History
Gox started as a trading platform in 2010 by McCaleb. He sold this to Mark in 2011. It is rumored that Mark was using customers BTC to expand Gox or/and it was already sold to Mark missing 80,000 BTC. When the price started to go up, Gox was forced to create the willy bot to try and buy back (at a higher price) the bitcoins they missing as they were running a technical fractional reserve). The willy bot drove the price up because it was always buying and in turn defeated its own purpose as it ended up bankrupting MxGot by driving the price so high that they could never hope to recover the missing btc. I wonder if they had not created the bot if they could have made GoT solvant again over a longer time frame.
This sort of thing is still happening, Poloneix is rumored to be inside trading, There was a DDOS attack a few days ago which caused price drops and it is rumored the Dossers were shorting the currencys on the exchanges. One of the exchanges had such little liquidity that a whale was able to dump eth yesterday causing a massive price drop on one exchange (which I am prety sure they then used to buy up cheap coins but you never know)
Anyone activity trading in Cryptoland is at the mercy of these whales, they are mainpulating price, daily pump and dumps on alts and no regulartion
That said, I cannot stop watching it all, i just hlod coins I like the technical merit of
Some light reading
History of Gox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox Information on McCaleb selling to Mark talk of missing 80k http://www.thedailybeast.com/behind-the-biggest-bitcoin-heis... Links on Willybot http://www.coindesk.com/bot-named-willy-did-mt-goxs-automate... Poloneix insider https://coinidol.com/suspicion-of-insider-trading-at-polonie...