7 ms·

The MtGox 500

265 points by bryanjowers 13y ago

bertil 13y ago
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.
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  Green -> Buying bitcoin with any currency Red -> Selling bitcoin for USD Blue -> Selling bitcoin for any non-USD currency
- reeses 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    I don't think the (publicly) leaked database contained any usernames/emails.
    - mbecica 13y ago
      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).
  - krisdol 13y ago
    > depersonalization I think you're maybe looking for bowlderization or anonymization or something similar?
    - reeses 13y ago
      The problem I had with both those terms is that they're not anonymized (and unless the usernames are obscene, bowdlerization isn't really a good fit). With the other leaks, at least for the older accounts, a name can be associated with these charts. For the newer accounts or those that lay dormant for a few years before trading, I suspect those who have been logging the web socket and IRC traffic could create a correlation with an individual. Anonymize is probably fine, but I want "reversible anonymization". :)
Zweihander 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- olalonde 13y ago
  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.
pdeuchler 13y ago
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
ebspelman 13y ago
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.
enjalot 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Or it could be a business that is accepting bitcoins for purchases and then immediately cashing those bitcoins into USD.
lerdorfsghosts 13y ago
Interesting to see that only lower user ids have glitch characteristics. Likely that they're "insiders". So either the messed with the system themselves or they got conned somehow.
nostromo 13y ago
How amazing would it be if we had this kind of data for publicly traded stocks?
- nerfhammer 13y ago
  For some classes of investors, we do
drakaal 13y ago
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 13y ago
  How exactly did these charts lead you to that conclusion?
  - drakaal 13y ago
    Look at several places the bots started binge buying when the price started to fall out.
    - poopsintub 13y ago
      What makes you think people wouldn't binge buy when the price started to fall out?
      - drakaal 13y ago
        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"
ChuckMcM 13y ago
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."
- bryanjowers 13y ago
  This project was built by https://twitter.com/syntagmatic https://twitter.com/syntagmatic and https://twitter.com/mbecica https://twitter.com/mbecica.
- mbecica 13y ago
  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.
jimrandomh 13y ago
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.
- eddd 13y ago
  They look like bid/ask offers.
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    May I ask, where'd you get the dataset?
    - oscilloscope 13y ago
      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_from_a_mod/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zz9rw/a_message_fr... If you find a copy, don't run the .exe file contained within. It contains malware.
zxexz 13y ago
This is incredibly well done. Did you just download all the data and analyze it with some crazy R skills?
- mbecica 13y ago
  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
dalek2point3 13y ago
i want to get married to stamen. the company. they're so awesome.
than 13y ago
Great use of small multiples.
square1 13y ago
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.
BTC_BruceWillis 13y ago
Pretty interesting stuff. Thanks for the dataviz. What kind of coin volume did it take to get in to the top 500?
imperialdrive 13y ago
AMAZING!!!
firebones 13y ago
What pattern would most likely represent the Winklevoss pattern? Assuming there was trading prior to raising public awareness?
munimkazia 13y ago
Isn't User 15 proof that the entire market is flawed and the users were scammed?
smrtinsert 13y ago
Really cool visualization. I wish we could see similar for retail vs institutional traders in the capital markets.

265 points by bryanjowers 13y ago

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.

oscilloscope 13y ago
Green -> Buying bitcoin with any currency Red -> Selling bitcoin for USD Blue -> Selling bitcoin for any non-USD currency
reeses 13y ago
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 13y ago
  I don't think the (publicly) leaked database contained any usernames/emails.
  - mbecica 13y ago
    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).
- krisdol 13y ago
  > depersonalization I think you're maybe looking for bowlderization or anonymization or something similar?
  - reeses 13y ago
    The problem I had with both those terms is that they're not anonymized (and unless the usernames are obscene, bowdlerization isn't really a good fit). With the other leaks, at least for the older accounts, a name can be associated with these charts. For the newer accounts or those that lay dormant for a few years before trading, I suspect those who have been logging the web socket and IRC traffic could create a correlation with an individual. Anonymize is probably fine, but I want "reversible anonymization". :)

Zweihander 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 13y ago
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.

pdeuchler 13y ago

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

ebspelman 13y ago

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.

enjalot 13y ago

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 13y ago
Or it could be a business that is accepting bitcoins for purchases and then immediately cashing those bitcoins into USD.

lerdorfsghosts 13y ago

Interesting to see that only lower user ids have glitch characteristics. Likely that they're "insiders". So either the messed with the system themselves or they got conned somehow.

nostromo 13y ago

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

nerfhammer 13y ago
For some classes of investors, we do

drakaal 13y ago

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 13y ago
How exactly did these charts lead you to that conclusion?
- drakaal 13y ago
  Look at several places the bots started binge buying when the price started to fall out.
  - poopsintub 13y ago
    What makes you think people wouldn't binge buy when the price started to fall out?
    - drakaal 13y ago
      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"

ChuckMcM 13y ago

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."

bryanjowers 13y ago
This project was built by https://twitter.com/syntagmatic https://twitter.com/syntagmatic and https://twitter.com/mbecica https://twitter.com/mbecica.
mbecica 13y ago
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.

jimrandomh 13y ago

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.

eddd 13y ago
They look like bid/ask offers.
oscilloscope 13y ago
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 13y ago
  May I ask, where'd you get the dataset?
  - oscilloscope 13y ago
    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_from_a_mod/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zz9rw/a_message_fr... If you find a copy, don't run the .exe file contained within. It contains malware.

zxexz 13y ago

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

mbecica 13y ago
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

dalek2point3 13y ago

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

than 13y ago

Great use of small multiples.

square1 13y ago

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.

BTC_BruceWillis 13y ago

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

imperialdrive 13y ago

AMAZING!!!

firebones 13y ago

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

munimkazia 13y ago

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

smrtinsert 13y ago

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