The entire market is obviously rigged. When you can pump stocks by printing money you don't get a clear view of what's going on. The metals market are also rigged. Spoofing in future markets is an ongoing thing. When JP morgan's ass was saved when they did the wrong trade on silver back on 2012 which resulted on Blythe Masters being executed.
People are saying the same thing about Bitcoin, that banks/governments can print money and buy it, that futures are used to manipulate the price. People are talking about whales and manipulators in Bitcoin every day.
They meet in chatrooms / telegram and manipulate prices, this is no crazy conspiracy theory. Obviously this is happening in all markets to some extent including Bitcoin but with the difference being that with Bitcoin it's the only thing you can know and audit to be strictly limited in amount so any Maddof scheme attemps to disturb real price discovery are short-lived.
Everything is a [conspiracy] theory until there is evidence. Manipulation, insider trading and other illegal practices happen all the time, on any market, but it doesn't mean that the whole market is rigged, especially if the market is huge.
There is evidence of manipulation everywhere. Just with JP morgan, here is a nice list of their "practices":
In October 2018, the U.S. Treasury imposed a $5.3 billion fine in a settlement with JPMorgan Chase for the violation of Cuban Assets Control Regulations, Iranian sanctions and Weapons of Mass Destruction sanctions 87 times. Back then, the U.S. Treasury also said it had found the bank violated sanctions on narcotics and Syria, when it processed 85 transactions and maintained accounts for six sanctioned individuals.
In December 2018, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $135 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allegations that it mishandled U.S. securities that represent shares of foreign companies, the latest bank fined in an industry crackdown on the practice. The bank improperly provided what's known as American depository receipts (ADR) to brokers when neither the brokers nor their clients held shares in foreign companies that were required to support such transactions.
Again in December 2018, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said on Friday that it had fined the Hong Kong branch of JPMorgan Chase $1.60 million and reprimanded it for breaching anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing rules. An investigation by the HKMA had found that between April 2012 and February 2014 JPMorgan Hong Kong contravened six provisions of the anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing rules.
In January 2017, the Indonesian government suspended ties with JPMorgan Chase after the bank's research analysts issued a negative report on the country and stopped using the bank for bond issuance. The ban on the U.S. investment bank was lifted and the Indonesian government commissioned JPMorgan Chase to issue bonds on May 2.
In 2016, an investigation by U.S. authorities found out that the JPMorgan Chase hired children of Chinese authorities from 2006 to 2013 in order to do jobs in China. The bank had to pay a $264 million fine to settle claims that its hiring violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
In 2014, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay over $2 billion for failing to alert federal courts about the largest Ponzi scheme fraud in U.S. history, the Bernie Madoff scandal. The bank had to pay over $1 billion to settle criminal charges, millions to settle civil claims by Madoff's victims and millions to be paid to the Treasury Department.
Serving as Madoff's primary bank for more than two decades, JPMorgan had a unique window into his scheme. In a document outlining the bank's wrongdoing, prosecutors had argued that "the Madoff Ponzi scheme was conducted almost exclusively" through various accounts held at JPMorgan. A fraudulent investor, Bernie Madoff was estimated to have swindled nearly $65 billion into his own accounts.
In 2013, the American investment bank was fined $13 billion for its manipulations on the quality of the mortgages it had been selling to investors in the runup to the 2008 financial crisis. The deal included a $4 billion consumer relief package, and a $4 billion settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees government mortgage financing companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Again in 2013, the bank had to pay $410 million in fines for its manipulation of the American power market in California and the Midwest, as an investigation by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revealed. JPMorgan Ventures Energy Corp, the commodity trading unit of the bank, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $285 million and disgorge $125 million for "manipulative bidding strategies" from September 2010 through November 2012.
In 2010, JPMorgan Chase was fined $49 million by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of the U.K. for failing to protect billions of dollars of client money over almost seven years between November 2002 and July 2009.
And this is only what is in the clear, imagine all the moves that don't get reported. The main point here was to show how Bitcoin cannot be manipulated long term due it's auditable, open source, strictly limited in amount nature.