Bitcoin Forum

In the Altcoin most high volume coins are powered by bots.
The owner of the coin setup a bot that will buy and sell its own coins, doing volume at low cost.
This tactic will insure that any purchase of coins will be his own coins, and he can pump the coin alone, living the investors with no choice than selling lower than him and loose, because of the difference between the buy and sell walls.

You can identify these bot by selling a small amount lower than the highest bet in the sell wall.
For example if the highest seller is at 0.0055, place a sell at 0.0050, then you will immediately see a bet at 0.0049.
That's because the bot won't let you sell your tokens, he has millions of tokens (owners can mint at infinity) and want all the money for him.

You can hack the bot by doing the following tactic.

Put a buy order (small, like 1.56 for example) above the highest buy in the buy wall.
For example the highest buy is 0.00042 and the highest sell is 0.0055. You want to sell at 0.0050.

Place a buy at 0.00048 for example and wait.
It is a matter of time until the bot will adjust. It is not programmed to buy anything else than his own coins, so unless a dude come and buy, the Bot will not buy your bet.

The Bot will readjust for example at 0.0049.
Then place a buy at 0.0051 (always lower than the selling wall).

The Bot will think, damn, this is too close. Then you will see all the sell wall changing to higher values, like 0.0058+
And the Bot will readjust the buy wall to 0.0052

Now place a buy at 0.0054, wait.
The bot will readjust at 0.0055: SELL MARKET PRICE!

You manipulated the bot to buy at your own price.

The bot will be useless if there will be a big dump, I mean the bot just to put buy and sell in the range that already putted by the users. But that looks so difficult to following your guides. But just waiting for the big dump and the bot will have got trapped in the high price.  :D A lot of people are using the bot right now.

I love this post couldn't you use the method to get more altcoins for cheap? You buy a small quantity of the coin then force the bot to go down in price as much as possible and then buy your desired quantity of that coin?

I only use this method when there is no transaction like right now, you want to sell your coins and you cannot because the bots are asphyxiating the market.
Of course in a rally or in a dump, bots are out of the trade. But many time these small coins have no transactions apart from the bots.
That's when you can play. I am not sure if it can be suitable to make profit, I haven't tried. But what I am sure is that it saved my but when I wanted to sell a dirty coin and no one would buy.

Giving it back to the owner though his bot, is elegant.

 ;D  ::)

Special case: the owner of the BOT might have set a threshold to avoid the previous tactic. You can see it if you place your small bet and nothing happen.
Then, try higher, and higher to catch his threshold, then use the tactic explained before with this values in order to trigger the bot.

If the BOT is programmed to eat the small bets, that is really fun... you can place a high bet to make it move up, and when it reaches your (reasonable) price, you sell your token with very small qties.
It will eat like candies.

Sounds great but this can only work at small bot oriented coins. With coins like Stratis or Litecoin I don't this is easy to apply or use. But very useful info nonetheless.

Sure, it works only in the altcoins when there is no volume and the bot is playing alone. In that case it is impossible to sell because the bot will always place a bet below you, driving the price down.
This hack is to block the bot or at least make it sell at a higher price. It will get the sellers and buyers at about the same price. If anyone comes in the game then the price will go up.

Don't try with BTC, ETH, Litecoins and everything that is trading / USD there are too many players.

The programmers are not stupid, in most cases there'sa penalty for hacking a trade bot...either you eat from the bot or you got eaten by the bot, easier said than done!

We know that bot like artificial intelligence, so they are smarter than us so if we want to defeat them, then we just need to play smarter than them and learn their weaknesses

Fantastic!  Please subscribe me to your mailing list.

I think anti-bot strategies should be a subject the BCT spec crowd discusses in depth, they are the main opponent in the way of our mutual goal of profit.  Coin devs should be in the mix too because long term these bots plunder the value of coins.

Thanks for a very informative post.

I think that I will do a website that will monitor how botted the coins are, so that people can make a choice which coin to trade and avoid the scams.

