Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that Uber and Lyft are only proposing such a policy because they are scared that drivers will be considered employees, and not independent contractors.
It’s probably much cheaper to pay drivers a minimum wage of $21/hour when they are driving a customer (not accounting the idle time, or time to get to the fare), than it is to provide benefits for every single driver.
To me, I don’t see this as an ethical move, but a somewhat disingenuous effort in an attempt to save money in the long-run.
That's really funny. I went to the github repo and saw my words copied and pasted from my blog into the description.
I'm not upset though, I think this is actually pretty cool. Good job for putting this together. I'm happy with people using this if they want to run it locally.
TLDR: Got sick of manually managing a cryptocurrency index, made an algo bot that automatically does it for you
Over the Christmas break I realized I was spending close to 5 hours a month manually rebalancing my portfolio of ~20 cryptocurrencies weighted by market cap.
I got sick of that pretty quickly so I decided to make a bot that uses Binance’s API to automatically handle that. For the memes, it’s called HodlBot.
A few months later, I’m releasing the hosted version of the bot. Now anyone can put their trade-only API keys into HodlBot, and it will automatically trade into the top 20 cryptos. It will also handle monthly rebalancing automatically.
What does the algorithm do?
The algorithm take the top 20 coins and assign each coin a % allocation based on their weighted market capitalization.
Then it caps every coin to be at most 10% of the total portfolio value. Anything above 10% gets redistributed to all the coins below by weighted market capitalization until the entire sum of the portfolio adds up to 100%.
What do I need to get started?
1.Binance Account
2.Binance Trade-only API Keys
3.$200 in cryptocurrencies
How much are Binance transaction fees on rebalancing?
I simulated monthly rebalancing on a 3 year period, and found that the average transaction fees were 0.26%.
This can be higher or lower based on how volatile the market is in the future. The theoretical max is 1.2% (if every coin in the top 20 turned over every month).
How much does it cost?
For the first month it’s $1. Afterwards it’s $10 per month. No % fees.
How can I trust HodlBot with my API keys?
We encrypt the keys on our end. Also we don't require withdrawal permissions, just trade-only.
I still don’t trust HodlBot with my API Keys
In the next month we’re releasing a version of the app that never stores API keys server-side and only executes trades in the browser. After that, we’ll be releasing an electron app so you can store your API keys on your local computer.
How is this different than projects like Crypto20?
Users hold their own assets as opposed to a tokenized guarantee of some underlying assets. Tokenized assets like C20 often times trade above and below the net asset value of the assets they claim to hold. In my opinion, this adds a layer of speculation and complexity on top of the index that makes it marginally worse than holding the assets yourself.
How do I report tax on HodlBot trades?
Export your Binance transactions as a csv. Plug it into a tool like cointracking.info and get a tax-friendly report.
More Info:
I dig into the portfolio construction and share the algorithm in this blog I wrote here:
A few months ago I saw a Hacker News post about the new Coinbase Index Fund. A lot of comments were complaining about shitty Coinbase’s index fund of 4 coins was. So I commented on the post about HodlBot and got 500 sign-ups (thank you guys). That gave me the courage to quit my job and start working on this full-time.
HodlBot is live now. I'm back and happy to answer any questions.
I decided to quit my full-time job in Feb and go 100% start-up.
Two of the largest risks I considered before taking the plunge was career risk, and financial risk.
For financial risk, I’m from Waterloo Canada, which is a relatively low-cost area. I’m doing some part-time contracting to pay off the bills just to break even. I am okay to lose out on the opportunity cost of earning more money at a full-time job. I treat that as an investment in the future cash flows of the company I’m trying to build.
For career risk, I think working on a start-up can actually make you more employable and increases your future earning potential. At a start-up, you work like hell and are constantly learning. If you believe your salary should be an accurate reflection of the market value of your skills, and you work to improve those skills, then your market value should increase accordingly.
Reading Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, gave me a lot of confidence. One of the central ideas from the book is to put yourself into environments where there is an asymmetrical bias for positive payoffs. I.e. you can’t get randomly unlucky and die from entrepreneurship, but you can get randomly lucky and do very good.
For those of you curious, my company is https://www.hodlbot.io After I realized I was spending too much time rebalancing my portfolio, I made a trading bot.
For the MVP, it uses trade-only API keys to diversify your portfolio into the top 20 cryptos by market cap on Binance. It rebalances monthly.
We keep a log of transaction records. We can easily add a feature for users to export this as a CSV. Better yet in the future, I'd love to work with a user who is knowledgeable about this process to build a reporting feature.
One thing I really don't like about Crypto20 is this:
"The liquidation option offers a price floor
protection – this ensures the price never drops below that
of the underlying assets because of market manipulation.
Prices are, however, free to increase as speculative value is
created by the high demand for a low-cost, diversified and
automated cryptocurrency portfolio that can be held as a
single token"
A unit of Crypto20 can be trading at a premium to the actual underlying assets.
I had the same problems with re-balancing my own portfolio and ended up creating a trading bot that automatically diversifies my investment portfolio across the top 20 coins by market cap (10% capped). It is heavily inspired by the crypto20 whitepaper.
For anyone that is interested, you can find the project here: www.hodlbot.io
I'm about 1-2 weeks from the MVP launch. Only the top 20 coins by market cap fund will be available at the start. In the future users will be able to create their own custom weightings.
The bot requires users to have a Binance account and uses their API key (trade only, no withdrawal access), to execute monthly rebalances. Users will always own their own coins.
At this point, I haven't run into any huge issues with min trading amounts given a reasonable initial investment amount (~0.5 ETH). For example, the NEO example you mentioned.... the min trading amount on Binnace is actually 0.01 NEO (~$1.1 USD).
I'll be making the project open source in the future and sharing with you all!
It’s probably much cheaper to pay drivers a minimum wage of $21/hour when they are driving a customer (not accounting the idle time, or time to get to the fare), than it is to provide benefits for every single driver.
To me, I don’t see this as an ethical move, but a somewhat disingenuous effort in an attempt to save money in the long-run.