Bitcoin Forum

A chart says more than thousand words:
from: http://blog.wizsec.jp/2015/02/mtgox-investigation-release.html
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MMgHyyWhebs/VOB_OQfeYyI/AAAAAAAACJU/pEH0IZU32dE/s1600/willy_market_presence.png

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=bitstampUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=&i=&c=1&s=2009-12-22&e=2013-08-01&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&

*this chart ends where OP's chart begins

Which bot was responsible for the previous bubbles?   ::)

i hope, it come again and rise the price to 2k at the very least

but i think it was helped by chinese, or maybe was a chinese bot?

mtgox was THE bitcoin exchange.

so we can assume that willy bot was active from the beginning of time.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=940&m=bitstampUSD&SubmitButton=Draw&r=1460&i=&c=0&s=2009-12-22&e=2013-08-01&Prev=&Next=&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=&m2=25&x=0&i1=&i2=&i3=&i4=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=1&p=0&

 :D

Have you read the Willy report? It argues that the Willy bots (markus and willy) played a role in both the $260 bubble and the $1200 bubble.

The 2011 bubble was made so early and with such a tiny marketcap that doesn't even compare to the magnitude of the other two bubbles.


Again, nobody is saying that the mtgox bots were the only CAUSE of the last two bubbles (in the $1200 one china played a major role too), just that their impact is obvious, and by having a bot providing constant buy pressure (pushing the price up and absorbing downward corrections) that attracts new speculators, more money and more confidence overall in a feedback loop was one of the reasons why the bubble went that far and was clearly unsustainable.

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/i-know-you-lying-but-continue.jpg

ohhhhhh, so a trading bot was responsible for faking a market rise that is still up over 8 Million Percent since its inception only five years ago.  :o

Read my post above dude...

Also, the last rise ($1200 bubble) completely retraced, in case you haven't noticed.

Actually there is nothing concrete like there is for the Willy & Markus bots, but there is this blog post which was originally posted during the 2011 hype.
http://nerdr.com/bitcoin-exchange-scam-bitcoins-are-worthless/

That was all straight out denied and even ridiculed as made up back then, but now in light of what we've seen in hindsight that's a different story.
If you put it all together there is now a plausible scenario in which the entirety of Bitcoin trading was manipulated using non-existing liquidity.

To be honest, back then if u were to say that bitcoin isnt the second coming of the lord and savior, you would be laughed out of the conversation..
I agree that bots played the cricial role in the two amazing bubbles, but they also pushed bitcoin to where it is today, so regardless of what bots did, bitcoin is now in stage to make another run,
bots or no bots.

cheers

Willy and markus brought bitcoin where it is today? How come if mtgox vanished when price was at $600?

Get out of my thread if you resort to this kind of fallacious reasoning. Your opinion that "bitcoin is now in stage to make another run," is no conclusion of anything in this sentence.

yes, it seems like Willy caused a nasty bubble with a resulting year-long bear market causing significant negative sentiment both due to the volatility and the price drop.  Hopefully the exchange market has been taken over by more responsible companies now and in 2015 we'll see less volatility and instead a price that reflect the steady worldwide adoption.

95% of volume is traded in china(hong kong). ... Do you trust in china ? China does not respect basic human rights.

You know it's funny that people are still yapping about the willy bot.

At this stage, if the theory indeed is true, it would only be bullish anyway.

If you wanted to help somebody, you should of said this at $800+

i've said it before and i'll say it again - the entire runup of bitcoin from a stable(ish) 100 (that 100 value was arguably heavily manipulated in the first place by artificial capital of previous fraudulent exchanges / drug money driven by the silk road) to the all time high price in the 1200s was driven by a *BILLION* non-existent dollars that MtGox used to "buy" bitcoin off of their own fraudulent exchange (which was at the time by far the highest volume exchange on the planet) ... and just to repeat that for the slow folks ... they used a *BILLION* dollars in fake capital to cause that rise in price ... and you all wonder why people think bitcoin is a scam ? ? ?

Isn't the dollar worse off in that sense then??

My friend, you're very shortsighted. When we're talking about such a big thing as a decentralized world economy system, you must look at the big picture.

