I have just posted this comment to the Willy report page on Wordpress:
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May 25, 2014 at 9:07 pm
Another possible explanation for Markus/Willy is that it was doing arbitrage with China. Namely, buying cheap coins at MtGOX and sending them to a partner in China, who sold them there (presumably at BTC-China) for a higher price.
Indeed, the report argues that Markus must have been the cause of the August rally because the price at MtGOX jumped up whenever Markus bought, and remained flat between his buys. But the price at BTC-China increased steadily through August. This suggestst that BTC-China was leading, and MtGOX was following, by discrete jumps, through Markus’s arbitrage.
I have not looked carefully at Sep-Nov, but it seems that in that interval, too, the leader was China (ultimately including Huobi and OKCoin, besides BTC-China), and Markus/Willy were following.
All that one-sided arbitrage would have required an awful amount (hundreds of millions?) of USD in the arbitrager’s MtGOX account. Since Markus/Willy paid no fees, it may have been an insider, and it may have paid with non-existent money, as the report argues. In that case, perhaps Markus/Willy expected to get the money later from the Chinese partner; but the latter defaulted, or could not transfer the money due to the PBoC restrictions.
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May 25, 2014 at 10:00 pm
PS. My chief argument for the 2013 bubbles being real, due to the huge increase in demand after the opening of the Chinese markets, is that after Nov/29 the price has reacted almost exclusively to events in China, ignoring events outside China. I don’t see how to explain that, if the rise from ~120$ to ~1200$ was due to forced buying by Markus/Willy alone.
If the theory above is correct, it would be interesting to know who the Chinese partner could be. Of course, it could be the same person that owned Markus/Willy, but could be someone else -- a Chinese national, or a non-Chinese with a presence in China.
The "huge amount" is given in the report, about 110 million USD.