The idea is to scan ETH transactions and see what addresses are doing the most transactions, then calculate the % of the volume made by bots.

If <25% it will be yellow
If <50% it will be orange
if >=75% it will be red.

Details like what addresses are using bots will be available.

I might do 2 versions, one free but limited and one $10 / month to compensate for the work and service.
I have no doubt that such a service will be DDOS by angry owners/ token holders, so the $10 is justified, the hosting and security must be top notch.

What do you think?

I just made a suggestion to Bittrex staff on their support about identifying orders that come from bots and they were somewhere between dismissive and hostile about it in response.

"It's not a problem", "It's unavoidable", "No one cares", "It would be too expensive to fix"

All BS.  The reality is it's too profitable for them to stop.  Bots make them money, and they don't care if long term it's slow death for the coins and scamming their customers.

So I think your idea of addressing it independently is a step in the right direction.  Good luck, I look forward to any results you may come up with.

We came to the same conclusion, I agree 100%, I am quite sure that botting is making good cash for both Exchanges and fat tokens owner at the expense of the traders.
This need to changes or Altcoins will become a dead zone where nobody will come to trade.

I have several projects to improve this, with an ERC30 standard that would store all the transactions inside the contract, making transparent what is happening in the exchanges, and also could limit the number of transactions per day per address.
I am doing a mini exchange that can be added in any website for the coin owners who cannot be listed in the Exchanges since it seems that they are only taking coins that are profitable (based on our conclusion), then ICO could be launched with its own mini local exchange that will work transparently because using the ERC30 new standard.

See, I am busy.

I love the way you assess this mate, its been a long while now since I seen this not and I thought it was just a normal way for the dev to secure that there's no quick dumped without their notice and it will likely benefits the project if slow movements happen thanks for your ideas mate keep sharing just in case you find more about hacking that bot.

This is great news I'm so glad to hear someone is tackling this problem head on.  I program a lot in a bunch of languages, maybe I could be of some help?  Let me know if so.

Are you keeping this under wraps?  I guess not if you'd talk about it in the forum publicly.  One of the bot makers I was discussing this with earlier today basically said "you can't do anything about it, accept it, no one else cares" etc.  It would be nice to show that other options do exist, or will soon, people very clearly do care (it's their hard earned money after all), and if they don't take action to correct the problem now, they could find themselves way too far behind the curve to ever do so by the time they realize it's inevitable.

Good luck!  I look forward to progress updates on this, please let us know how it's going.

I will keep the community tuned and update this thread when I have something working.

Cool post! Got me new insights since I was wondering about the bot activity anyway ???

Quite the eye opener! Pegging this down for future reference!

POST REMOVED

the advantage of bots is they execute very very fast, you can never beat their speed, but the strategies are pre-defined by  human, so when your trading strategy is better, you can beat them, just like beating other traders

@TheWolf666
Wouldn't it be better instead of a website to develop a bot that uses your strategy and that hunts the trading-bots? Maybe opensource so everyone could adjust it incase the bots strategy changes?

That bot automatically does your manual steps automatically and logs all important transactions. If smth. like you said happens (a smaller order is entered within seconds) the bot just saves it in a log file with all informations (which coin, which amounts, what date what time and so on). The log is  published on a website and if someone thinks of investing in a coin he/she can check on your website if the market might be controlled by one or more bots. The new bot network (if alot of people have your bot running) could get you more accurate results like at what times are the trading-bots most active.

I mean through that you could check many coins at a fraction of the time. Plus you could even implemend your bot and sell/give it to new coins as a unique feature to avoid bots. EDiT: Or switch to the dark site and let people pay you so you don't check certain coins.

The bots name would be "coincontrol" - yes I already figured that out in my fantasy haha

I had a thought on how to address this that attacks the problem from a different angle.

Since you're so involved in tackling this issue, I thought I'd bring it up for discussion, maybe we could refine the idea some.

"TraderCoins"

Coins that are mined by making successful trades for someone else with their capital.

So whoever comes up with the most successful strategy to beat down bots benefits from it, perhaps greatly.  Even if they don't have the funds to actually make the investments necessary themselves.

