Few questions..
So, the price is 99/year or what? Can't see it's recurring payment on Paypal but you've talk about subscriptions... hate bot subscriptions to be honest
What is the timestamp of introducing altcoins from btc-e?
Thanks
Hi
,
The new pricing schedule will go out next week, it's currently being finalized so I can't give you definitive information here yet. Please bear with me on this, we will update everyone on that soon.
Please keep in mind that anyone who signs up between now and the full V2 release will receive a FREE full one year subscription to V2 as an early adopter.We have several updates planned during the life cycle of V2. The next one in line is the ability to backtest your trading strategy against historical data. We are making considerable efforts to include altcoins after that. Altcoins will be a part of the trading model no later than V3 however. We have developed B-Bot quickly and it is our aim to include as much functionality as fast as we can while maintaing the highest possible standards of quality.
I have to agree that software subscriptions suck. This may be a dealbreaker for some.
The thing I find most disturbing is that with V2 you have introduced additional points of failure (V1 had only #1 below):
1. if the MtGox API goes down, the bot is unable to trade. Understandable. This was the V1 behavior. Common problem for any bot dependent on API information.
2. you said earlier that the V2 bot gets its information through your server instead of Gox; so if your server goes down (even if Gox is working fine), the bot doesn't trade. This failure mode wasn't present in V1. Plus you are asking customers to trust that your server doesn't get hacked and starts sending bogus or delayed data or otherwise interfering with trades. Again, this is a problem not present in V1.
3. if you decide to shut down your business, your subscribers seem to be out of luck because the V2 bot would no longer be able to get its trading data. The V1 bot could continue to be used by its owners even if you or your business disappeared. V2, being subscription based, would become useless.
So I am having trouble seeing the value proposition offered by the V2 subscription service. Seems to be a step backwards for customers, unless I have misinterpreted something. If I have, then I apologize.
Epoch,
You make some valuable points, but there is a misunderstanding about why we have gone ahead and done what we are doing.
You state that the only point of failure for V1 was the Gox API going down and that this was understandable. I appreciate your point of view on this, and it is a very mature point of view given the condition and low functionality of the Gox API. The problem here is that we spend about 90% of our customer support time dealing with customers who have Gox API issues. To the vast majority of our active user base, the "Dropped API" warning is a real deal breaker. I think it is the only consistent point of complaint within our entire user base so we had to do something about it. Back end server integration was thus a necessity to keep our user base at large satisfied.
It is important to understand that the exchange APIs aren't completely down but only flaky most of the time. The old bot had to do more than 140 requests on startup or when changing the trade interval which are very unlikely to succeed under such conditions. The new bot only has to do one request to our backend which polls for the prices continuously so it doesn't have to process the backlog for the historical data. Chrome also has a DDOS protection built in which throttles requests to failing websites (like when the API is having issues). The server backend doesn't have that limitation so it will be able to recover more quickly.
Bottom line, with V1, the bot experienced dropped API issues almost daily which it struggled to recover from (which was not the fault of our software but rather Mt.Gox low quality API) and which our user base hated; I have been running V2 on my system for two weeks and have not experienced a single issue with the bot.
There is another technical reason for the need of a server back end. Much of the functionality we have included and that we plan on building into V2 is very, very difficulty to implement, if not impossible, without a back end structure. A point in fact here would be the ability to back test your trading strategy against historical data. It's currently hard to impossible to get the historical trade data from btc-e. The btc-e API is very limited and has some bugs which currently wouldn't allow to implement the functionality we have in our bot or that we plan to develop in the future.
We have big plans for the bot in the future, back testing, altcoins, multi-strategy integration, apps; all these require a back end to function.
We are not that happy either with the new subscription model as it is clear some customers will be turned off by it, but we have built a very robust and scalable back end to allow the bot to grow and set itself apart, this is an expensive month to month proposition and if we didn't charge a subscription, we likely could not suport the infrastructure needed to make the bot better.
Finally, if we ever were to shut down business, we would make every effort to keep bot functionality operational for our customers. I think we have shown our good faith over the last couple of months as we have consistently kept our word and developed the new features we have promised. This is a very unlikely scenario as we run a very popular platform, but if we ever had to shut down, all efforts would be made to keep functionality for our user base. I'm not sure what this would look like, but we would do as much as technically possible.
Please let me know if you have any other questions, I am here to help
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Pablo.
$200 to $300???