- how do you figure that ? i mean logic-wise ? if i lived in wherever-stan (or japan prior to any regulation) and opened up an intentionally fraudulent/unregulated bitcoin exchange and ran it in the opposite direction (using fake btc to acquire real fiat dollars) it would be similarly possible to pull off the exact same scam ... in the case of mtgox they needed a certain amount of real cash to cover withdrawals in the 2 months they caused that price rise (which was provided by the people trading there of course) ... in the case of a theoretical fraudulent exchange using fake btc they would simply need an adequate amount of real btc (provided by the people trading there of course) to cover the requested withdrawals ... or actual cash on a different "real" exchange to purchase and send out real btc requested as withdraws ... so to answer your question NO ... fake numbers are fake numbers when youre talking about a fraudulently run exchange be it fraudulent dollars or fraudulent btc ... all you need is adequate runup capital to cover requested withdrawals while you rob everyone blind ... also all the btc in the world wouldn't budge the us dollar by even a fractional amount while all it takes is a billion fake dollars on a fraudulent exchange to jack the price of btc up 1000% ... i'd say btc is far worse off ...

- it's been estimated that there are less than 1,000,000 people worldwide who hold any amount of btc at all ... with most wallets holding dust (less than 0.1btc) ... a million people out of the global population of 7 billion is 0.0142857 % of the population ... the country of djibouti is a good equivalent comparison (tiny hellhole on the african coast tucked between somalia and ethiopia for those who aren't familiar with where that is or want to look it up) ...  definitely not a "world economy system" ...

So MtGox was the cause of the two last bubbles?

Come back Karpeles, all is forgiven...

Bitcoin is a butiful piece of software and idea, now, what people are doing to abuse it is another thing. The same schemes u described happened many times with other assets over the years, but did people stop using fiat,stocks.etc? Ofc not. Your claim can only be placed on bitcoin price, that it will continue falling until a new current low is found, but please dont say stupid things like "bitcoin is a scam", because afterall, you are also here, and have a bitcoin adress in your signature, which is a bit ironic.

cheers

agreed - definitely ironic - i do possess some btc - i also value truth more than profit - that wallet is at zero today and has never received 1 donation ... can't say i'm surprised but it's out there anyway ... why not ... the referral links have proven financially beneficial - not to be overly pedantic but saying that there are people who think bitcoin is a scam is different from stating bitcoin is a scam ... but whatever ... - cheers!

Why you mad, bro?

Whether this is true or not obviously nothing we do now can change it. Mt Gox is a scandal that everyone ought to put behind. More important is to look ahead.

No, I don't think so. Moving on shouldn't happen until the perps have been found, prosecuted and sentenced and it's certain that this kind of fraud can't be repeated on other so called 'exchanges' by correctly enforced regulations.

Ok, now the argument went from moving goalposts to trying to look cooler. What's next?

Plenty did warn of Willy and Markus at much higher price ranges than Bitcoin is now at, but were invariably shouted down by the same old fucking mentally stinted bampots as are doing the shouting down even now....

Now...when Bitcoin is cleary setting itself up for another leg down.

Moving averages on the 15 min, 1 HR, 4 HR and 1 day chart are all positive. All the other EMAs are close or neutral. Six exchanges got hacked and nobody panicked. R U sure about that leg down? It's not very cleary to me.

if it was as easy as you say what's to stop anyone turning willy back on making mucho moolah?

nothing happens in a vacuum, except perhaps your synapse firings.

Well, nothing is stopping an exchange from operating as a fractional reserve while posing as a full reserve exchange and using a buybot to cover the charade. As best I can tell that's what Krapeles was doing. Gov't regulation gives people a false sense of security IMHO. There is no effective substitue for investor and customer oversight. Caveat Emptor.

And what stops some smart guys to make the charts in a way that counts?
If some "areas" of the chart can be suspected - for any exchange - to inflate/deflate the price only playing with no money or rotating the same money, then the chart will show an alarm too.
Of course, we need some smart guys for that.

(And then their site will surely get enough traffic to cover the expenses for the time and effort on this.)

Correlation is not causation. It could just as easily be argued that it was the rise in price that caused willybot to activate.

But correlation and a red flag could usually prevent such problems to rise.
And yeah, I may be wrong. If I would be smart enough for this, I could try to do myself what I proposed :)

Alright. Let's say we are no longer "in denial" about willy.

The bot existed. Created plenty of buying pressure and drove up price.

So, how about the evidence that it wasn't a customer funded, exchange internal bot, running to split up large orders of gox' preferred clientswhales over a longer time span to minimize costs? As in: who says Willy didn't have the USD behind it?

I mean, I get it... I dislike gox as much as anyone in here. There's at least a real chance that they have been running a fractional reserve for a long time, and the last "bubble" was created without new money coming in (to a degree at least). However, "chance" is not the same as "proof". In your own words:


To conclude foul play only from the existence and activity of Willy is bullshit, by your own standards. Be consistent.

