Not common with Bitcoin itself-- even if someone comes up with something that actually will move the price, it's hard for them to be the ones that profit from it.

The P&Ds are common with thinly traded premined coins.

The altcoins have done a fair job of sweeping people with zero scruples away from Bitcoin. I'd be quite surprised if this were someone trying to drive up the price of Bitcoin.

I've not been following Bitcoin news for a few years now but I seem to recall there were lots of reports about BTC "whales" making up a significant proportion of the overall wealth on BTC. And how they used their position to manipulate the market to some extent. A quick Google seems to back my assumptions too, eg https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/052014/why-b...

Now I'm not saying that the OPs theory about this being a pump and dump is likely correct. But I don't think it is any more speculative than the other ideas offered here (jilted ex / copy&paste error / testing code that mistakenly shipped / etc)

Inevitably when you see people talking about "whales" they end up linking to exchange wallets (which naturally experience activity that both leads and lags trade).

And they're also talking about parties controlling 1000 BTC levels... which, while an astounding amount of money, are still small compared to the markets.

I can't say it's impossible, but I'd rate most of the other speculation above it.

Then again, nothing stops someone from trying something that won't work...

MtGox, Tether?

If the receiving wallet is truly dead, the "dump" part of the scheme is impossible, which makes the scheme non-profitable.

The OPs point was this the "pump" part (ie get people talking about Bitcoin again). If their theory is true (and I'm not saying I believe it is), then the dump part wouldn't be transferring to another wallet, it would be selling their remaining Bitcoin.

If this is a pump and dump scheme (and that's a big "if") then they would need an order of magnitude more than 27BTC (ie the amount they sent to this wallet) for this to work.

Potentially even better than selling their remaining bitcoins is buying options right before doing this pump.

Well, I'm speculating that the $1M is just a (massively expensive) gambit to get the public interested in bitcoin again and lead to a "pump". The "dump" would then involve the even larger amounts that the person in question would have to be holding (for this scheme to even remotely make sense).

Profit is the motivation of human endeavor…. Maybe we aren’t alone, it is as it will.

Now my wife’s musings about crypto dog yesterday are far more meaningful.

Let's say you sit on ~2716.9 BTC. You have a scheme that'll cost you 26.9 BTC to shift the price. You "only" need the scheme to successfully increase the price of your remaining 2690 BTC by 1% to have recouped your cost. Any movement higher than that and you'll profit.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not unusual for pump-and-dump schemes to involve burning a lot of value to trigger the pump they're trying to profit off of. You need to treat the bit they're planning on dumping as separate from whatever capital they're prepared to invest to make the pump happen.