And the other question related to this one is how to protect yourself from being manipulated in this way. If I understood the article correctly, the solution could be not to set stop losses triggers (or rather not to set them at obvious targets) and actively watch the price action.
For example, if you have a stop loss at an obvious target, say, below a support line, when the support is being broken, big traders will buy your stop loss and then go long. And big traders may even deliberately drive the market down to collect from this liquidity pool, even if their intention is to go long.
Now if you didn't have stops triggers at obvious targets, you could be safer. You could see that the support is being broken, but soon afterwards the opposite trend will appear and you will be fine.
Yeah, I think regardless of what you do, you may not be immune since with such low liquidity the market moves by the hands of people who do this sort of manipulation. and even trying to follow them can be dangerous and very tricky.. The realization that the normal market has lost control for the time being at least allows us to put some logic to what is going on, if trading on margin not to follow your typical stop patterns, and just in general know that that these patterns isn't caused by a massive selloff that bitcoin is going down forever I think is what most people can take out of it. I personally think its too tricky like you said to try to follow the patterns with any amounts of huge success, but the easiest way to see if you could develop a skill for this is use testnet on BitMex to see how often you can guess right based off of the wicks in consolidation from last bart candle... even if you got your average up to 60-70% it may would be tough to actually riskk that kind of money following them, but could be an interesting test.