Fix itthe crypto bots

Sending bitcoins across borders is as easy as sending them across the street. There are no banks to make you wait three business days, no extra fees for making an international transfer, and no special limitations on the minimum or maximum amount you can send.

There is no fee to receive bitcoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send , bitcoins for the same fee it costs to send 1 bitcoin. With Bitcoin, there is no credit card number that some malicious actor can collect in order to impersonate you. In fact, it is even possible to send a payment without revealing your identity, almost like with physical money.

As a new user, you can get started with Bitcoin without understanding the technical details. Once you have installed a Bitcoin wallet on your computer or mobile phone, it will generate your first Bitcoin address and you can create more whenever you need one. You can disclose your addresses to your friends so that they can pay you or vice versa. In fact, this is pretty similar to how email works, except that Bitcoin addresses should only be used once. The block chain is a shared public ledger on which the entire Bitcoin network relies.

All confirmed transactions are included in the block chain. This way, Bitcoin wallets can calculate their spendable balance and new transactions can be verified to be spending bitcoins that are actually owned by the spender. The integrity and the chronological order of the block chain are enforced with cryptography.

A transaction is a transfer of value between Bitcoin wallets that gets included in the block chain. Bitcoin wallets keep a secret piece of data called a private key or seed, which is used to sign transactions, providing a mathematical proof that they have come from the owner of the wallet.

The signature also prevents the transaction from being altered by anybody once it has been issued. All transactions are broadcast between users and usually begin to be confirmed by the network in the following 10 minutes, through a process called mining.

Mining is a distributed consensus system that is used to confirm waiting transactions by including them in the block chain. It enforces a chronological order in the block chain, protects the neutrality of the network, and allows different computers to agree on the state of the system.

To be confirmed, transactions must be packed in a block that fits very strict cryptographic rules that will be verified by the network.

These rules prevent previous blocks from being modified because doing so would invalidate all following blocks. Mining also creates the equivalent of a competitive lottery that prevents any individual from easily adding new blocks consecutively in the block chain. This way, no individuals can control what is included in the block chain or replace parts of the block chain to roll back their own spends.

This is only a very short and concise summary of the system. If you want to get into the details, you can read the original paper that describes the system's design, read the developer documentation, and explore the Bitcoin wiki. To the best of our knowledge, Bitcoin has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions. However, some jurisdictions such as Argentina and Russia severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions such as Thailand may limit the licensing of certain entities such as Bitcoin exchanges.

Bitcoin is money, and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes. For instance, bitcoins are completely impossible to counterfeit. Users are in full control of their payments and cannot receive unapproved charges such as with credit card fraud. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks. Bitcoin allows money to be secured against theft and loss using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption, and multiple signatures.

Some concerns have been raised that Bitcoin could be more attractive to criminals because it can be used to make private and irreversible payments. However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established. The Internet is a good example among many others to illustrate this. Attempting to assign special rights to a local authority in the rules of the global Bitcoin network is not a practical possibility.

Any rich organization could choose to invest in mining hardware to control half of the computing power of the network and become able to block or reverse recent transactions. However, there is no guarantee that they could retain this power since this requires to invest as much than all other miners in the world.

It is however possible to regulate the use of Bitcoin in a similar way to any other instrument. Just like the dollar, Bitcoin can be used for a wide variety of purposes, some of which can be considered legitimate or not as per each jurisdiction's laws. In this regard, Bitcoin is no different than any other tool or resource and can be subjected to different regulations in each country.

A government that chooses to ban Bitcoin would prevent domestic businesses and markets from developing, shifting innovation to other countries. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is freeing people to transact on their own terms. Each user can send and receive payments in a similar way to cash but they can also take part in more complex contracts.

This allows innovative dispute mediation services to be developed in the future. Such services could allow a third party to approve or reject a transaction in case of disagreement between the other parties without having control on their money. As opposed to cash and other payment methods, Bitcoin always leaves a public proof that a transaction did take place, which can potentially be used in a recourse against businesses with fraudulent practices.

It is also worth noting that while merchants usually depend on their public reputation to remain in business and pay their employees, they don't have access to the same level of information when dealing with new consumers. The way Bitcoin works allows both individuals and businesses to be protected against fraudulent chargebacks while giving the choice to the consumer to ask for more protection when they are not willing to trust a particular merchant.

The Bitcoin technology - the protocol and the cryptography - has a strong security track record, and the Bitcoin network is probably the biggest distributed computing project in the world. Bitcoin's most common vulnerability is in user error. This is pretty similar to physical cash stored in a digital form.

Fortunately, users can employ sound security practices to protect their money or use service providers that offer good levels of security and insurance against theft or loss. The rules of the protocol and the cryptography used for Bitcoin are still working years after its inception, which is a good indication that the concept is well designed. The more such issues are discovered, the more Bitcoin is gaining maturity.

