How to fight the BOTS (and win)

[TheWolf666]

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.

[Rastadon]

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.  A lot of people are using the bot right now.

[cnx-set]

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?

[TheWolf666]

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.

  

[TheWolf666]

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.

[followmenot]

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.

[TheWolf666]

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.

[bengems]

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!

[bustomi]

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

[greyworld]

You manipulated the bot to buy at your own price.

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.

[TheWolf666]

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?

[greyworld]

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.

[TheWolf666]

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.

[Golftech]

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.

[greyworld]

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.

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.

[TheWolf666]

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.

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.

[VFabio]

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

[Bowtiesarecool]

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

[mythrill]

POST REMOVED

[ifyousmell]

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