Aricie: Announcing a new trading bots platform

[Aricie]

Hi,

Our company develops DotNetNuke extensions, and the next version of our Firewall module will introduce a scheduled bots platform.

The free version will come with trading bots for various btc exchange, and we'll provide hosted bots services.
I have set up an demonstration website where you can register your own bots online or download an unrestricted beta version of the DNN module.

All Bitcoin specific code was isolated into an dedicated project, available for download, and will be soon open sourced on Codeplex.

As a Software architect with a background in Telecom, I learnt a lot in those last two months of full immersion in the Btc world.
Now I feel it is time to let Finance experts get their hands on the actual trading bit, while focusing on delivering a robust platform.
Definitely looking for open collaboration here.

Please give our system a try, and feel free to ask for more information.
The final release is expected to End-August and will feature a detailed documentation.

I'll be away next week, but our team of DNN experts will be there to help if needed.

Cheers,

Jesse, CTO Aricie

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[phorensic]

Somebody be the guinea pig, use this, and report back.  kthxbai

[Aricie]

Somebody be the guinea pig, use this, and report back.  kthxbai

Yeah well this is about free bots as in in free speech AND free beer you know.
But you were expecting free BTCs, right?

[davout]

Somebody be the guinea pig, use this, and report back.  kthxbai

Haven't tried it, but I met Jesse in person in Paris.

[Aricie]

Haven't tried it, but I met Jesse in person in Paris.

Thanks Dav, I understand reputation is important here.

We are quite new to the Bitcoin community, but we have been around for a while in the DotNetNuke ecosystem. Hopefully that's a starting point.

This is still an early stage for this project, there's a bunch of information missing, but I made sure everything is transparent so far:

• On the bot architecture:You can browse a detailed read only version of each bot online, you get recent dumps of your hosted bot, you can download a Beta version of the DNN module and run your own trading bot platform.
• On the trading Strategy: You can edit many control rates and the formulas that compute order prices and amounts for each of your bots, you can download the source code for everything Bitcoin related and implement your own strategy.

If you're interested but you don't feel like trusting the hosted version, then go for the DNN module and do the testing on premises.

[phorensic]

I'm excited about this, I just want to see someone turn even a 1-2% profit and prove it first.

[enmaku]

Interesting... I don't have huge sums of cash myself to try this out so I'll await external confirmation with phorensic

[Aricie]

I'm excited about this, I just want to see someone turn even a 1-2% profit and prove it first.

To be honest, the default Strategy is very conservative, but at least you can change it to your tastes.
Of course it would be nice if people communicate about their winning strategies.

[evolve]

it looks complex, but if i can figure out how to use it, ill be the guinea pig...

[runlinux]

complex? eh...

im going to take a break from my bot and see how yours works.

i have a few coins to play with, so dont let me down!

[evolve]

i set it up and left all the default values alone....looks like it has trades set up....ill let you guys know how it goes

[Jessynoo]

It looks nifty, but there is no HTTPS.

Of course this is on our plans but as we don't have a wildcard certificate on our domain name, I just skipped it for now.
I'll look for it.

[Aricie]

We're currently insrtalling a new certificate.
The site should be full Https soon.

Also, while talking security: your bot settings are encrypted using RijndaelManaged, with a salt from your account email and a unique init vector. The encryption key itself is stored encrypted against the web.config machine key.
There might be a glitch with the password textbox though, as just reported. Enter it twice if it gets deleted on the first try.
Once properly saved, if you disable the chars display, your password isn't included anymore in the html while you edit other strategy parameters.

Finally, if you download the DNN module, you should see that the bot engine also powers an application firewall.

[Aricie]

OK I've got a problem now.
The server's IP was banned by Mt Gox because someone's entered a wrong password.
I should have foreseen this coming.

I'll check with MtGox to get the IP unbanned.
I'll re-enable verbose logging so that we can investigate ourself on which account has a problem; til now, I haven't logged the bot dumps, only in each users recent history.
I should precise that the password is dumped with another run of encryption, so we won't see it going through.
That will probably slow the site a bit though by generating heavy Data access.

Now here's a few remarks to get started again:

- The bot uses the legacy API, what's needed as credentials is your regular Mt Gox account username and password. Hopefully the API is here to stay for a while, I'll switch to recent API when I'm back.
- Please check your credentials for those who enabled their bots and did not see any new open order on their Mt Gox account.
Edit: the bots won't not issue unavailable orders. If your account is empty, don't expect to see any order coming.

-Sorry for the others, your account is probably left with orders, no need to worry as those positions should be fine, yet you may still want to clean your account until the IP address is removed from ban list.

