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The Highs and Lows of Trading Bitcoin
Three years of trading with a scrappy bitcoin bot
A few years ago I wrote a computer program to buy and sell bitcoin. I called it BitBot.
Pretty soon, I began to refer to it as “him.” Naming him turned him into a little person. “BitBot made £500 today,” I’d say, or “BitBot had a bad day; he lost £900.”
Cost per bitcoin: $2,000
More often than not, BitBot made money, rendering him (and, indirectly, me) a digital Warren Buffett. BitBuffet. Unconsciously, I started to invent a little personality for BitBot. I imagined him coming home after a hard day of digital trading, his arms piled high with coins and pieces of treasure. I know this isn’t how the economy works. But my mental image of financial traders remains halfway between Fred Homepride, the bowler-hatted figure from flour packets, and a Lego pirate with a treasure chest full of gold coins.
The thinking behind BitBot was that because the price fluctuated so much I could write some code that would trade between euros, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies and profit on the volatility.
Watching BitBot do his thing was compelling. Every few minutes, something would change, and during bitcoin spikes, I became hypnotized by the totals…
