Being a multi-billion dollar company that's proven to be pretty cunning, does anyone know if they have a crypto trading desk/s? With the amount of mining power they possess, it wouldn't be that difficult to prioritize one coin over the other, and dump money to trigger cascades of protections.
As bitmain was the first company of ASIC miner sellers, they might be among one of the pump and dump groups.
Not only bitmain but other major companies holding huge amount of bitcoins are doing pumps and dumps occassionally.
I believe if all these bigger amount of coin holders will start pumping simultaneously, we could see the price surging abover $50k
you can no longer pump and dump bitcoin anymore. the market has grown so much bigger with the number of exchanges and number of investors in it that no matter how big you are, you won't be able to pump and dump it. you can certainly influence the price if you are a whale and manipulate it but pump and dump is very different.
what they can do and still be
profitable is to pump and dump altcoins. that has a lot lower risk since they are smaller and they are already pump and dumps so they have their work cut out for them.