BOTs and a BTC Dip

Hey all – welcome back, lots to update. I’ve been busy with general bot maintenance this past week.  Restarting lower.

It’s funny because as an active-HODLer investor I see the market differently.  Where other people are price sensitive and worried when BTC goes down (in this case near to $38k) – I can rest assured that the momentary depreciation seen in my portfolio is temporary: I know I would NEVER sell my BTC until it hits my take profit prices.  So, while others see red, I see green.

As others are worried that the sky is falling, I’m peacefully resetting bots lower and lower.  I sometimes need to set up a quoteless bot more than a dozen times as the price goes down gradually over a few days farther into a potentially new diagonal upwards channel.  But once it’s on the bottom of the trading range, not only is that usually the best buy-in opportunity, but it provides for the best opportunity for a long running bot.  The lower you are able to start a quoteless bot the chances are greater that it will run far longer.  And longer bots mean less maintenance / restarting 😀

When it comes to TA (Technical Analysis), it’s sometimes important to wait for a pair to double bottom and print a higher low.  The extra confirmation of a reversal is usually indicative that the asset is turning around in its trading range.  But to me, I lose the bottom part of the range if I start a quoteless bot above the lowest low.  I’ve noticed that traditionally the bottom part of any trading range tends to offer the most volume.  This (I believe) is because many people want to “buy the bottom”, but no one really knows the top – so “selling the top” orders get spread widely.  Though if that doesn’t make sense it doesn’t matter if you are proactive about restarting those BOTS that don’t yet deliver you’ll be doing the needed for your portfolio.

In general, BTC price drives the market and, as BTC bottomed out on it’s trading range around $40k, I started to see some of my bots start sticking.

Cyclical Results

First off I’m not talking about any officially named economic or market cycle – I’m just talking about what I have seen repeat.  It’s really interesting as I’ve seen now four or five cycles of the very same thing.  I feel each of my portfolio’s positions contract and grow like a cement crack throughout the year.  BTC goes up and then BTC goes down.  The rest of the prices tend to follow suit.

This last down leg I closed bots that fell out of the bottom of their range and collected the newly created QUOTE assets that were locked in the BOTS.  This gives me the ability to restart these bots down a bit on the starting grid line which will position me better to make more gains going forward.

Impermanent Loss 

A few folks have connected and asked about impermanent loss and how I handle this.  Personally I see impermanent loss as forced profit taking and so long as the trading price of the bot is above the price I paid for the asset, I’m ok with losing a little of my BASE.  This, to me, is the only risk; losing some of the base.

I did a little experiment and pulled some running bots and as you see this potential loss is hedged.  Meaning that a well structured BOT should preserve the quantity of BASE that the BOT was started with.  The total value of the bot liquidity (including profits) should represent the total amount of BASE quantity used to open the bot at any time.

As you can see above with each of these examples, the total value in QUOTE of any healthy bot should be able to purchase / deliver the starting quantity of BASE.  In other words, you can just choose to sell all to BASE when you close the bot and you will return your investment plus whatever the bot earns.

QI – Movin’ In 

Sooo, off in the pasture one of the assets became ripe enough to pick a little for botting!

As a strategy in Q4 2021 I made inroads into many DEFI networks, the ones I can afford the gas on. 😉  You can read more here.

One of these core network assets is AVAX and the corresponding network is Avalanche.  Within the Avalanche network I purchased a little QI with AVAX in the Avalanche ecosystem.  So there’s no stable coin cost basis on this bag.  It was purchased in AVAX and eventually I’ll sell it back to AVAX for a profit (hopefully) in AVAX.

QI is an asset belonging to the BENQI service.  It was honestly just a really low coin price to me.  I didn’t much care what it did.  It was one of many assets of similar price that I purchased back then and immediately staked it.

I bought these back in September / October and of course I overpaid, the story of my life.  But for the better part of 4 months all it’s done is sit in liquidity farming contracts, growing in quantity.  One day, I noticed that QI was listed on Kucoin – time for that guy to graduate to the big leagues.  I formed a plan to get some QI out of their DEFI and into Kucoin.

Thankfully Kucoin accepts the Avalanche C-Chain as I was able to unstake some of my QI and transfer them directly into Kucoin from Metamask.  The transfer took about 5 minutes to complete.

