2) ongoing mtgox manipulation:  This subject matter of mtgox manipulation comes off as another one of those distracting and misleading talking points that seems to infiltrate into a lot of discussions, including discussions by seemingly smart people who are finding a pattern or attempting to find a pattern.  I remain of the "who gives a shit" perspective on this particular talking point.  Sure, you can include mtgox into your analysis, but it remains one of many factors that seems retrospectively over-hyped.  For example, when the trustee first began to sell coins between December and February, those sales were not getting too much publicity, but after the fact, they are being described as if they were in the public consciousness at the time of the initial dumps and able to affect the price.  I remain of the perspective that there was so much trade volume between December and January that the mtgox coin dumps were quite unlikely to have any kind of meaningful effect, but such supposed effect has been exaggerated after the fact in order to attempt to get affect on the current price dynamics,  and in order to attempt to shake some additional weak hands of their bitcoins.