Aren't you ignoring the fact that the two previous bubbles were artificialy made by MtGox?
After Gox closed the price just went down to where it should have been, and would have been, had there never been a MtGox.
Now hold on a minute, let's flesh this out. You believe the Willy bot
produced the 2013 spikes? What is your basis for this?
I don't know exactly how Marc did it.
But the price on Gox was alway higher than on all other exchanges, making all other follow. And when gox went away, so did the bubbles.
My guess would be that he just made the figures up, Willys part in that is unknown to me.
Way back, Peter Rizun occasionally made sense
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497289.0 Peter R Rizuns Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox
-story has changed a bit over time but the Willy part is accurate enough:
...
And so Willy was born. Willy was a bot, discovered by Wall Observers from bitcointalk.org and named by Opet on Bonavest's trading show, who would consistently purchased[sic] bitcoins at regular intervals between November 2013 and February 2014. Evidence that Willy belonged to Mark was revealed when both web and API trading at Gox was disabled for a brief period of time, exposing Willy as the only one left buying.
Willy served two purposes: he drove the price of bitcoin on the MtGox exchange high, thereby slowing and sometimes reversing the outward flow of real BTC, and he reduced the number of GoxBTC held by clients. Of course, this meant that Willy eventually became the owner of a huge number of GoxBTC (that were of course no longer backed by real BTC).
...
He shifted Willy into reverse and cranked the throttle. Willy relentlessly dumped bitcoins into the open bids. The price fell further and further, eventually dropping well below the BitStamp price[1]. But still not enough people were buying! He needed his customers to buy the GoxBTC. Willy kept dumping coins until finally the price dropped below $100.
...
Incidentally this[1] is one of the main refutations (whether correct or not idk) recently of anti-Tether/Bitfinex fud: no great price disparity between Finex and the other Stamps.