^You have me on ignore so you probably won't read this post, but whatever, here it goes:

I actually do believe that willy may have contributed to the late 2013 bubble! The continued buying pressure, never mind how low, actually may have taken the edge off if the continuing supply of new coins being minted. But it does t account for the previous bubbles. Willy may have been activated due to the rising price, as well.

I agree with oda.krell on that one. Coexistence is not yet causation of the whole story. Mt. Gox was definitely back then the biggest BTC exchange, so many want to connect the dots too quickly. Possible yes, certain not.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2whyyl/the_truth_about_willy/

It doesn't matter if the single buys taken by themselves don't take the price higher immediately.

The more buys the market gets, the bullish the market becomes. The total amount Willy and Markus purchased is a gigantic amount of coins, anyone that slowly takes that amount of coins out of the hands of traders on exchanges is gonna have a big impact on the price short medium term.
Supply/demand.


What the guy is basically saying is that only big market buys that INSTANTLY take the price higher have an effect on price.
That doesn't make any sense at all.

Alright, it's correct that we can't conclude that Willy operated with fake funds based on it's existence and the VIP client/whale theory is a possible explanation. At last what's going for it is innocent until proven guilty and I think that's also the reason why Mark Karpeles is still a free man.
The reason why to argue for the "Bots were funded with fake USD" is the context. It could explain the withdrawal problems and the subsequent "missing" Bitcoins.
Another argument is motivation: Why should a "VIP" want to acquire Bitcoins denominated in Bitcoin amounts, not based on a certain USD budget? Why only market orders?
Here we have the "Very deep pockets, vs infinitely deep pockets." And I argue that infinitely deep pockets only has one reasonable explanation: fake funds
The motivation for GOX: Why offer such a deal instead of giving them a regular account? They had motivation to earn fees.

Regarding foul play: At least that Willy & Markus operated during Market downtimes has been established. That's foul play IMO.

Well it existed - doesn't that mean someone wants very hard for bitcoin to succeed?
Someone very powerful?
I see it as bullish.

Certainly was at the time.

As clearly seen, for a lot of the time (especially when the market was otherwise quiet), Willy had a significant presence, and it is hard to think that this would not have an effect on the market and in turn the exchange price, through its added buying pressure. There are even some suspicious incidents where Willy becomes absent and soon afterwards the market "corrects" itself to a lower price level.

Willy report from worldpress https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/

There's two ways to look at the "why was it denominated in BTC", after all, each sequence of the bot stopped at a certain USD amount (2.5M iirc). And I can absolutely see a motivation to run it: it's a spread out market order, essentially.

But I suppose we agree on the main points: even if it was fully funded, it was foul play in the sense that it ran during downtime of the site. I don't buy the idea that the entire run to $1200 was caused by Willy, and thus, if it wasn't funded, was entirely fake (Chinese gamblers would like a share of the glory as well :D), but it probably had a substantial influence on price.

Just one of many ways gox screwed everyone over. Pathetic that Karpeles is not behind bars yet, and, yes: it probably threw the Bitcoin economy back substantially by decreasing even more the already low trust everyone had in exchanges.

after careful consideration of all the points of view above....

definitely bullish.  ;)

Says who? Uncle sam who respects all basic human rights?

i agree, willy or wont he?

now let's see some analysis on the anti-willy that got turned on July '14 just when the 600 breakout move was gaining momo

Very interesting commentary, I'm looking forward to more from such respectable participants such as you and sgbett. I think we're on the cusp of something that will totally blow the doors off this bear market trickshow.

Imagine instead of being a troll-bear you bought bitcoins in 2011 when you joined this site.

If you read his posts from back then you'll se that he actually did.

But whatever.

"I made money with a large scale pump&dump, therefore any argument from you to discredit it comes from the fact that you missed the train".


I know it's inconceivable for you that one might just prefer to be objective rather than to shill for personal profit, but yeah.

A glance at the short btc swap interest for the last 12 months shows most of the story. Since then the number of shorts rose from 5-10k to 25k at some points. Long interest dropped from 30 million to less than 15 million over the same time frame.

I don't buy the argument that this is correcting long held disparity in ratio between longs and shorts (currently about 3:1) as long margin positions can be opened with BTC or fiat. Whereas short positions are dependent upon available coins to borrow. There are currently about 3000 on finex, so not a lot really.

