Bitcoin Forum

I'm working on a concept for a Bitcoin exchange that works exactly like a regular exchange, but without real money or real bitcoins.  You would simply get an automated deposit of currency and/or bitcoins daily with which to trade.  The idea is that you could use this to test out trading strategies or bots in a realistic environment without putting any real money at risk.

Main features:

• A website (trading page, accounts, order book, graphs, etc.) - everything you would expect at a regular bitcoin exchange.
• A fully featured REST/JSON trading API along the same lines as Gox, CryptoXChange, Intersango etc.
• Automated "order monkeys" that copy orders from the major exchanges.  This would provide a full order book and liquidity even if no "real" people are trading.
• Possible competitions with prizes for winners (best return over X days, etc.  kind of like Motley Fool CAPS)
• Semi-public account information (e.g. public leaderboard(s) or rankings to show which users have the best performance, again, similar to CAPS)

Would this be something that anyone would be interested in using?  Anything else you'd like to see (or not see)?

Kinda like Trade Ninja and how it allows you to play the stock market with fake money?  

Would it use the actual live data from mtgox?

Sounds like it could be useful, I say go for it.

Even better, make a test bitcoinica platform.  I really need to learn how to play around with margin.

Would this just be for bitcoin exchanges or for stock markets like GLBSE?

Sounds like an interesting idea

Yes on both questions - it would mix live orders from mtgox and the other smaller exchanges, plus whatever orders were placed on the site itself.


That would be cool, but I still have a hard time figuring out exactly how Bitcoinica works, much less trying to actually code it :)


Would just be for bitcoin exchanges.  There are lots of other "fantasy stock market" like sites out there, although I suppose there are none around GLBSE.

This is also known as a prediction market, for example hsx.com, the hollywood stock exchange where you can buy shares of movies and movie stars.

Wasn't s3052 creating some simulator or something?

Or is this it?  Currency Tycoon?
"Currency Tycoon is a MMO game for practicing your bitcoin day-trading skills and compare your performance to others."
 - http://currencytycoon.com
 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EU0Ui-RZ4g

I've also seen this discussion:
 - http://www.bitcoinforums.net/threads/coin-2-coin-simulation-game.308/

I see there are several open source bots out there, for use in testing against your simulator.

AFAIK s3052 wasn't a coder, I mean I could be wrong, maybe he hired someone.

That site looks about right, like the name.

Took a look at currencytycoon.com, my site would be a bit different in that it would operate more like a bitcoin exchange - only BTC/USD trading, would have an actual order book, etc.  Similar in concept though.

I would like to point out that Bitfloor runs a fully featured 'testnet' site which provides all of the capabilities of our production exchange using fake money:

https://testnet.bitfloor.com/

It is a feature clone yet completely separate from the production network.

This is pretty much what I'm building now, the biggest difference being that I would bring in orders from other exchanges as well so that there would always be liquidity and trading action.

You could just write a bot that will simulate those orders on the bitfloor testnet ;) We had one simulating MtGox for a while.