. The price today is almost $1000 lower than the heights directly caused by MtGox and has been in continual decline ever since the collapse of the fraudulent exchange , as early buyers and early miners sell the millions of bitcoins they produced in total obscurity , miners who now immediately sell mined coins , and the criminal CEO of MtGox Mark Karpeles continues to cash in his nearly 1 million stolen bitcoins.
IT never occured to me that they might have been manipulating the price all the time , but as other people are saying , why does it even matter now ?
The bitcoin is/will survive on it's on , no one is manipulating it now and no one can , seeing how much it has grown since then.
So just sit and enjoy the ride
