Does the 2017 Mt. Gox study hold up when checked against real trade logs?
Research question: Does the original 2017 Mt. Gox suspicious-trading study cited in [7] report trade-level evidence that can be independently re-tested against exchange-published trade logs, and do its conclusions survive that test?
The numbered facts do not describe the 2017 study cited as , so they cannot show whether it reports trade-level evidence. The only 2017 reference is Feder et al. (2017), which 4 names as a source on Bitcoin ecosystem problems, and 4 gives no detail on its data or methods. Related work on the leaked Mt. Gox trade history is from 2021: it identifies 440 investors as arbitrageurs 2, and it reports that money-traded values differ for around 310,000 legs between the leaked and public datasets, so its cross-check is not perfect 6. Whether the 2017 study's conclusions survive a re-test against exchange logs cannot be determined from these facts, and the newest fact dates to 2021, about five years before October 2026 26.
Sources
"We then use our direct evidence to evaluate various indirect techniques for detecting the presence of wash trades and find measures based on Benford’s law, trade size clustering, lognormal distributions, and structural breaks to be useful"Direct Evidence of Bitcoin Wash Trading (2019)
"The availability of user identifiers per trade allows us to focus on the historical record of 440 investors, detected as arbitrageurs, and consequently to describe their trading behavior."Who are the arbitrageurs? Empirical evidence from Bitcoin traders in the Mt. Gox exchange platform (2021)
"we find that arbitrage actions performed by expert users are on average non profitable when transaction costs are accounted for, while skilled investors conduct arbitrage at a positive and statistically significant premium."Who are the arbitrageurs? Empirical evidence from Bitcoin traders in the Mt. Gox exchange platform (2021)
"frequent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, price manipulation, stolen Bitcoin and other problems resulted in Mt. Gox’s move toward insolvency from the middle of 2013 until trades halted for good on February 25, 2014 (see e.g. Feder et al., 2017 or Gandal et al., for problems in the Bitcoin ecosystem)."BITCOIN AND THE CROSS-MARKET EFFECTS OF THE MT. GOX MELTDOWN (2020)
"Founded in 2010, by 2013, Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange handled up to 80% of all Bitcoin trading volume (Abrams & Popper, February 25, 2014)."BITCOIN AND THE CROSS-MARKET EFFECTS OF THE MT. GOX MELTDOWN (2020)
"The values related to the money traded, instead, show some differences for around 310,000 legs."Who are the arbitrageurs? Empirical evidence from Bitcoin traders in the Mt. Gox exchange platform