A single person caused bitcoin to spike from $150 to $1,000 in 2013

In 2013, a single Bitcoin was worth just $150 when suddenly, the price spiked.

Within two months, one Bitcoin was worth $1,000.

In 2014, researchers from the Tandy School of Computer Science at The University of Tulsa and the Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University realised that this spike was caused by one individual person trading on Mt Gox.

According to a trader who analyzed publicly-released logs, trading bots ran rampant on Mt Gox at the time under various user IDs, including one dubbed "Willy" that placed repetitive buy-only orders which always manipulated the price upward.

Another bot, dubbed "Markus", appears to have bought and sold at completely random prices, paying zero trading fees. Both Willy and Markus were most active immediately before and during November 2013, when bitcoin's price suddenly headed moonward.

They found that a majority of the price manipulation happened due to these two bots.

Odd patterns in the bot's buying behaviour were compounded by suspicious details in their user registration data. Willy had only '??' listed for a country code when all other accounts were identifiable. Markus' location was listed as 'Japan', and both had ID numbers unusually high compared to other users.

Markus acquired a total of 335,898 bitcoins and was active from February 14th, 2013 until September 27th, 2013, until it suddenly went dark.

Seven hours after Markus became inactive, Willy appeared as a group of 49 accounts. Each of these Willy accounts would sequentially purchase $2.5 million worth of bitcoin and then become inactive. Over this period, the price of bitcoin spiked.

On days in which this suspicious activity occurred, the USD-BTC exchange rate rose by $20 on average. On the days in which no suspicious activity occurred, the exchange rate saw a slight decline.

By analyzing the identification numbers associated with Willy’s account the researchers were able to confirm their suspicion that a single actor was responsible for both bots which, over the course of 2013, had acquired approximately 600,000 bitcoins.

At today's value, that would now be worth over 16 billion dollars.