I've got a handful of sales coming in which is great. Mostly driven by a post on the bitcoin forum.
People there are certainly raising the trust/hacking issue. I am being open and honest with them and trying to communicate in a responsive manor. Maybe honesty, responsiveness and time will be the key.
yes, i am running it myself and making a profit, but as i mentioned (in another post) it is a small amount. currently it is about $1 a day with a very small risk. it may grow, but that depends on volume or volatility growing at cex. the profit is directly tied to volume and volatility.
in terms of the risk. triangular arbitrage is in "theory" safe. in that it ONLY trades when there is guaranteed profit. in practice what happens is that other automatic trading bots can place the trade faster than your bot which means you have to wait for the trade to complete. the other risk is that there can be a network problem. the triangular arbitrage needs 3 trades to complete, if only 2 complete and the network goes down, you can be left scrambling to fix that last trade.
both the risks seems to be fairly managable from the 1 month or so that i have been successfully going.
so why am i trying to sell it? if i can get $50 straight up rather than wait i will do it. also, "quant trading" from the real world stock market is way way advanced on what this app does, so i have plenty of new trading bots to create and in some fantasy land of mine i would love to be the guy that created the first set of software for it on the bitcoin market
I might also add, that to give an analogy. if bitcoin mining is so good, why do cex sell cloud mining and not keep it for themselves?
As with them the answer is that it is more profitable to build a customer base and profit from them and let them then make a small profit on the mining
Mining is not marketed as risk free though. I have personally made some money through automated inter-exchange arbitrage but I ended up concluding that the risks outweighed the rewards at current time (maybe intra exchange is less risky).
most of the inter exchange arbitrage opportunities are eaten up by the fees and because there can be a time delay across exchanges it also adds risk. The intra trading (especially in my case ) has those risks minimized. there are no fees on cex and the trades happen very fast.
@fabulist, thank your for taking a look and giving real feedback. it is very much appreciated.
in no particular order, the questions you have raised.
Why 6 seconds. cex has a 600 requests per 10 minute limit on their API otherwise they ban the caller. i make sure that I am under that
I already know that others are using triangular arbitrage, in the stock market and I suspect they are also doing it on cex, otherwise I would be getting large numbers of profit opportunities rather than say 20-60 a day i am currently getting. So others doing something similar cant be controlled.
out of date opportunities i am thinking of doing. i can simply report every arbitrage i find to let people see what is happening. Although currently the trial which doesnt need people to even sign up or use cex shows it live as it happens.
I think you are also right into going into the math/detail. originally i have been thinking about keeping it fairly "high" level because most won't want to learn the math, but it may give them a greater sense of it being a real opportunity
No trouble, I'm experiencing similar problems with trust trying to get my pentesting company started. The skepticism is frustrating, if understandable. :)
From what you've said, I'm inferring that when one utilizes an triangular arbitrage opportunity it is expended. If thats so, I would advise extreme caution. This could make scaling painful, as your customers would be using the same algorithm and finding the same opportunities, but only one of them would get the payout. The result would be that the value of your product decreases with the number of customers. Perhaps you could adjust your code so that it queries CEX no more than 600x/10min, and ever 6s on average, but the timing has a random element. This would prevent your clients from syncing with each other. YMMV.
I am using it. it works quite well, but it is not big money. it makes as much as the volume and volatility of cex. So that works out at about a $1 a day right now. if cex grows, or if there is more volatility then it will increase.
right now i am starting to look the coding for other exchange.
maybe its not something bitcoiners are going to accept because it seems too good to not be a scam or it doesnt seem like there is enough in it to make it worth while.
currently the feedback i get is that people think its a scam
I am thinking of doing a speech at the local bitcoin events but that doesnt seem too scalable
HN actually use replies, rather than @tags. Below olalonde's comment, you'll observe theres a small "reply" link. I can understand how it'd be easy to miss though.
Paul Graham often advises people to "do things that don't scale" in order to get to a large scale. Doing a talk sounds like a cool idea, and if it get onboard your first few customers (or additional customers if you already have some), its a win.
when asked to estimate, i ask if the biz if they can also give me an estimate for meetings, UAT, changes, hiring resources, unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime and historic data comparing previous project estimates to actuality. Its the only way to get closer to accurate.
The developers estimates generally are best case scenarios without any external or motivational factors included.
I've got a handful of sales coming in which is great. Mostly driven by a post on the bitcoin forum.
People there are certainly raising the trust/hacking issue. I am being open and honest with them and trying to communicate in a responsive manor. Maybe honesty, responsiveness and time will be the key.