So they would throw away their money, destroy Bitcoin, and by doing so empower alternatives that don't use POW?
Cant you read the link I provided to you?
so lets safely presume the miners are offloading their mined tokens as soon as the 600 block (~100 hours) holdback period is completed
It was always assumed that miners had no incentive to destroy Bitcoin because of their hardware investment, but this doesnt factor in that cratering the price mostly impacts only the marginal miners, because the network difficulty and hashrate adjusts down to the new lower price level. Those who have the control over the only two 14nm fabs in the world, thus remain profitable even with a cratered price. Add the conspiracy theory on top of that, which is TPTB which control those ASIC fabs have absolute power/control as their primary objective, not profit.
Dont you see Bitmain creating alternatives such as Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and NEO? Jihan has all his balls in play to capture all the outflow and using relativity to extract our money from us.