So what you're saying is until now, miners could afford to make less money, but now that they're stuck with all the new HW, they have to get serious? Is that the gist of it, or am I missing something?
Chinese exchanges are in business to make money. Miners going broke doesn't add any new tools to the exchanges' manipulation arsenal. If they could manipulate the price, they're already doing it.
They cannot sustain price manipulation for prolonged periods of time.But by simulating these parabolic rises they're hoping to create enough FOMO so that they could unload slowly on the market at highest possible price for as long as possible, now that they have ROI as a reason.Hash rate was steadily increasing even when the price was in the low 200's, so Chinese miners were profitable even then, otherwise they wouldn't have had a reason to invest huge amounts of money in these new 16 nm Asic chips.