Now with some bullish sentiment forming and short interest still near all time highs, if long interest recovers then watch out above, especially if we breakout of the trend line technically.

My extent of "trolling" here pales in comparison to what we're seeing in this tread alone by your fellow "troll-bulls":


nuff said

Says the guy who was bearish in 2013. Says the guy who questioned the solvency of coinbase before they acquired a further 75 million dollars of funding. You are just a stopped clock.

This willy bot analysis isn't analysis at all. It neatly ignores the fact that gox was 10% of global volume in the 2013 bull run. And anyway who cares a hoot about gox - we are almost a year on from its demise.

Get out if you are here to attack me, I don't have time for flamewars any more.

Yeah and all the while when we went down Chinese exchanges suddenly have "fake volume", now what is it?
Can't be both fake and real.

It wasn't always no fee trading now was it..

During the 2013 run up to $1200 BTCChina (chinese exchange with the most volume back then) had no fees.
Then they suddenly introduced fees when the PBOC was talking about their "bans", and everybody switched to Huobi and Okcoin.

You can clearly see the difference between no fees VS fees, lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-YnhGUCQAAq9C2.png

I personaly dont believe in any of the trading volume chineese exchanges has during the bubble. Every time there was a run to the top, it was so artificial, and if other exchanges wouldnt follow the price hype,
china backed down also. Therefore, i believe its fake, and i never look at them while trying to analyse anything. You have stamp and btce, which are 99x more reliable than chineese ones.

cheers

Any of you guys that think for a second that now that Mt. Gox and Willy/Markus/Whatever are gone and the system can't be gamed again are nuts.

This market is still incredibly small, and incredibly controlled by a small number of deep pocket whales that have accounts in every major exchange.

As we speak, they are probably planning their next big runup score and how it will all go down.  They'll spend a year accumulating cheap coins off exchange, then turn on the turbo bots YET AGAIN on every major exchange.  And everyone will get caught without coins YET AGAIN and go "WTF?? Oh my!  Look at all that sudden demand from Average Joe!  Must be some type of country bank run!"  And of course the major media will be secretly paid to confirm it all ::)

First of all, there's no way Mark would program that shit. I think it's quite telling when Shrem said recently that he literally had to beg Mark to change a single line of code, and that they had to post him humus and schnitzels from New York to entice him away from his cat. But let's say the function was legitimate, why would you rotate the accounts? It makes no sense. If it was to split large whale orders, why not use one account or run accounts simultaneously?

It seems probable that it was a hack, made while the K man was blissfully oblivious, building a little mansion for Tibane up in his high-rise Tokyo apartment.

Interesting observation.

The idea of Willy and Marcus makes me feel good.

Because it means without them, we would have simply been on a slowly increasing incline from $50 over the last couple years.

And all this bullshit about Bitcoin being too volatile wouldn't be the mantra of naysayers.  

All this bullshit about Bitcoin being a failure due to huge crashes, wouldn't even be in the discussion.

All these claims of hundreds of millions being lost or stolen wouldn't even exist.

There would be nothing but an impressive gradual increase over time, as would have been expected.



This is why when say Karpeles and Gox fucked Bitcoin more than any other entity, I agree with them.

-B-

I think speculation on what would have happened without the bots is a pointless exercise. Because the action caused by the bots influenced the trading decisions of may people and there is no basis for extrapolating what they would have done if the bots hadn't existed.

^This

just like the analysis of the bots that have walked us down from $600 after the July breakout.

what are you raving about? pure conjecture?
thought as much.

In a dead straight line as well...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Jn8LEbgvhgw/UxST0OtWADI/AAAAAAAAAvI/Uv08_vHIQi0/s1600/all+hail+the+troll+king.jpg

The Money Powers be like:

MONEY POWERS: "Guys, the Bitcoin Protocol is starting to seep into the Public Consciousness.  We have to slow down the rise by convincing newcomers that Bitcoin doesn't add any value to the global economy.  Quick, tell them a trading bot is solely responsible for the 10 Million+ Percent Price rise.  Get Mark Karpeles on the phone.  We'll offer him a carrot or a stick to comply.  Then pay a bunch of internet trollers a quarter a post to spam the web and support our narrative."

We'll not need willy next time. People will naturally come in as the objectively inferior payment methods compared to Bitcoin continue scamming their lifes.

The future is decentralized: Decentralized electric batteries and generators, decentralized maidsafe internet and decentralized bitcoin currency. Get in now or suicide later after acknowledging you missed the boat.