The way I picture it, there would be a profit sharing component involved as well, so if you made a successful trade for me and it made me a profit of 10 BTC, you would get 1 BTC and some TraderCoins.

Perhaps the TraderCoins are the only currency used to contract new traders, so prospective investors buy the coins on the open market, and then spend them to retain a trader for themselves.

But then again if I have to invest your money and I fail I dont care and I move on and do another trade. If I make profits (commission) its fine if I fail I dont care as it was not my money. Maybe I got you idea wrong but what keeps me from just failing and loosing someone elses money?

I cannot do a "BOT" that is doing that because I would have to use the exchange API and my bot will not be liked by the exchange. They will certainly cancel my API access.
Also I want to make a shield not another warfare tool. The idea it to make excessive BOT usage a problem, because if investors are aware of the level of rigging, they will likely stay away from the bad coins.

My system will accept low level of botting in its ranking, bot used to animate the markets are not a thread. But rigging the market will probably rate the coin as junk, and leave the bot playing alone losing money while investor are spending elsewhere.

Also the system will detect changes in the market and warn the members of these changes, dumps or rally will be notified as well as change in the 'quality' of the coin - if the bots are less aggressive, or disabled, or overflowed by investors for some reason.

Your idea sounds complicated for me. I think that if a coin is excessively botted, that mean +50% of the trades are from bots, then investors should stop trading them.
This will have the consequence to hurt the one who is running the bot and he will have to redefine his strategy in a way that traders are enough space for trading.
Simply say, better avoid the junk coins than trying to defeat the bot in a war that is not going to help the regular traders who are just using the exchange interface.

I will rate the coin based on their health.
<25% of botting = healthy -> green color (go trading)
25-50% of botting = sick -> orange color (trade at your own risk)
+50% of botting = junk => red color (stay away)

This way, traders will have a way to focus their trade on coins that are carefully managed by the owners. The scams and dumpers will stay alone dying with their coins until their master understand the lesson and respect the investors by offering a healthy coin in a fair market.
What is the point to fight a junk coin where you are likely going to lose money in favor of the bot?

I will not create another bot that will fight the bot for the benefit of my bot users. I want to give tools for all traders so that they can take fair decision as to where they invest their money.

If it happens that all the altcoins are red, then stay with ETH/ BTC and wait that the altcoins stop milking the investors.

Got it. Sign me up :D

Just to clarify, I am not going to make a bot that is doing a strategy to fight the bots.
I am working on a website that will rate the coins based on the level of fake trading, and rigged trades.

I will open a new thread when the website is up. I don't want to give the URL right now because I am still doing the UI.

 ;D

i am waiting for the good news from you if everything is set up. but i think i have my experience to fight with bots and i considering its a fun because in that time, i can play around with the bot, make buy and sell order and i feel its good to test my skill to fight with the bot especially if the coins is moving fast. i think its about how fast we can fight with the bot but like your strategy, if we are smart enough than the bot, we can win the challenge and even we can make nice profit.

Fighting with bots is not supposed to be the rule of the game when you place your money and expect to do a good investment.
I think that the current situation is killing the altcoins, I don't see any real volume right now, most people have moved their money on ETH.
Bots are doing fake traffic, and the coins not botted have 0.1 BTC of volume... the rest is in red. There are some exceptions, but rare.

Things needs to be sanitized.

another way to beat the bot is to execute trade even faster, I heard some high frequency trading companies that design bots that trade within seconds

man, I read these types of posts and realize I still have SO much to learn.  Thank you all for posting such useful information out here for us newbies to learn. 

sounds good. if i have too many btc someday , i will try this tactic. i never used bots and i will never trust bots but oneday i'm thinking to try bots too.

There are advantages and disadvantages in using bot. But it is still very limited in its actions. It may give 24/7 attention, but during, as you say, big dump, the bot will only be watching and can do nothing.  ;D That is why it is very much preferable that you yourself will be the one to manually monitor the charts and do the necessary steps.