Breakbot is a bot able to take advantage of price discrepancies between several bitcoin exchanges. So far, support has been added for MtGox, Bitstamp, BTC-e and a limited support for Intersango has been added as well.
I’m releasing this code because this is currently not possible (understand: profitable) to perform arbitrage between bitcoins exchanges. The main problem currently (2012-12-14) is that there is no way to automatically move funds (in currency equivalent, like USD) between exchanges (or the cumulative fees of buying/selling/moving money around would then be to high), and that the profit realized in performing arbitrage is currently too low to justify doing this activity manually. There is also no reason to believe it’s going to be so in a foreseeable future.
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Exchange info is fed using the fastest possible way (websockets for MtGox, TCP socket for Intersango, HTTP polling for the other ones that do not support anything better).
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CLI to interact with several bitcoin exchanges
- lwt
- cohttp
- cryptokit-sha512
- ocaml-rpc
- bitstring
- jsonm
- ocaml-websocket
- uuidm
- cmdliner
- zarith
I recommand you install these libraries using OPAM.
Just type make. It will produce two executables, cli.native and
breakbot.native. The CLI is a command-line interface to the
supported bitcoin exchanges, and it allows to interact with your
account in several ways (mainly display balance, place an order,
withdraw bitcoins, display ticker, etc…). breakbot.native is the bot
itself, currently all is he doing is to print out arbitrage
opportunities each time an exchange is updated, that is, printing the
amount of money to be moved from one exchange to another, and the
resulting gain you can expect by doing so. Transaction fees for the
exchanges are hardcoded, and are set to the current (2012-12-14)
highest possible fees of a given exchange. It is thus an upper bound.
Rename breakbot.conf.example into breakbot.conf and replace the
template strings by actual values. The file follows the JSON syntax.
This is not a final product, I abandoned development when I realized that this project cannot be profitable for now. It was a cool project to develop, but as it misses its purpose, there is no much point doing anything more for it for now. Maybe the CLI could be useful for people that frequently interact with bitcoin exchanges, but it would require some polish to be really practical to use (and probably some testing as well :)