Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Testing Butterbot, an Automated Bitcoin Trading Bot (day 1)

1, Feb 2014

btce-btc-usd-day-chart

Butterbot is one of the few available automated trading bots for Bitcoin (BTC) trading based on EMA (Exponential Moving Average) logic that professional currency traders use. It is in the form of a Google Chrome browser extension and the trading is done in the cloud, so you will need to have the Chrome browser installed in order to be able to use this automated trading bot.

The Butterbot is a commercial product that works in the cloud, so as soon as you purchase the product you will also need to pay a small monthly subscription fee. This however is a good option, because you don’t have to have a computer on all the time with the bot installed on it, it will work automatically as soon as you activate it and set the trading parameters and you only need a computer to be able to monitor what the actually bot is doing or to change the trading settings.

The best thing about the automated exchange trading of BTC/USD that Butterbot does is that it supports three of the major BTC exchanges – MtGox, BTC-e and Bitstamp and the bot can operate on all three exchanges with independent settings or only on one or two of them, it is up to you. Furthermore there is a7 day free trial that you can activate in order to test the automated trading bot, before you decide if you should pay for it and start using it on the long run. And while these 7 days to try it out are a great feature, this bot may not give very good idea if it will be profitable on the long run as it is designed to be used for longer periods of time and the results you get may not only vary based on your trading settings, but also on the current market situation and the trading on the exchanges.

For the moment the Butterbot supports only BTC trading, but the author of the trading bot is apparently also working on Litecoin (LTC) support in an upcoming update with the feature already available in beta. This is definitely a good thing, because it can increase your profitability chances by operating on more trading pairs than just the standard BTC/USD ones that are currently supported.

butterbot-btc-trading-bot

We’ve decided to give the Butterbot a try for the 7 day test period before deciding if we should start using it on the long run and we are going to share our results from the product during or trial period. We have started with a small sum of about 25 USD in the BTC-e exchange, it is good to start the test with a small amount on a single exchange to get a feel of the interface of the product and to minimize the potential loss if you mess up or you are not happy with the results you get from the bot at the end of the trial period.

What we’ve liked a lot about the Butterbot is the powerful and very easy to use backtesting engine that lets you try and experiment with different trading strategies until you find your optimal settings. And the testing is being done against actual trading data that has been collected from the Bitcoin exchanges, so it is not some inaccurate mathematical simulation, but testing against real trading data. We even received a recommended startup settings to try on the different exchanges by the authors of the bot, you can find these settings below…

The recommend starter settings for Mt. Gox:

– Short EMA: 10
– Long EMA: 21
– Buy 1: 0
– Buy 2: 0.25
– Sell 1: 0
– Sell 2: 0.25
– 2 hour time window

The recommend starter settings for Bitstamp and BTC-e:

– Short EMA: 20
– Long EMA: 42
– Buy 1: 0
– Buy 2: 0.15
– Sell 1: 0
– Sell 2: 0.1
– 30 minute time window.

We started with the recommended settings for BTC-e and already a day has passed with the bot active on the BTC-E exchange with a starting capital of 25 USD to operate with. So far the bot has executed just a single trade – it bought 0.03 BTC, so at the moment our balance is as follows: Balance = 0.030 BTC + 1.48 USD. We also noticed that the bot has not acted on some possible opportunities, so while the recommended settings may be well balanced for start they will need some tweaking for better profitability. For now however in just day it is hard to give any positive or negative feedback about the bot, so stay tuned for more of our testing results with the Butterbot automated Bitcoin trading bot in the next few days as we continue to test how will it perform.

– If you want to learn more about the Butterbot and to give it a free try run…

Protoshare Mining Test at 1GH PTS Mining Pool

31, Jan 2014

1gh-pts-mining-profitability

After trying out PTS mining at ypool we have also decided to try out another Protoshares mining pool with CPU mining to see if we are going to get better results with the Round-Based Pay Per Share (RBPPS) payment system and the lower 3.5% fee that the 1GH PTS mining pool has. We’ve been testing the pool with GPU miners lately, however for the last 24 hours we tested only with CPU miners to see what profit we are going to get.

The two CPUs we’ve used for mining are:
– Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core 3.3 GHz
– AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Six Core 3.3 GHz

The 1GH pool we used for PTS mining has:
– 3.5% fee

The total earnings for 24 hour period (confirmed + unconfirmed):
– 0.1169 PTS

The value of the Protoshares mined for 24 hours is as follows:
– 0.00173806 BTC
– ~$1.38 USD

The profit we got from the 1GH PTS mining pool was a bit higher than the one we’ve managed to get for 24 hours at ypool, however the difference in USD is also affected by the BTC/USD and PTS/BTC exchange rates. What is clear however is the fact that there is not much point in mining Protoshares (PTS) with CPU at the moment, if you plan on mining Protoshares then you need to think about going for GPU mining. The 1GH Protoshares mining pool has a very good performing GPU miner that works on both AMD graphics and Nvidia graphics very well. Furthermore the 1GH pool has another advantage over ypool and that s the fact that this pool sends automatically your earnings as long as they are over 0.1 PTS confirmed and in ypool the minimum is 1 PTS.

How to Overclock Your Bitmain AntMiner S1 to 200 GH/s

27, Jan 2014

bitmain-antminer-s1-200-ghs-overclock

The Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC miners are shipped at 180 GH/s default hashrate and they do support easy overclocking to about 200GH/s or a little over by increasing the operating frequency of the chips that is set at 350 MHz by default. Increasing the frequency to 400 MHs seems to be the most common solution to overclock your AntMiner S1 in order to get about 200GH/s hashrate, however that leads to an increase in the number of HW errors that you are getting. Now, it is completely normal to get some HW errors for an ASIC, especially overclocked one, but the percentage value should be fairly low if everything is normal.

When you login to the Bitmain AntMiner S1 web interface and open the Miner Status page you have a field called HW, this field may show a high value, but in order to calculate the actual percent of the HW errors you need to use a special formula and not directly compare the number in the Accepted and HW fields as they may show similar numbers getting you to think that you are getting way too many errors when that is not the case.


AntMiner S1 HW Error Calculation Formula:

HW / (diffA + diffR + HW) * 100


By using the formula above we can calculate that our miner has:

1937 / 1747537 * 100 = 0.11% HW Error Rate

0.11% is a very acceptable HW Error percentage for a Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC overclocked to provide about 200 GH/s hashrate. That is however the case with our settings using 393 MHz overclock frequency of the chips with an average of 201.55 GH/s hashrate. If overclocking to 400 MHz we are getting a little bit of a GH/s increase, however the HW Error rate also goes from 0.11% to a little more than 1%, so no point pushing the clock of the chips to 400 MHz in our opinion.

In order to overclock your Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC to provide 200 GH/s and low HW Errors rate with our settings you need to follow the steps below:
– Login with SSH to your AntMiner S1 ASIC using the IP and username/password you’ve set it to use.
– Type “cd /etc/config” (without the quotes) in order to get to the folder where the config file is located on the miner.
– Type “vi asic-freq” (without the quotes) to edit the config file, comment the currently set options by placing # in front of them and add the following lines or directly replace the values with the following ones:

option ‘freq_value’ ‘5f05’
option ‘chip_freq’ ‘393.75’
option ‘timeout’ ’36’

– Save the changes you have made and type “reboot” (without the quotes) to restart the miner, so that it can apply the new settings and start mining at 200 GH/s with the overclock settings you’ve set.


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