I personally love the MarginBot, I set it up super easily using Elastic Beanstalk, and it works great so far. We may disagree on what rates people will choose as their minimum. I set mine very close to 0, because something is better than nothing, and I would rather have my funds in use 99% of the time, because whatever you get today, can also be offered tomorrow. In other words, waiting on a better rate in the future lessens the effect of compounding. Anyway, I really think it is a good thing, and I, personally, hope that more people use it. I was wondering, do you plan on offering BTC management as well? Given that the rates have "swapped" places (no pun intended), some people might find it very useful to be able to do the same for the BTC side of things.
I was wondering if we here at bitfinex could help in any way. We love when people in the community build tools that help everyone, and try to support and encourage that, BFXData is an example. I mean, on the one hand, if everyone currently using the FRR simply chose to switch to the bot, it would end this whole pointless debate. I don't know why it would act strangely though, if the FRR were to go away...it should just keep placing orders spread across the range of the bottom and top. Anway, I just wanted to say thank you, I appreciate the work you put into the MarginBot, and if we can help with your project, lets discuss it.
Actually, I don't think we disagree as to what rates people would set. I imagine most people would set it very low.
What people set it at isn't as important as the fact people
CAN set it for preventing buildup of walls ( unless everyone somehow decides to choose the same setting ). One thing I could easily add to the bot is a simple tool-tip that converts your daily rate to a compounding annual rate, and maybe even an estimate of worst case actual returns, so people could get a quick glimpse of how much they'll actually be making. I think for most people its difficult to work out in their head how much 0.02% /day actually works out to. ( Though doing this will probably make people realize how much more than they think this really is, encouraging them to accept even lower numbers... hmm... maybe thats a bad idea
)
As for BTC and LTC, I used to actually have it working in the bot before I released it to the public, so it would be pretty easy to build back in. At the time I was putting the interface on the bot though, BTC and LTC rates were so low, and had been for so long, I didn't even feel like it was worth the extra hour of work to add interface lines for them. In a future version, I may revisit this.
I'm hoping to work on the bot some over the weekend, but I'm currently traveling, and competing in a Seven Day Rougelike competition (
http://7drl.org/ ), so I barely have enough time to even post this as is. Once I start working on it again, I may well want to talk further about working more closely with Bitfinex to get MarginBot as good as it can be. I'll also definitely want to be on the list to get test access to the new API when its available.