And here’s the first BOT I opened and closed.  NOTE that it took 6 other tries to get this BOT to stick and the returns aren’t all that great.  I think QI is on it’s way down… oh well…

Ironically, if I held QI rather than ran a BOT with it, I’d have lost 3.64 USDT in notional value. By setting a bot up, it offset the depreciation of QI and allowed me to gain 6.28 in new USDT while keeping my QI – well all but 0.0001 QI I kept.

QI to me is a crap shot if it will succeed, but I’ll bot with it to make new crypto as long as I have to, particularly since I’m botting with the newly created QI from staking contracts and my initial investment in QI is still staked earning more QI…

And here we go – on the next QI bot I just restarted today.

EFANI Node!

When Haseeb Awan, the CEO of efani, first told me about his idea to make a node I was extremely excited.  I think the concept is revolutionary; building a secure cell phone network on top of many pieces of inter-connected hardware and national networks worldwide.

First off, what’s a node?

A node is a device, server, or virtual machine that acts as a participant in a network with other similar nodes.  They all work towards a collective shared goal.  So, if you think about it, your cable box is a node on your cable company’s network.  I believe it’s an analogy that works really well and I encourage you to keep it in mind as the cable box is specifically engineered to do only a few things.  It’s certainly a powerful computer, but not a general computer that you can write an article on or browse the internet.

Most blockchain networks have nodes that help the miners and some only have Nodes.  Nodes all serve single purposes and are developed by the network developers and managed remotely in most cases.  Each Nodes purpose can be as unique as what you and your neighbors watch on the same model of a cable box.

Who is Efani?

Efani is a cell phone provider with a 5 million dollar insurance policy against sim hacks.  I have been a customer for about a year and we have a great write up of efani here.  With these nodes, they are taking the concept of a virtualized cell phone company to the next level in offering the ability to self-host a portion of their network.

The idea is to connect many networked devices together to form an alternative cellular network.  This network does not run it’s calls through any one carrier, thus eventually becoming a meshnet of cell service that they can rent out to other carriers in order to backstop their services.

Anyhow, they have posted their waiting list and to those who want to participate, you can go here and put a deposit down.  I’ll write more as progress is achieved.

REFI

Alright, I out-right FOMO’d into REFI… not sure if it was stupid, but I gotta be honest with you…

FOMO is the “Fear Of Missing Out” and it’s what folks do when they first hear about something and buy it no matter the price.  This asset is on the ETH network and I bulldozed into it just before it lost about ⅓ of its value – great investment eh, LOL.  Though to me it’s a lifetime HODL. The only thing that annoyed me with the downturn was that my investment could have bought more REFI if I was patient and timed it correctly.

I bought REFI with some ETH I recently gained in a long-term trade.  Longest 6 months of my life LOL.  Anyway, I took some of that gain and I way over paid and I got eaten alive on fees.  REFI is to be a lifetime hold and I now have some, but not too much, but some assets just seem foolish to sell anytime soon. This seems to be one of them.

First off, my REFI bag has apparently depreciated by half and knowing what I paid on gas has really got me looking like a fool.  Who knows, maybe I am. But the important part of this was that I used profit to buy and spent far less than 1% of my portfolio balance to purchase these tokens, so I’m within my risk range.

REFI is one of those coins with interesting tokenomics that allows it to deliver a certain quantity of ETH to each and every holder on each and every transaction.  This ETH accumulates until you go to claim – very similar to liquidity mining.

To date REFI has only fallen and I haven’t seen much ETH gain, but it’s only been a few days. This is also a time when the ETH price is depreciating, so I can’t accurately see through the USDT fog.

Mana Baby…

Each market has its own personality.  Certain markets move up quickly and down in jerky motions while others have gradual slow moving motions.  The more volatility, the better for bots, but it’s also a volume game.  If the volatility is high and volume is low far fewer transactions will happen within the bot and that will result in less profits.  The best of both worlds is high volatility and high volume!

One thing I have learned over these past few years: go with the masses.  What I mean by that is if lots of people need to buy an asset to do something popular, that’s a market I want to be botting in.  So I find that these payment networks, gaming coins and metabase network assets are really good to bot with when the projects are going through updates, changes, and such.  There’s a potentially unlimited amount of transactions that one can be involved with.  So long as the project survives, it’s far easier to generate more quote in quoteless bots when the need grows based on the users of say a video game…

MANA is one of these metaverse things and, although I personally have no time to invest into feeling my way through decentraland, I’m sure many millions of other folks will make the time.  They will ALL need the MANA tokens to play and buy things.  I see it similar to a paywall because behind the purchase and subsequent spending of these MANA tokens lies a game / alternative 3D world that could potentially make folks “real money”.

