by forwardslash

Somewhere in December 2013, a number of traders including myself began noticing suspicious bot behavior on Mt. Gox. Basically, a random number between 10 and 20 bitcoin would be bought every 5-10 minutes, non-stop, for at least a month on end until the end of January. The bot was dubbed “Willy” at some point, which is the name I’ll continue to use here. Since Willy was buying in such a recognizable pattern, I figured it would be easy to find in the Mt. Gox trading logs that were leaked about two months ago (there’s a torrent of the data here). However, the logs only went as far as November 2013; luckily, I was able to detect the buying pattern in the last few days of November.