Hi BTC ,
    The situation with Mt. Gox has come to a head and we take this very seriously. Although this is not a software design issue but rather a Mt. Gox issue. A lot of times it has also turned out to be an interfering app and not necessarily the Gox API.

We will be releasing Beta versions of V2 late next week. We have rewritten the bots code in it's entirety and we have also implemented a significant server side component, these and other features will seriously mitigate any issues with Mt. Gox as well as implement BTC-E trading for anyone who wants to deal with another exchange.

The way V2 works is that the bot code you are running on your browser, gets it's information from our server instead of the Gox API directly. The server will maintain a clean connection to the bot at all times and when the API drops the server will periodically try to reestablish connection and when it does it will feed the latest data to your bot to execute it's trading. This will all be entirely transparent to the user and should eliminate the dropped connection warnings and the need to reset the bot in it's entirety.

I want to make clear that the code we will be releasing next week will not be the final code or look of the V2 release, but it will be a significant improvement over what we have now.

Anyone who would like access to the Beta version, please drop me an email to pablo@btcbots.com. We would like to try to limit this Beta to people who are having issues with trading since this is not the final version of the V2 release.

After V2 is officially released, we will be developing and releasing exciting and free upgrades before V3; including the ability to back test your strategy based on historical settings .

If anyone has any questions, please contact me at pablo@btcbots.com and I will take care of you promptly.

Again, I would like to apologize for this inconvenience. It is not an issue of our making, but we will take responsibility for it and we will make it work for our customers.

Pablo .

Friends,
  I am happy to report that we have solved the compatibility issue with Chrome V28 and we will be emailing a patch to everyone on the customer list by this afternoon EST .

If anyone does not receive it by tonight, please email me at pablo@btcbots.com and I will take care of you immediately.

Just to let everyone know we are on track to release V2 Beta late next week, anyone who wants to give it a go in the beta version, please drop me an email; this will be a significant upgrade to V1.

.

Pablo.

Friends,

The release of the V2 Bot Beta is scheduled for late next week and we are very excited! We are asking for volunteers who would like to help us test drive the bot to please contact us, we will add you to the list and deliver you a Beta copy for testing as soon as it comes out.

V2 introduces major changes, first of all, we have rewritten the entire code from scratch, nothing remains of the old code. We have made it cleaner, faster, more stable, we have made it better.

We have added support for BTC-E and we have built our own server back end to build new features and make your client side bot lightening quick (the difference in loading will be obvious).

In the current version the bot will get it's information from our server instead of the Gox Api. The server will help process orders by advising the client when the API is available for trading and helping your bot trade with the latest data as soon as the Gox API is up. This will all be transparent to the user and should all but eliminate the dreaded "Dropped API; Check the Options Page" message. As far as we know, we are the first in the Bitcoin community to develop a bot with these features.

We will be adding the ability to back test your strategy with historical data soon after we launch V2, as well as other features. We are already working on V3 .

We look to the future with a bright, positive attitude, and we hope to make your experience as fun, simple, and profitable as possible. We are here to help, so whatever you may need or want, please just let us know, we will strive to make it so.

Pablo
Pablo@btcbots.com

Thank you! We will definitely look into other exchanges for V3.

Best,

   Pablo.

Hi Keil ,
   I'm happy to answer your questions, most of the fun for me comes from interacting with customers and potential customers .

Let me take your questions one at a time:

1. Unfortunately I can't give you this specific information. It's not that I don't want to personally, but company policy keeps me from revealing this kind of data. I can tell you we have a healthy user base.

2. Will be answered in question 4.

3. We have kept EMA values at 10/21 as recommended in Gomboo's Journal for our testing models and personal trading and had success with these. I can't speak to alternative models because we have not personally tested them, but customers have contacted me about modifying these and I know there have been positive results with those changes.

4. After we release the official version of V2 (The V2 Beta goes live towards the end of next week) we will be adding the ability to test your potential settings against historical data and get results. To answer question 2, we really can't test this as there is not one set of "right" or "necessary" settings. Almost everyone is using different settings so to fully answer your question we would have to know everyones settings and average them out; which at the moment is not feasible. I can tell you that we have heard from a lot of customers with positive experiences, many have posted about them publicly (please see the "Testimonials" section on the website). I think that the best proof of this is that we are still around and we are gaining popularity, otherwise we couldn't afford to keep developing B-Bot .

To address the question of price: Price reflects our development costs. We do this as a full time business, not as a hobby and our development team is professional and of the highest caliber. We pride ourselves on first class customer service through email, chat and voice, free of cost, as well as quick and free patches to any software issues that may arise. We believe the support we provide plus the constant release of added features and new versions makes our sales price more than fair . Personally, I wish we could sell for less and involve more clients, but our overhead and development costs do not allow us to do this.

I do hope you decide to jump on board though. I think your return analysis is not accurate given the volatility of the market, but you must make your own analysis of risk and reward. I can tell you unequivocally that we are loyal to our customers and that all early adopters (people who purchase before the official release of V2) will get the best deal available.

Please let me know if you have any other questions .

Pablo.

****************
Announcement
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Friends,
   
We have been hinting for a while now that early adopters will get a special deal, here it is :

There will be a service restructuring after the launch of V2 that will affect prices and how we take care of billing; V2 will become a subscription product, this is out of necessity as we have a growing user base and with the addition of new features and our dedicated server back end (to be launched with V2) our monthly overhead has grown considerably.

As promised, none of these changes will affect anyone who subscribes or has subscribed before the launch of the V2 Beta who will all receive a free upgrade and a full year's subscription to V2, free of charge. Now is the time to buy, anyone who purchases before the launch of the V2 Beta will receive this same deal, a free one year subscription and a free upgrade to V2.

We have had a series of coupons on the thread valid for purchase at the store pretty much from launch. These were intended to encourage and reward early adopters and will be disabled by next Friday with the launch of the V2 Beta; so now is your last chance to take advantage of them.

We promised early adopters (people who purchased before the launch of the V2 Beta) would get the best deal possible. We are keeping our word. You can still get in on this deal.

We hope to make this transition smooth and profitable for all concerned and rest assured that the features we will be adding with V2 through V3 will make your experience more than worthwhile .

If anyone has any questions, please drop me an email .

Pablo.
Pablo@btcbots.com

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.


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 .

Pablo.