While I'm not happy with the actions of the zzhang group, I've never for a second considered them stupid. You can read their posts and see they are not idiots. But the leadership is very shifty, in my opinion.

Based on my evaluation of them, I have no doubt they understand the mechanics of running a pump. It's not that complicated, especially since you don't have to figure it out for yourself, you can just learn by observation. Nonetheless, that's far from arguing that they are responsible for it.

While I strongly suspect there are elements within that group that are profiting from the pumps in SBD and HBD (more from SBD, for obvious reasons), I believe they are mostly profiting from the arbitrage opportunities between the other markets and upbit (which anyone who trades on upbit can do, I'm sure they're not alone).

But to repeat the point from my post and later comment where I go into a little more detail, I think the best reason to suspect an intentional pumper is the choice of HBD as the coin to speculate on. HBD is really low on most crypto radars as a choice of a token to decide will really go up in price (i.e. selection by a dumb speculator). But like SBD, it's a very likely target for a clever pumper, due to it's low liquidity.

And arguing that zzhang would think that HBD will endlessly go up in price (i.e. blind speculation) make no sense to me, because they've had plenty of time observing SBD and HBD performance over time. The one clear rule for SBD is: what goes up, will come down.

So while you're assuming stupidity of zzhang is the most likely answer, I disagree. Mind you, in many cases stupidity can be a likely answer for many perplexing behaviors. But I think the evidence in this case argues otherwise.