The last few days of charts for BTC look like an alt-coin pump-n-dump, and this has been going on for a while. So what is the end game? Suck in newbies, get them to spend some money, shake them out with a crash, shake them out with erratic pump-and-dump manipulation so that the few can continue to amass BTC - to what end?
Where will they be when they are the only ones holding crypto and everyone else either a) has been burned and won't touch crypto again or b) doesn't care to join in the dance?
What's the point?
You need to put yourself in their shoes to understand the motives. Those guys who have a lot of coins, like 1000 or more, they are there to make money on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Most of them don't care about the coins they're holding, they want a monthly wage to appear on their bank account. So they will pump and dump with those thousands of coins and each move can make them 10k USD, sometimes 100k, a couple moves each month and the newbie sheep get fleeced and there's 100k back on the bank account and they still got the initial 1k coins on the exchange and another month begins. They've been doing it for years and the fact that they are owning a large percentage of money on a given exchange gives them advantage.
If I had 1000+ or more coins I would be worried about the MtGox trusteed crushing my portfolio.
We have a guy hired by a government loaded with 160,000 BTC that's constantly dumping on Kraken. Is nobody going to do anything about that?
And if I was holding 1000+ I wouldn't trade much, all I have to do is sit and relax, in 5 years I would be a billionaire++ by only selling a portion of my BTC.
If you want to make money in a bear market you have to short and that's too much risk, don't want to take such risks when you already made it at 1000+.