Comstock

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. I have not tested this using real money, and I don't want you to lose money! I plan on using this personally, and I wanted to get the code out there since there aren't many similar projects on Github.

Thanks,

Ryan

The Future of Buying Bitcoin (for me, anyway)

Since the price of bitcoin will never fall, ever, I'm using a very basic long strategy of buying when the price dips. I'd encourage you to use this at your own risk, as it's in no way stable (yet).

I like the idea of passively buying bitcoin because I'm extremely bullish on its future, and I just started playing with the Bitfloor API.
Eventually, I'd like to incorporate historical data and use a more sophisticated strategy.

Installation - Not as bad as it looks

I have the bot using the test API by default, but to change over to trading real money (AT YOUR OWN RISK), you must change the host in keys.json from:

https://api.testnet.bitfloor.com

to:

https://api.bitfloor.com

I'm using redis as a datastore, so you'll need to install that on your machine and grab the gem. If you want to persist the trade data easily for storage, install the redis-dump gem as well:

brew install redis

gem install redis

gem install redis-dump

Next, I'm using the wonderful HTTParty gem for pulling data from the REST API:

gem install httparty

Signing requests is a key to the security of the API, but it's kind of a pain. I used the querystring gem to make signing requests simple. Install the gem as well using:

gem install querystring

Lastly, create a keys.json file from keys_example.json. Update keys.json to use your own API key / secret / passphrase (ports must be 443 for https)

Real-Time Market Data (optional, but highly recommended)

What would a trading bot be without real-time data? I'm using node and socket.io to serve data to the trading bot. Once you have node.js installed, run the following:

npm install socket.io

npm install socket.io-client

These modules will allow us to connect to the Bitfloor Feed and serve the freshest market data to our application. Once you've installed this, see below to get our trading bot started.

How Do I Use This Thing?

Once you've cloned the repo and updated the keys.json with your relevant information, start redis:

redis-server

If you installed the live market data module above (highly recommended), run the node process in a separate window. The data will be stored in redis and accessed by the ruby client as it's available:

node market_data.js

Finally, you can start the trader:

ruby lib/comstock.rb

You'll be prompted to either use the defaults or choose your own. I tried to make sensible defaults based on the amount of $ and BTC the user has in his/her account, but you can override them at your own risk by entering 'N' at the first prompt. Good luck, and remember that this has only been run using the test API. It is in no way ready for real money trading use (yet).

Contribute

Pull requests are more than welcome, as usual:

1. Fork this repo

2. Create a branch with excellent code (git checkout -b excellence)

3. Commit the new code, push to your forked repo (git push origin excellence)

4. Create a pull request, and I promise I'll look at it