Cointrol

Cointrol is a Bitcoin trading bot and real-time dashboard for Bitstamp created by @jkbrzt.

Cointrol was created to automate Bitcoin speculation. Besides automated trading based on price change triggers and various trading strategies, it also provides a real-time updated dashboard for your Bitstamp account where you can see all your orders and transactions real-time updated (something Bitstamp lacks). The dashboard for a real-time updated overview can also be used standalone without letting Cointrol make any transactions.

Even though the original idea was to perhaps provide a fully-fledged hosted service, the system remained quite basic as it has only been used by its creator for a period of time in the winter of '13/'14 (when BTC price fluctuations were pretty insane). Some of the obvious limitations—all of which could easily be addressed—are:

• Only basic trading strategies are implemented
• Single user/Bitstamp account is supported
• Only one active trading session at a time
• The whole account value is used when trading
• Django admin is used for auth and trading strategy/session manipulations

Even though Cointrol has been used for real transactions, no guarantees are provided in terms of security, correctness, etc. (see LICENCE).

Architecture

The system consists of the following components:

cointrol-trader

• Polls various Bitstamp API endpoints
• Writes changes to DB
• Publishes changes to Redis pub/sub
• Opens orders, when suitable

cointrol-server

• Serves Webapp static files
• Exposes DB for Webapp via a REST API
• Forwards Redis pub/sub messages from Trader to Webapp via WebSocket
• Exposes Django administration that is currently used for managing trading sessions

webapp

• REST/WebSocket API-powered Single Page App
• Real-time updated overview on orders, transactions, and trading sessions

Technology

The server-side parts (cointrol-server + cointrol-trader) are written in Python 3 (3.3+ is required) and use a mixture of Django (models, admin) and Tornado (WebSockets, async IO). Other libraries that are used include sockjs-tornado, Django REST framework.

The single-page webapp is written in CoffeeScript, Sass, Handlebars and uses Backbone.js, Brunch, socksjs-client, Bootstrap.

Installation

0. Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following software installed on your system:

• Python 3.3+
• Redis
• npm

1. Install Cointrol

#### 1.1 Install cointrol-server & cointrol-trader

mkdir Cointrol && cd Cointrol

# Create an isolated Python virtual environment
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv ./virtualenv --python=$(which python3)

# Activate the virtualenv
# IMPORTANT: it needs to be activated every time before you run
#            a manage.py or cointrol-* command.
. virtualenv/bin/activate

# Get the code
git clone https://github.com/jkbrzt/cointrol