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/what-part-did-the-mt-gox-bot-really-play-in-the-bitcoin-price-bubble/30162

They're taking an pragmatic approach to dealing with the zealots of the cult. That's to be expected, I would. I'll bet they have been flooded with angry messages.
Gladly I'm not in the spotlight, so:

The scenario where the Willy & Markus bots not only played a major role but actually caused the rapid price inflation we've seen is more plausible than any other scenario I've heard of. I base this not only on the available data on the bots themselves but also on the observed social dynamics of the Bitcoin community, in particular how the mtgox bankruptcy went down.

http://www.trbimg.com/img-543ee3b6/turbine/os-bitcoin-st-petersburg-bowl-accepting-bitcoin-to-buy-tickets-20141015

Amazing how the Marcus and Willy Bots all seemed to manipulate so many huge corporations into accepting Bitcoin.  All this attention, all these companies pouring millions and millions of venture capital into the Bitcoin infrastructure.....because of a couple trading bots.   ::)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hskXarXtGBw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hskXarXtGBw)

Trolls out in full force

Willy trolled Microsoft into accepting Bitcoin, that sneaky Willy!
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/264/f/4/where__s_wally_willy_by_rennis05-d5ff224.jpg

Again: by your own standards, as posted in here by yourself, that's bullshit.

a) You have no way to tell what the market would have looked like without Willy.

b) There are valid arguments both stating that the impact of Willy shouldn't be underestimated (basically, constant buying adding low level pressure) and equally valid arguments limiting the upside of Willy's impact (basically, total Willy volume was a drop in the ocean).

c) It completely ignores China, which is widely considered to be at least one of the most important factors in the $1200 run-up.

d) It ignores that previous rallies ignited without Willy (i.e. Willy didn't run in 2011 and early 2013).

If I'm not mistaken the willy report says that one of the bots was involved in the first 2013 run.

But yeah china played a major role, I guess what ElectricMucus is saying is that we don't know if the advent of china was made possible or more likely because willy and markus bots were pumping.
I guess we'll just never know  :D

"Willy" traded September to November 2013.

"Markus" is probably what you have in mind, but a) where the reports on Willy are pretty detailed, there's a lot less info on Markus, and b) that still doesn't account for the huge $32 rally in 2011, or less extreme but still pretty impressive rally to $16 in late 2012.

Seriously, anyone who thinks rallies (or crashes) in any market need an external fraudulent "cause" is probably in deep denial about human nature and market behavior.

anyone who was around in Nov. 2013 recalls clearly that the bull run stopped, in fact went into complete reversal for a few days to a week at around ~$700 when bitstamp had a banking backlog/issue of some sort?

explain to me again how willy on gox was "in charge" of the bull run?

a) I don't need to guess how the market would have looked without willy, from the looks of it there is a highly significant correlation.

b) Willys volume wasn't a drop in the ocean but consisted of the majority of mtgox's volume at times.

c) China is a factor but I don't see it important enough that it makes the scenario of a bot driven rally unlikely because during that time they didn't have trading fees and the amount of liquidty was lower than mtgox. We can't know how much that contributed, and we don't have complete information on how much else was going on (like double reporting on trades, etc..)
Depending on that it could make the scenario more or less likely, but it won't change how plausible it is, only a complete explanation which is more plausible can do that.

d) Yes, it ignores previous rallies because they don't have anything to say about this rally, there could have been other bots we don't know about or there could have been a genuine hype, can't know so either we stop speculating altogether because "we can't know" or we ignore it. You don't have to tell me that Market psychology can lead to bubbles, and I don't need to tell you that exchange operators are shitheads.


In conclusion, it's not Bullshit, because I explicitly posted, I see the bot-caused-rally scenario as more plausible than other ones, not that it was what necessarily happened. Because, duh we can't know, only speculate.


I would also like to point out that I don't think that if the run-up to 1200 was caused by bots it has to end in a complete price collapse, others could pull the same stunt again, or the price can take off for technical or fundamental reasons. But it doesn't change that if the bots have driven the rally and if it happened with fake funds it was an epic scam (A plausible scam to be exact).
Just that we are clear.

MtGox volume, September 27 – November 30:  1.9M (btccharts data)

=> ~13% of total volume.

I take back the "drop in the ocean" remark. But you sure you want to continue talking about 'majority of volume at times'? I mean, I'm sure there were brief moments were 13% of the total happened to be the majority, but in total, 87% of the volume came from someone else.

What if it was mt gox that attack the bubble?  Maybe karpeles cash out on another exchange when he stole the coins.