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by werediver 898 days ago
If the receiving wallet is truly dead, the "dump" part of the scheme is impossible, which makes the scheme non-profitable.
4 comments

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).
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.

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.