The entire 2013 Bitcoin bull run from $150 to $1,200 was fake and was printed by two bots inside an insolvent exchange that had already lost half a billion dollars

The exchange was Mt. Gox
In 2013 Mt. Gox was processing 70% of all Bitcoin trades on Earth. If you bought BTC during that bull run, you almost certainly bought it on Mt. Gox
What nobody knew was that Mt. Gox had already been hacked
In June 2011 hackers drained approximately 650,000 BTC from the exchange’s wallets
CEO Mark Karpeles never told anyone. He kept Mt. Gox running for nearly 3 more years while the exchange was technically insolvent
To hide the missing coins he started running two trading bots inside his own exchange
The first was called Markus
Markus appeared in February 2013 and ran until September
The bot was credited with 335,898 BTC of buying activity that the exchange had no actual coins to back and no real Bitcoin changed hands
The trades were just database entries that made it look like someone was constantly buying BTC at every price level
The second bot was Willy
Willy took over in September 2013 right when Markus disappeared and the behavior pattern was almost identical
It would buy 10 to 20 Bitcoin every 5 to 10 minutes around the clock, using fake USD that didn’t exist to acquire real Bitcoin from sellers on the platform
When Willy hit a $2.5 million USD purchase target it would shut down and a new account would spin up to do exactly the same thing
Willy bought approximately 250,000 BTC over six weeks
Across both bots Mt. Gox printed about 600,000 BTC of fake demand into the market
Bitcoin’s price went from $150 in October 2013 to $1,242 by November 30. A 730% spike in two months. The largest bull run Bitcoin had ever experienced at that point
University of Tulsa and Tel Aviv University researchers later studied the leaked Mt. Gox database in detail
Their conclusion was that the suspicious trading activity caused the unprecedented spike
The 2013 bull run was a manipulated bubble engineered by an insolvent exchange
On the days the bots were active, they accounted for 12% to 50% of total Bitcoin trading volume across all major exchanges combined
Other exchanges’ prices followed Mt. Gox upward because traders assumed real demand was driving the move
Arbitrage bots transmitted the fake Mt. Gox price across the entire global Bitcoin market
Every retail buyer who entered Bitcoin during that run was buying into a manufactured bubble
The bubble couldn’t hold
In February 2014 Mt. Gox announced it had “discovered” 850,000 BTC missing from its reserves. Bitcoin crashed from $850 to $483 within months. It took two and a half years to reclaim the previous high
Karpeles was arrested in Japan in August 2015 on charges of manipulating electronic data
He admitted in court to running the Willy bot but disputed it was illegal. He spent nearly a year in jail before being released
The truth had been hiding in plain sight
Chainalysis confirmed through blockchain analysis that Mt. Gox had effectively zero Bitcoin in its wallets by mid 2013 eight months before the public collapse
The bots weren’t a side project. They were the only thing keeping the exchange alive
Every Bitcoin price chart from 2013 still shows the spike to $1,242 as a milestone
Most retail traders point to it as proof that Bitcoin can rally hard from any base
The reality is that peak was generated by a single CEO running fake buy orders on his own exchange because his exchange had no real Bitcoin left