[i-use-nixos-btw]

I’m not sure what I’m finding harder to believe here. That one could lose more than 99.99% due to a timing fat finger (even on a quiet market - 11m over 30 minutes eating through the order book?), or that an arb bot that you forgot about managed to run for that long on a server without hitting endpoint changes, API changes, re-auth requests, etc.

[ifdefdebug]

Yeah this is a made-up story so obvious for anyone who spent any time whatsoever programming against those exchanges... Please don't upvote just to keep your replies on the top...

[withinboredom]

I highly doubt we are/were on the same exchanges. The algorithm only worked on volatile coins with low-mid market volume. It wouldn't work on high market volume or stable coins.

[i-use-nixos-btw]

In order to eat through over 99.99% of the price, this isn’t a low-mid market volume. It’s non-existent market volume.

I’ve worked on everything from the ultra liquid equity futures markets down to the shittiest of shitcoins imaginable and these numbers just don’t make sense at all. There’s a paradox: your valuation implies an active market and your execution implies a dead market.

When shitcoin markets die, they die at small fractions of a cent, and there are lingering sell orders in from people who got caught in the pump’n’dump and live under the false hope that their superconductorcoin will be worth something later on, which then removes the possibility of any remaining large-price buy orders. So for your valuation to be that high, it can’t have been a dead market.

But for your execution to be that low, it has to have been one.

I can’t truly believe that someone who is smart enough to build a system that accidentally stays functioning in the background for that long (I’ve never seen such a thing) is silly enough to calculate valuations so naively.

[withinboredom]

Not dead markets, but not very active ones by the time the death of this project occurred. I'd have to review the code to see how it calculated a 'cash out' value, exactly, but IIRC, it basically just took the highest bid to convert to bitcoin/eth or whatever and summed up everything. It was entirely naive af, for sure. Probably because I assumed that my future self wouldn't essentially sell off everything in 30 minutes.

Also, I still know of at least two projects that I wrote, running since 2012 with very little maintenance ... knowing how to write resilient software and being clairvoyant aren't mutually exclusive.

[ifdefdebug]

I call BS

[withinboredom]

On what?