Markus and Willy. The Bots that drove Bitcoin price from $150 to $1000

in bitcoin •  7 years ago 


Is it possible that just one man was the cause of the bitcoin rise to $1000 in 2013?

Back in 2012, Mt. gox was hacked for 500K + Bitcoin. In an effort to hide the hack from customers, Mark Karpeles made two trading bots on his site Mt Gox.

The first named Markus began buying bitcoin on 2013-02-14 and was active until 2013-09-27. He did not
pay for the bitcoins he acquired nor did he pay fees for the transactions. During the 225
days the account was active, Markus acquired a total of 335,898 bitcoins (worth around $
76 Million) on 33 days.

Later came the bot Willy; Willy was a collection of 49 separate accounts that each rapidly bought exactly 2.5 million USD in sequential order and never sold the acquired bitcoin. The first Willy account became active on 2013-09-27, a mere 7 hours and 25 minutes after Markus became permanently inactive.

together, these unauthorized traders “acquired” around 600,000 bitcoins. This is very close to the number of bitcoins (650,000) that Mt. Gox claimed to have lost .

View the study: http://weis2017.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/05/WEIS_2017_paper_21.pdf


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