There are often misconceptions about thefts and security breaches that happened on diverse exchanges and businesses. However, it is accurate to say that a complete set of good practices and intuitive security solutions is needed to give users better protection of their money, and to reduce the general risk of theft and loss.

It is not possible to change the Bitcoin protocol that easily. Any Bitcoin client that doesn't comply with the same rules cannot enforce their own rules on other users. Therefore, It is not possible to generate uncontrolled amounts of bitcoins out of thin air, spend other users' funds, corrupt the network, or anything similar.

However, for anyone willing to learn more about that, I would be more than happy to discuss in private, to some extent. Long story short, I ultimately ended up going for the stock market, but not into high frequency trading in its real meaning. My bot holds a single position from seconds to minutes sometimes even hours , which makes it more of an automated trader than a high frequency trader.

The reason behind this is that being an individual trader makes it extremely hard to compete with the big guys, as you're lacking perks such as very powerful hardware, advance trained software, and great locations for your servers. The closer to the stock exchange you are, the faster you receive the information. Large investment servers are literally paying millions to get their servers a few miles closer to the exchanges. Their limitation is 3 requests per second, and this was more than enough for my new strategy.

Getting solid historical financial data isn't cheap, and with so many people hitting the providers to scrape and download data, I don't blame them for limiting the offered information.

Intrinio is a good provider for real-time stock quotes at very inexpensive prices. However, getting access to more in-depth data would always yield better results. I built the first prototype in a little under a month. I was working late hours, trying to find time around my daily job as a freelancer. At this point the bot wasn't very smart. It took me about 2 more weeks to feed it with data until my error rate was satisfactory, and another 2 weeks to test it before putting it in production.

Summed up, the technical implementation of the current version took about 4 months, with some more improvements along the way. Since I publicly announced it , I've been receiving dozens of offers from trading companies. At the moment the system gives me an edge over other traders. If I sold it, I'd be giving this advantage to other traders and, subsequently, losing my lead.

Although I do not exclude a future buyout, I am presently focusing on improving the product and trying to scale it.

One of the things that I plan on doing soon is increasing the capital and therefore putting the bot through more trading volume. There are tons of improvements I have in mind, especially on adjusting the position-holding time span, as well as solutions to make it more lightweight, facilitating larger volumes. I wasted way too much time trying to apply high frequency trading in Bitcoin.

At first the idea sounded great, but I was soon facing a lot of technical issues trying to scale the amount of requests. However, I am not yet convinced that it's impossible to achieve true HFT with cryptocurrencies, so it might be something I come back to in the future. After drifting away from the idea of HFT due to the technical limitations, I looked into a more analytical approach in automated trading.

Most of those concepts couldn't be applied in the Bitcoin market, as it's highly unpredictable, making it hard to shape the models around it. That's when I decided to stick to the stock market. Another big mistake in the beginning was relying too heavily on models.

Instead of trying different approaches in analyzing the data I had, I relied solely on the models for identifying profitable patterns without investing time into other more direct solutions. Models are only simple real world abstractions, and my common sense has saved me more than once. Now this is not by any means a reliable metric, and there are many factors that affect it. The bot has not been tested enough to guarantee that this isn't just a fluke it might as well be.

Large investment management companies would do anything to achieve those statistics, and I'm sure I won't keep up that amount of success in upcoming trades.

The success so far was also greatly impacted by the favorable market conditions, chosen stocks, and the fact that the bot was running intermittently. I learned this the painful way. Not too long ago the market went pretty crazy, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't expecting some major crashes of the stocks I was trading.

Although my stop-loss saved me from some brutal losses, had I not stepped in at the right time, the bot would've ruined all the profit from the past months. That event really got me thinking, and I decided to stop it running for a few days until I fixed that loophole. This was also a great learning experience for me, and I believe that without going through those ups and downs, I would've never managed to get the algorithm to where it is today. I have no regrets losing time on Bitcoin, as it gave me a deeper understanding of how cryptocurrency trading works, which might prove useful some day.

Probably my biggest single advantage is being a starry-eyed young dreamer. To some extent, this allows me to believe enough to put effort into ideas in that others wouldn't. That's what motivated me to persevere in finding those "backdoors" in the market. While many people believe individual traders don't stand much of a chance against the well-equipped companies, I am here to prove that with the right implementation there still is plenty of space in the market. Another immensely helpful resource were the public research papers available online.

In fact, I got tremendous help from papers published back in I often found that most of them are easily overlooked, although they contain super useful analyses. Being a workaholic has also contributed a fair amount to this success. I have no issue whatsoever working hours per day. With time, I developed a very productive and consistent lifestyle, managing to get rid of most distractions. This allowed me time to invest in polishing and researching the different strategies for this project.

If you've worked your butt off to build something and give up on launching it, no one will care about it. We live in a very capitalist society where people will judge you based on real results.