Topic: The Bromance of FruitsBasket and CryptoSparks - page 2. (Read 919 times)

You can't actually do anything without the API secret, including trade...

I understand where you're coming from, and I have read some of the replies that you have on the associated flag you are talking about. I'm not decided whether to support it or oppose it, I know that CryptoSparks said a lot of things in his thread and mostly, it's pretty transparent on what you can do as a possible user.

1. You could choose to use his service and get possibly scammed (no actual evidence of someone getting scammed)
2. Trust the service and try it for yourself

For number 2, the most worst-case scenario is that you lose all the balance in your own trading account because of a wrong trade. Without enabling the withdraw part in your API Key, the balance can never be acquired. Just a wrong bet on the wrong trend (Betting a lot of money in LONG but it dumped) Losing everything.

The monthly fee is what concerns me too if you have profits, 20% goes to them but if you don't have and you lost a lot, they are not going to give anything back (no responsibility in losses). It's like meh, you lost the trade, it's your account. Better luck next time.

In a way they are saying it's a guarantee that you would earn BTC if you use this service. There is no guarantee in trading, ever. Unless you have the power to sway the market into your favor (thousands and thousands of BTC)

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It's called secret for a reason. Anyway, if it's not intended for that (withdrawal) it cannot be. I just don't like the idea of having someone getting my API Secret too. It's like a security thing.

Nice advertisement....

Really though, there are not many differences between what CryptoSparks claims to be selling, and Gunbot.

Assuming this is not already the case, to get from what CryptoSparks is claiming to offer to Gunbot in terms of a trader being able to customize their settings, someone would need to set fixed values to variables whose values are determined from a second file that can be changed by the trader.

It may also be somewhat of a headache to get the bot to interact with a specific exchange's API, but this would not be a major project.

Creating something that works very similar to how Gunbot works is not terribly difficult, what is difficult is figuring out the best settings to use to maximize profitability. You can backtest specific settings, but correlation does not always mean causation, and to try to rule out correlation but not causation, you can run A/B tests for when the output is not close to the expected output based on the input, but you may not have enough data.

The whole hubbub about the API secret in your post is advertising hogwash. If you create the API so it can only trade, that is all it can do.

Your post is not unlike the type of advertising referenced in the OP.

I try my best to be blunt and to the point. Some people react better than other to this approach. Thanks for not taking it personally, it is refreshing for a change.

Which bot you think is superior aside, reviewing Cryptosparks statements, do you see anything unrealistic or out of the ordinary for this specific business model?

You might want to chime in here as well: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=752

I understand. I thought it would be useful to have another set of perspective when it comes to someone using a trading tool. I will just continue reading and see what will happen in the next few days with regards to this topic. Thanks for your honest opinion.

And I am just stating the fact that he is in direct competition with Gunbot, and some of the people here making accusations against him are affiliated with the project raising questions of conflict of interest and potential ulterior motives for this reputation burn fest. It has nothing to do with which is better. Honestly though I think taking this opportunity to pitch Gunbot is kind of tacky though.

There's no need to do with anything with the competition, I'm just stating facts that are already out there. I was just reading some of the posts and come across this thread and saw that something that mattered to me, it's better to rightly out say that there is a big difference when it comes to functionality and usability of the two. One is claiming to have 480% returns and the other is a tool that could improve a traders strategy and automate it. What would you choose?

 Thanks for the advertisement. I am curious, how many of the people supporting these accusations and this flag are affiliated with Gunbot? It seems to me there could very well be some conflict of interest here in an attempt to stifle competition.

As part of the Gunbot Family, there are a lot of differences with regards to the function of the bot. Generally, what CryptoSpark is offering is that the bot has limitations and "requires" a certain amount of balance to start. With Gunbot it's not like that. A big difference as well is that it's a subscription and you have to pay 20% of the earned profits from your main account while Gunbot is a one-time payment fee and it includes future updates.

Features and functions don't compare to Gunbot, it's lightyears away to be near to the functionality Gunbot. Gunbot is for real traders/users, not "pre-filled" settings.

That's what's great with Gunbot, we don't need the API Secret just the API Key. When sellers ask for your SECRET key, it's already a warning sign, it should stay secret and with Gunbot we don't need that to activate your license.

My concern also is that with the "pre-filled" settings. What if they decided to trade against the trend or something that would lead to your balance liquidation? I don't think I would be interested in testing this kind of bot.

If some of you guys are interested to try Gunbot, let me know, there are ongoing promos.

Sure someone with API keys can do all sorts of things, but I don’t believe there is evidence to suggest the bot is doing any of these things. More importantly, CryptoSparks appears to have a target market of those using a few thousand dollars to trade with, and even the altcoin markets on bitmex are liquid enough so that these amounts are not going to move the market very much.

More importantly, I think CryptoSparks probably stands to profit more from the long term trading profits off of his customers verses having advance knowledge of a few percentage points move caused by his bot.

Regarding your "transaction accelerator" comment, I have seen these threads and thought about approaching one or more mining pools with a proposal to 'pre-pay' for block space well in advance, with the hopes of setting up a platform where I would resell block space to people whose transactions are 'stuck' at a premium rate, and a profit.

Edit/spelling 

I agree... but this is similar to when the whole "bitcoin accelerator" spam took off where they are basically hoping that the users using the method (or believing that they're using the method) are profiting.

