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Blackbird: Bitcoin arbitrage

(github.com)
298 points vega_empire | 1 comments | 23 Dec 17 12:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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overcast ◴[23 Dec 17 15:31 UTC] No.15994492[source]▶
I will tell you that any working piece of code that allows someone to make money, is not public. Use this if you want to inevitably lose money.
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kristiandupont ◴[23 Dec 17 15:48 UTC] No.15994570[source]▶
That seems like a silly statement to me. Obviously, huge amounts of code that "allows someone to make money" is available publicly, for some definition of "making money" or other. I am guessing your statement is specifically directed towards code that is meant for trading markets and referring to the efficient market hypothesis. That may or may not be true but I think it would suit you to at least back up such a claim, especially when it comes to crypto currencies which are obviously a very immature asset class.
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valuearb ◴[23 Dec 17 18:52 UTC] No.15995602[source]▶
Yea he means trading systems. There are thousands of people selling “trading systems” for the stock market, by definition none of them work.

An example is why Warren Buffett got special permission from SEC to withhold reporting his trades for longer periods then normal. If you know that WEB bought a stock today, then you know he’s done the research and it’s a clearly profitable trade to buy and hold it for the long run. If WEB had to report trades daily, he’d be out of business, he’d never be able to buy more than a tiny amount of a stock in a single day, because the next day its price would have increased at least 20%.

Selling any kind of successful trading system is to invite others into your trades and make them less profitable for you. Selling the system only makes sense if the system is unprofitable or it's so thinly profitable that selling it to suckers is more profitable.

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1. kristiandupont ◴[23 Dec 17 20:14 UTC] No.15996039[source]▶
I was already being pedantic before so I will try to keep it at a minimum but you say "by definition" and then you go on to talk about the worlds most famous investor as an example of why the market adjusts. I get the point, when something has value the word will spread and the advantage will disappear. But that applies to a perfect system only. When Warren Buffet does something, people hear about it. But can we agree that it's (at least, theoretically) possible for some dude to discover something and make a bot that exploits it for some small value and a limited amount of time before that effect will kick in?

Also, the implied premise here seems to be that nobody in their right mind would give up on something that made them money, hence it has to be a scam. I'd say that open source in general is a perfect example of people giving their work away for free for whatever reason. Maybe they would rather have fame (i.e. github stars), or maybe they want a developer career and see this as a way to get feedback on code they wrote. Or maybe they simply feel that the potential value they could gain from this wasn't high enough to make it interesting so they decided to set it free.