I honestly do not believe this is true at all.  For one thing, the altcoin market tends to be a good canary in the coalmine.  If there's a flood of new interest in bitcoin, there's typically a flood of new activity in altcoins as well.  The alt markets are currently imploding with volume going down to nothing, so it sure doesn't seem like there's a flood of new people in bitcoin.  The price of bitcoin is also a lot higher, so small guys who want to purchase one bitcoin could have done so when it was $200-400, but it takes a pretty large leap of faith to buy one when the price is $1000.

If anyone is moving the price of bitcoin around, it's the usual suspects of Chinese mining cartel, Digital Currency Group, Pantera Capital, Winklevoss, fraudulent exchanges, etc.  One thing that's a giant red flag to me is that ever since Bitfinex goxed, the western price is still determined by that insolvent, scammy exchange with all the big moves occurring there and not places like Bitstamp.  There's no market maker on earth who is going to risk his funds at an insolvent exchange like that, yet with Finex being the market maker, this tells me the people running these fraudulent exchanges might be the main people moving price.

Finex has a great history of walls going plus or minus 4000ish coins at random from a single entity in the past and as of very recently.  Would you store $4 million on Bitfinex post Finex goxing?  I sure as hell wouldn't.  It's probably the exchange owner/employees themselves.  Here was Finex's walls right after they came online after they goxed everyone.  The sell side is clearly all from one single entity (around ~3600 coins), likely from the exchange owners since nobody on earth is gonna keep all those coins stored there right after they stole everyone's money:



Nothing ever changes.  Karpeles controlled the Bitcoin price, then he passed the baton onto another exchange owner.