When hackers posted 750 megabytes of data pilfered from the bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, many people seized on it as a kind of treasure map, hoping it would help locate the nearly half a billion dollars in digital currency that went missing from the exchange.

But not Kai Chang and Mary Becica.

Chang is a design technologist at San Francisco visualization studio Stamen Design, and Becica is a product manager at cloud management outfit AppDirect, also in San Francisco. Both love to geek out on data. When the Gox data was released into the wild, they weren't interested in finding the allegedly stolen bitcoins. They went looking for patterns in the way the digital currency was flowing across the net. The result is a set of some 500 visualizations that show the activity of the 500 Gox accounts that traded the most bitcoin, a graphical representation of the exchange that shows how it progressed from a casual trading table for a small group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts to a hyper-speed market dominated by fairly sophisticated traders. "As you get later in the data," Chang says, you see the development of "more consistent techniques."

The visualizations provide a window into not just Mt. Gox but bitcoin as a whole (see photos above and below; click to view larger versions). Until it ran into regulatory and security problems, Mt. Gox was the world's first major bitcoin exchange and by far the most popular. In recent years, the digital currency has evolved into a rather complex financial market – though there are still many kinks to iron out.

In an effort to explain some of their graphs, Chang and Becica invented larger-than-life characters to represent various types of market behavior. There are the up-by-their-bootstraps winners, who got in early, bought low, and made a killing, and there are the losers, who accumulated scads of bitcoin just before Gox imploded. Chang and Becica also look a specific types of trading, from high-frequency speculation to strategies that seem to make no sense whatsoever. Though the duo speculate about motives, all their charts are based on actual, individual Gox accounts found in the hacker dump.

The Bitcoin Baron —————–

One graph shows the activity of a Gox account that Chang and Becica dub "The Bitcoin Baron" (see chart at the top of the page). The baron got in early and later made big sales as bitcoin prices reached a peak. But as Chang points out, the baron may actually be many barons, selling only when they need to cover electricity or tax costs – or after the market begins to peak. "It could be a mining pool, like BTC Guild," says Chang. "They sell in small quantities, but when the bubble comes around, they really unload."

The Greater Fool —————-

Chang and Becica refer to another user as "The Greater Fool," saying he represents the suckers who invested in a booming bitcoin market right before Mt Gox started to implode (see directly above). But since their visualizations went online last week, the pair have been inundated with messages presenting an alternate theory: that this user was actually making a savvy bet, albeit a failed one, on the solvency of Mt. Gox.

After Mt. Gox stopped allowing withdrawals earlier this year, Gox users rushed to sell their Gox bitcoin to other Gox users at a discount – "like rats on a sinking ship," as Chang puts it – and speculators who thought Gox would ultimately hold up financially then swooped in to buy these discounted bitcoin. That may look like a bad move now that Gox's assets are frozen, but at the time, many believed that the company would eventually get its head above water.

The Dueling Bot —————

The data miners also identify an account that seems to automated. It shows a very regular pattern of activity across tens of thousands of trades. "The fact that you're doing this for a year and a half suggests that you're a bot," Becica says.

The Market Maker —————-

One account seems to have special status. It is the highest-volume account on the exchange, it doesn't pay fees for trades, and it never buys bitcoin. It only sells. "It seems very likely these [trades] have something to do with the exchange itself," says Chang.

The Mysterious Schemer ———————-

This is a weird one, "User 15," meaning the 15th highest-volume account. As Chang and Becica point out, it "purchases large volumes of bitcoin at seemingly random prices."

Many traders sell to this user at low prices, and it buys are astronomically high prices. "Are these faulty trades or an algorithm gone mad?" they ask. One clue: this is a counter party to many trades made by The Market Marker. "We expected more feedback on this one," Becica says, "but haven't heard from the community."

All images: Stamen Design