The allure of the metaverse is real and MANA is not the only crypto asset involved. Why I chose MANA to get into is because I’m seeing LOTS of usage and large companies like Walmart have also gotten involved in their actual Decentraland project.  Even Barbados is looking to open a virtual embassy in Decentraland and there are/will be conferences and concerts to be held inside this digital world.

I’m not saying I buy into any of the above. In fact, I don’t need to – all I need to do is see it’s popular and reasonably safe to build a base in as the token MANA has utility and should last through a bear market.  So, I have started to build that base. I bought some, bought a little more, and even a little more than that – I have a start of a bag.

I now need it to appreciate 4x so my bots can start meaning anything or purchase more MANA to increase the order volume and make the percentage gain mean more new QUOTE.  I have low fishing prices set to purchase more but in the meantime I started a pionex bot.  I had to set the grid range at 4.7% because of the low quantity I have.  A far greater move needs to occur for a round trip trade to generate new crypto for me.  Those trades should net more of a percentage gain though.  But since I started with less BASE, the quantity of assets used in each trade is low, so all told I won’t make much on this bot for quite some time.  This means I will have locked in my price so potentially on the next MANA media blitz the MANA/USDT pair can step up a rung or two on the ladder of price.

Presearch Node and Botting with Gains

PRE is an awesome asset, just like presearch is an awesome search engine!  Not only is my bot doing well, but my node is still running without issue!  I’m generating more and more PRE with each passing day.

Allow me to explain. Presearch is a search engine allowing users to search on the internet without using a centralized search engine, thus allowing for better privacy to be maintained.

Google and Yahoo have massive server farms that fill search requests of all their users.  This allows a centralized search engine to track everything and muck with the actual results.  Presearch democratizes this function and allows folks to run nodes that facilitate the search results for each user.  This lowers the overall carbon footprint and allows Presearch to focus on software development and not need to invest time and money into massive datacenters.

A year ago I set up a Presearch node.  My PRE node runs some of the user searches and returns the results privately to the users search session.  This is done within a coded docker container running non-stop on a server in my basement.

Every search my node delivers successfully anonymously helps a person who made the search on their computer and in exchange I will receive a small portion of a PRE token.

When I started the node I ran several of them and gained many more PRE tokens each as there were less folks running nodes.  Now I only run one node and gain only one or so PRE per day, but I find it helpful to participate in the community by doing so.

Brave Browser

I can’t talk about Presearch without talking about the Brave browser.  Brave completes the security and privacy stack.  Both tools are a must for everyone regardless of their relationship with crypto.

Brave automatically blocks most malicious scripts and trackers as well as speeds up general browsing by killing unneeded aspects of corporate websites.  Trackers from social media, overreaching website analytics calls, and various other cross-site collection scripts are all quelled immediately and automatically.  Brave developers bring forward any permission requests per website and I can rest assured my information isn’t being fed into the great data mining companies of the 21st century.

The default is to be protected but sometimes cookies aren’t bad and Brave knows this.  This is why their developers went through pains to pull apart websites and focus their removal only on the malicious things. This means your shopping cart stays in place as good cookies are allowed by default.

Brave has a built-in privacy tab and embedded TOR VPN that can be turned on anytime with a few clicks, plus Brave was built with the same open source project that Google Chrome was built on, Chromium.  This means that most chrome extensions also work in Brave.

Brave now has built-in crypto wallet functionality (though I haven’t tested it yet).  I don’t think I want to give any one program this much information, though if there were a program I trust, it would be Brave.  I know Metamask has my wallet information but to me it’s encrypted within a Brave extension, so it’s removed two times from the main program.

Potential Helium Node 

Another node I have been procrastinating is Helium.  Helium nodes work just like Efani nodes, but so far I think that network is mainly used for IOT devices.  They facilitate cell to web data calls and in exchange, award the administrator with HNT tokens.

Perhaps I’ll get to that on my next push deeper into crypto.