The difference here is that with an API key a malicious entity can do much, much, more than a 'bitcoin accelerator'. They can enact trades to dump their coins and manipulate the market by wash-trading to inflate volume, creating buy/sell walls, chunking off buy/sell orders, etc.

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If the bot is transparent and OS then CryptoSparks will only get a temporary customer. If it is not then you are relying on the trustworthiness and reliability of CryptoSparks.

There are many people who create trading bots for their employer. Hedge funds and HFT firms need bots to trade, and I would assume their principals are not the only ones creating their trading bots (the HFT firms, and hedge funds hire people to create their bots).

He is selling his bot for 20% of the profits. If he can get people to cumulatively use a 'bankroll' 501% of what he can afford to risk in a bankroll, he will have higher profits than if he was using his own money.

I also am not sure that he is claiming it is 'guaranteed' his bot will produce positive returns. In a heavily regulated world, he would give a disclaimer that previous performance does not guarantee future results, but the crypto economy is still the wild west with virtually no regulation.

I am not sure I agree with this conclusion. He may argue that buying during a sharp, sudden decline may slow or reverse the decline and create bounces off lows we often see in trading action. See bitcoin going from ~7800 to ~8400 in well under an hour today. If he did make this argument, I am not sure I would agree with his logic without first studying the specifics.


Do you have a link to this? If this is true, and there are no extenuating circumstances, my opinion on him would change.

This should be transparent to anyone considering using his services. You may have a good reason to think this is a raw deal for any possible investor, but any possible investor is free to negotiate terms acceptable to him or her.  

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I am not vouching for CryptoSparks, and he may turn out to be a scammer. My position is that him offering his bot services does not automatically make him a scammer.

So now some ones innocence or guilt is determined by how many people defend them? This is the popularity contest I was speaking of previously in addition to the burden of being judged guilty until proven innocent. Not only do people have to prove themselves innocent to the mob, but if they don't grovel sufficiently it doesn't matter how much they prove  their innocence. Plenty of people have no one defend them even when they did nothing wrong simply based on the fact that they don't want to be the next target of the mob for daring to contradict them, exactly like is being done to FruitBasket.

Aside from FruitBasket there is really no one defending CryptoSharks on the services he is offering so I wouldn't give too much weight on him since he is only one person which can't be proven reliable. It's obvious that only one person is saving his ass that it can only mean they are either working together or FruitBasket is paid to save him, I don't see how only one person is giving him a good feedback when he claims that he has a good trading both that provides "guaranteed returns" to its users.

Simple.

If you profit, he'll ask for a share.
If you don't, he didn't risk anything.

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It's basically equivalent to having 100% lossback on a gambling site.

For example he can buy some horrible low volume shitcoin and then sell it to his customers, i.e. buy it from himself at an inflated price using customer funds.

I never said the flag is wrong at it place, I think you miss read it. I just said I don't support it as I don't see any solid evidence about him scamming someone's money.

And yaa, as @tmpf said earlier, until proven everything is just guessing. I can trust his judgement blindly lol.

Of course you're right.  Stooping to the level of mudslinging by CryptoSparks is beneath me and I should do better to avoid it.



He did ask for a 5 bitcoin loan offering nothing of value as collateral.  I'd call that fairly high risk.



There's nothing wrong with that strategy, other than the fact that he was promising impossible returns.  And I will take issue with your claim that he responded strongly to his detractors; all he's done is respond with insults and attacks.  Nobody really paid any attention to him until he offered to pay for promoting his service and requesting a $50k loan.  He might have actually made something of his service if he didn't start lying and insulting those who asked legitimate questions.  His responses also seem to contain a lack of knowledge of how bitcoin works, making it clear to me that he's no programmer.  He is an altcoin spammer who some how came across a trading bot that I doubt he developed, and threw in some buzz words to make it sound legit.

If he really does have a quantitative trading algorithm why would he share it with the two million members of bitcointalk?  That would effectively defeat the purpose of having such a tool.  The more people who employ a trading strategy the less profitable that strategy becomes.  Institutional trading giants pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary to their quant programmers.  Their code is a top-secret tool, not something they show off or boast about.  The algorithms they use are constantly in flux, what worked yesterday is certain to not work today.

You can show me code of his bot, and I wouldn't be able tell you if it's real or not, because I'm not a coder.  But I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, either.

He wants to participate in the upside of his investors without disclosing the full range of risks involved in his proposition, that typically counts as the equivalent of fraud in the world of hedge funds & asset management.

He will not profit when his trading system incurs losses, he will have simply offloaded the losses onto his naive investors who trusted his 100% false marketing propaganda like "ROI 490%" and similar (what RoI , it was a hypothetical backtest, which is one of the first standard basic steps in creating any trading strategy, nothing was invested, just to give you one example)...

I've been watching the development of trading bots/quants for a long time and seen them come and go with varying results, not just in crypto.
CryptoSparks has had to field some pretty dumb assertions and has reacted strongly, I don't blame him for that.
Obviously we're all on Scam Alert on a daily basis, usually triggered by high ROI's, and I'm making no judgement on CS and his scheme at the moment.
The central question is "How will he scam you?"
If you invest your money directly into your own Bitmex account and IF the API key is set up so that no third party has direct access to those deposited funds, where is the scam?
You may well lose your money if/when the trading system incurs trading losses, but how will CS profit from that if his only income comes from sharing in your profit?
Until that can be answered, everything else is just peripheral noise.