All the bullish wave in Bitcoin in 2013 from $150 to $1,200 was fake and printed by two robots inside a bankrupt exchange that had already lost half a billion dollars.

The exchange was Mt. Gox.
In 2013, Mt. Gox handled 70% of all Bitcoin trading worldwide. If you bought Bitcoin during that bullish wave, you probably bought it on Mt. Gox.
What no one knew was that Mt. Gox had already been hacked.
In June 2011, hackers stole about 650,000 Bitcoins from the exchange's wallets.
CEO Mark Karpeles didn't tell anyone. He continued operating Mt. Gox for nearly three more years while the exchange was technically insolvent.
To hide the missing coins, he started running two trading robots inside his own exchange.
The first was called Marcus.
Marcus appeared in February 2013 and lasted until September.
The robot was credited with activity buying 335,898 Bitcoins, but the exchange had no actual coins to support it, and no real Bitcoin was exchanged.
The trades were just entries in a database making it look like someone was continuously buying Bitcoin at every price level.
The second robot was Willy.
Willy took over in September 2013 right after Marcus disappeared, with a nearly identical pattern of behavior.
He was buying 10 to 20 Bitcoins every 5 to 10 minutes around the clock, using a fake US dollar that didn't exist to buy real Bitcoin from sellers on the platform.
When Willy reached a purchase goal of $2.5 million, he would close and start a new account to do the same thing again.
Willy bought about 250,000 Bitcoins over six weeks.
Through both robots, Mt. Gox printed about 600,000 Bitcoins from fake demand in the market.
Bitcoin's price rose from $150 in October 2013 to $1,242 by November 30 — a 730% increase in two months, the biggest bull run Bitcoin had seen until then.
Researchers from Tulsa University and Tel Aviv University later studied the leaked Mt. Gox database in detail.
Their conclusion was that suspicious activity caused the unprecedented rise.
The 2013 bull run was a managed bubble engineered by a bankrupt exchange.
On days when the robots were active, they accounted for 12% to 50% of total Bitcoin trading volume across all major exchanges combined.
Other exchanges' prices followed Mt. Gox's rise because traders assumed the real demand was driving the movement.
Arbitrage robots transferred the fake price of Mt. Gox across the entire global Bitcoin market.
Every retail buyer entering Bitcoin during that wave was buying into an artificial bubble.
The bubble couldn't hold.
In February 2014, Mt. Gox announced it had "discovered" the loss of 850,000 Bitcoins from its reserves.
Bitcoin's price plummeted from $850 to $483 over a few months, taking two and a half years to recover to previous highs.
Karpeles was arrested in Japan in August 2015 on charges of electronic data manipulation.
He admitted in court that he was running Willy's robot but claimed it was illegal.
He spent nearly a year in jail before being released.
The truth was hidden in plain sight.
Chainalysis confirmed through blockchain analysis that Mt. Gox actually had zero Bitcoins in its wallets by mid-2013, eight months before the collapse.
The robots were not a side project; they were the only thing keeping the exchange alive.
All Bitcoin price charts from 2013 still show the rise to $1,242 as a key milestone.
Most retail traders see it as proof that Bitcoin can surge strongly from any base.
The reality is that the peak was generated by a single CEO managing fake buy orders on his own platform because his exchange had no real Bitcoins left.