There has been a lot of speculation concerning the possibility of some people or groups of people to trigger bitcoin’s price. For example, Russian Kaspersky Lab co-founder Natalya Kaspersky, who recently paper, concerning the issue, is named "Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem," and was released by the Journal of Monetary Economics. The study itself brings the jeopardy of value handling into light as well as it points out at possibilities of scam on the market of virtual money.
The Proof: One Person Behind Two Bots
One of the researchers, when conducting a study, looked through the data that had been anonymously offloaded four years ago after accusations that 650,000 of BTC units were disappeared in the Mt. Gox case. Explorers discovered that the most substantial number of crypto value manipulations took place because of two bots, in the name of the client country of which were positioned two question marks. Therefore, the researchers decided to call the first bot “Marcus,” whereas the second bot received the name “Willy.”
Our top trading bots
According to the study research, bot Marcus was functioning in 2013 between February 14 and September 27. In the space of this period, the bot was randomly purchasing bitcoins at various prices, collecting nearly 336 thousand of bitcoins in general. As it was disclosed later, Marcus was not giving the money away for the ‘purchased’ bitcoins. A few hours after the first bot ‘turned off,’ Willy came onto the stage like a bunch of 49 accounts. Each of them bought bitcoins, worth $2.5 million, and then ‘turned off’ too.
As the researchers found out, it was the time when BTC’s price soared. For instance, when there was no questionable activity, the USD-BTC exchange rate demonstrated an insignificant decrease. But when one of the bots was maneuvering on the market, the price would usually soar by $20.
"We conclude that the suspicious trading activity caused the unprecedented spike in the USD-BTC exchange rate in late 2013 when the rate jumped from around $150 to more than $1,000 in two months," the researchers stated.
Ultimately, the group of discoverers managed to confirm that only one individual was responsible for two bots, which took about 600,000 of BTC units. So now as people are aware of it they should think twice before piling into cyber money.
Chart Source: coinmarketcap.com.