Cheers

[Aricie]

Just registered an support ticket with Mt Gox.
I asked if the server's IP can be white-listed, but we'll probably have to implement a ban list of our own to isolate faulty credentials, and to rely in the long term on a private pool of proxies. That was expected anyway.
I'll make sure to implement that before the final release.

In the mean time, I have restarted the service for TradeHill and ExchangeBitcoins bots.

[Aricie]

Just one last thing before I leave and our support team takes over, about strategies and profit since they might be lost in that area.

The default Strategy isn't too risky, and the main entry points to increase profit/risk are the following:

• Min Order Value (increase for more risks) / Min Order Margin (decrease for more risks): they deal with orders close to the ticker; the first determines the value of min orders relative to max orders, and the second how close you get to the ticker thus the density of low orders considering the exponential pricing distribution 
• The extreme orders (Lowest Bid / Highest Ask). All orders in between are computed relatively to those value (linear in value). For more risks, you can increase their value or reduce the band width, just make sure it does not dry out your reserve.
  

Hope our team will be ok with handling that current pb.
They don't know much about Btc, but they're good DNN programmers, and they should be able to sort out most issues.
They'll contact me for detailed answers if needed.

See ya,

Jesse

[evolve]

OK I've got a problem now.
The server's IP was banned by Mt Gox because someone's entered a wrong password.
I should have foreseen this coming.

I'll check with MtGox to get the IP unbanned.
I'll re-enable verbose logging so that we can investigate ourself on which account has a problem; til now, I haven't logged the bot dumps, only in each users recent history.
I should precise that the password is dumped with another run of encryption, so we won't see it going through.
That will probably slow the site a bit though by generating heavy Data access.

Now here's a few remarks to get started again:

- The bot uses the legacy API, what's needed as credentials is your regular Mt Gox account username and password. Hopefully the API is here to stay for a while, I'll switch to recent API when I'm back.
- Please check your credentials for those who enabled their bots and did not see any new open order on their Mt Gox account.
Edit: the bots won't not issue unavailable orders. If your account is empty, don't expect to see any order coming.

-Sorry for the others, your account is probably left with orders, no need to worry as those positions should be fine, yet you may still want to clean your account until the IP address is removed from ban list.

Cheers

does this mean no new orders will be made by my bot until the servers IP is unbanned?

[phorensic]

I think the more important question is what happens to your old orders if the bot can't communicate all of a sudden?  What if you had risky orders placed that are now set to lose a lot of money because the market is constantly changing?  I guess you could just log in the MtGox and cancel, but we are relying on millisecond response times here, right?

[Aricie]

I think the more important question is what happens to your old orders if the bot can't communicate all of a sudden?  What if you had risky orders placed that are now set to lose a lot of money because the market is constantly changing?  I guess you could just log in the MtGox and cancel, but we are relying on millisecond response times here, right?

Well that's a reason why you shouldn't use a Strategy, which leaves your orders uncovered in case of service interruption (There's already a warning about that on our home page).
The default Strategy is fine with that: small orders around market price are covered by bigger orders further away. That kind of non predictive, passive market making strategy is only "breaking" on market moves and does not require any special attention if the trading band orders are slowely cleared with increasingly bigger moves, without being replaced. This Happened to me several times already while testing without any harm.
 Of course it's very different if you get the bot to issue big orders and you want it to pull out at some point.

As for milliseconds, each call to the MtGox API is no shorter than a regular HttpRequest (50 ms at the very minimum) and the fact that the bot itself doesn't need more than a couple of milliseconds for itself doesn't help much.
The access time is very variable, typically slower during market rushs, ExchangeBitcoins was very slow lately, and Mt Gox times several times a day.
You need at the very least 2 calls (Orders+balance and Ticker), and I added a 100ms wait time between 2 calls as TradeHill may consider faster calls as DOS.

Accordingly you should expect a couple of seconds for your bot to run especially if it's issuing several orders (1 API call per new order).

Our bots are programmed to run every minute by default and considering their Strategy, this is fine: most significant market moves span over several minutes, and your're always one trend ahead, replacing currently executed order for the next trend change.
Hope that makes sense.

In the mean time, I did not get any answer from Mt Gox yet (I guess we can resume the Mt Gox connection on Monday), but the site is now full Https.

Well this is probably my last post before Ozora, don't expect from our team too much information on financial matters, rather on the platform itself.

Cheers guys

Jesse

[evolve]

any idea on when this is going to be back up? my bot hasnt traded in a week, and now the sites down...any update would be appreciated....

is there a way to run the bot from my own computer so im not relient on your servers?