
The MtGox 500 - bryanjowers
http://bitcoin.stamen.com/
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jimrandomh
Users 1 and 15's charts make no sense - they have to be special system
accounts of some sort. My guess is that #15 is the account that receives
trading fees, and #1 represents MtGox itself (or some specific aspect of
MtGox, such as its cold-storage).

There're still a lot of points on these plots that don't make sense, though;
generally they look like vertical stripes labelled as sets of small sell
orders, both far below and far above the market price. User 30 has what looks
like a large sell (in Mar 2013) far above the highest-ever price. So either
MtGox's order-matching is way more broken than anyone ever knew (unlikely), or
these actually represent fees, withdraws, or something similar, and the y-axis
position is meaningless.

Also worthy of note is that massive sell order by user 1 in Nov 2013. That's
hard to interpret without knowing what the dots on that graph really mean (I
doubt they're trades), but it's likely significant.

~~~
oscilloscope
Each dot is a trade. I pulled the columns from the db we generated with the
raw info of that one big trade, so you can see what the structure of the
source data looks like. Removed the user id of the buyer, but it's trivial to
find if you have the dataset.

File|Trade_Id|Date|User_Id|Type|Currency|Bitcoins|Money|Money_JPY|Money_Fee|Bitcoin_Fee

2013-11_mtgox_japan.csv|1384974682548514|2013-11-20 19:11:22| __
__*|buy|USD|1000|610000|60941267.96|0|3

2013-11_mtgox_japan.csv|1384974682548514|2013-11-20
19:11:22|THK|sell|USD|1000|610000|60941267.96|0|0

~~~
sillysaurus3
May I ask, where'd you get the dataset?

~~~
oscilloscope
A torrent found on Reddit the day it was leaked. It looks like mods may have
removed that thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zz9rw/a_message_fr...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zz9rw/a_message_from_a_mod/)

If you find a copy, don't run the .exe file contained within. It contains
malware.

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drakaal
The biggest take away from this is that bots were driving the price up, and
preventing its fall.

"Bots" offer a lot of stability to the market because they don't react to bad
news. Though an error can cause "flash crashes" As happened in May of 2010 on
the stock market.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash)

~~~
clarkm
How exactly did these charts lead you to that conclusion?

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drakaal
Look at several places the bots started binge buying when the price started to
fall out.

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poopsintub
What makes you think people wouldn't binge buy when the price started to fall
out?

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drakaal
People react to news. They might binge buy, but they sleep, and they don't
sell as often there after. The Bots were keeping the price steady by buying
and selling. If not for the bots, the ups and downs would have been a lot
"peakier"

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enjalot
I love seeing the mostly red charts, looks like people that mined a lot. check
#145 and #180. These people are selling at exponential curves on a log plot...
mind blowing.

~~~
bcsmith
Or it could be a business that is accepting bitcoins for purchases and then
immediately cashing those bitcoins into USD.

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pdeuchler
Very cool. Important to realize the graphs are on a log scale... threw me for
a loop for a second before I noticed.

Could one of these graphs represent the activity of Willy[0]?

As an aside, I experienced a nice bit of schadenfreude when looking at a lot
of the graphs from ~250 to ~299

[0]
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497289.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=497289.0)

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ebspelman
This is really beautiful. It's an amazing amount of information to be borne
(almost) purely visually.

My favorite is 117. They are the Devon Sawa in Final Destination of Bitcoin.

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Zweihander
Any theories on user 15?

The amount of money lost is a little easier to get your head around when you
see so many traders buying at relatively high prices towards the end.

~~~
olalonde
Sounds like a bug in the author's graph generation code or some incorrect data
in MtGox's database. The price didn't vary that much.

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nostromo
How amazing would it be if we had this kind of data for publicly traded
stocks?

~~~
nerfhammer
For some classes of investors, we do

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ChuckMcM
Fun stuff. Bryan if this is your site can you add to the plot in the corner a
dot with net value change? Assume that all bitcoin "held" are currently
worthless, so a holding of 10 btc at the end would be -10*last sale price
recorded on the exchange. That would give an interesting idea of which traders
"won" the game and which "lost."

~~~
mbecica
We started doing this analysis and have the data per user but didn't want to
include it in this goaround. Still much to do and investigate with this data
set! Thanks for the feedback.

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bertil
I’m not sure I understand the difference between the green Selling BitCoins
(to get Dollars, presumably) and Buying Dollars (by selling BitCoins, also
presumably).

I’m even more puzzled by the rates out of trade: did MtGox allowed traders to
agree one-on-one on their own rates? That would allow a lot more laundering
than any theft.

Missing too are relative size of the traders.

~~~
reeses
Yes, you used to be able to trade via dark pool in large amounts (at the time,
that would be 5+ kbtc) to avoid upsetting the market price. Not sure if they
still supported it at time of closure.

This is actually rather scary. Enough people have logged data that these can
be dereferenced despite the feeble attempt at depersonalization, but I guess
the names will come out in the legal proceedings anyway, depending on
jurisdiction.

Then we'll have Newsweek writers at our houses asking how we feel about
"losing millions" when our cost basis was really around $10. :-)

To head that off: "Umm, now I don't have to worry about how to declare this on
my taxes? 'Miscellaneous Income' was making me nervous."

~~~
olalonde
I don't think the (publicly) leaked database contained any usernames/emails.

~~~
mbecica
You're right, it didn't. All of the trades data included internal User IDs.
More recent data (as of April 2012) included User ID hashes, which Gox users
have access to (from their password recovery emails for example).

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dalek2point3
i want to get married to stamen. the company. they're so awesome.

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BTC_BruceWillis
Pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for the dataviz. What kind of coin volume did
it take to get in to the top 500?

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zxexz
This is incredibly well done. Did you just download all the data and analyze
it with some crazy R skills?

~~~
mbecica
Thanks! The data was released in a big zip file with a mix of malicious
content (malware that stole your btc, personal data on MtGox CEO Mark
Karpeles). Trade data was in monthly csvs, and also included some duplicate
data which we removed.

Analysis happened in sqlite, python/pandas, csvkit; charts were built in d3.js
and exported with phantom.js

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square1
1-45 is interesting when compared to 15. Others mentioned this may be a bug in
data interpretation or a GOX account, but if you look at all of the high
volume traders you can see horizontal striations that correlate with user15.

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firebones
What pattern would most likely represent the Winklevoss pattern? Assuming
there was trading prior to raising public awareness?

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smrtinsert
Really cool visualization. I wish we could see similar for retail vs
institutional traders in the capital markets.

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than
Great use of small multiples.

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munimkazia
Isn't User 15 proof that the entire market is flawed and the users were
scammed?

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imperialdrive
AMAZING!!!

