A very good point:
I'm a little surprised that so many people are jumping straight to conspiracy theories in the last 48 hours following the "Willy Report". It especially surprises me because Willy follows the exact same patterns that so many people here have theorized would be done by "whales".
Imagine you are a high value trader or company. You want to enter bitcoin or increase your position. Do you really think you would simply open up a regular trading account on MtGox, put millions of dollars into your web account, and start making million dollar trades? Absolutely no way. I've worked for two large Wall Street banks, and I can tell you flat out that high value clients have access to products and services that "normal" people do not. High value clients have dedicated staff to service them, they get taken out to dinners and events, they have exceptions done for them, they simply operate outside of the normal world that you and I live in.
Willy didn't pay fees or fiat because it operated outside the purview of what a normal trader would have to do. High value clients would have direct relationships with MtGox, and would likely have special fee structure in place that they would pay to MtGox separately and at a different time than trades. Willy didn't back up trades with fiat because fiat was likely wired to MtGox separately, in bulk.
Willy only bought because these high value clients weren't looking to really "trade". They were looking to enter the market, and likely couldn't find enough early adopters off-market to facilitate their needs. So, they had to go on-market. Second Market has publicly stated that they started having issues finding off-market individuals to buy from. What then? Just stop buying? Absolutely not. They instead needed to start coming on-market. However, you can't simply start making buy orders for several millions dollars. So instead, MtGox would offer an automated API that was directly connected to their servers (just like Mark said) and could make small buys at frequent intervals so as to try to not influence the market too much and cause the price to go skyrocketing.
Willy had "??" in data fields because Willy likely facilitated several different clients at once. There is no grand conspiracy there.
Again, I'm surprised that people aren't coming to these simple conclusions, especially since this is exactly how all of us have assumed "whales" work. What we're seeing in Willy is exactly what we expected to see in whales.
Also, does anyone really think that Willy, a bot that was a small percentage of MtGox's volume, could really single-handedly incite an entire bubble when there were at least 2 or 3 other similarly sized exchanges? The truth is that Willy was just one form of high value clients entering the market on one exchange. Other exchanges likely have their own forms of "Willies" that contributed to the bubble just like it did on MtGox. And trust me, those "Willies" are no more conspiratorial than this MtGox Willy is.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26is61/the_simplest_explanation_is_usually_the_right_one/
