How To Rule The Bitcoin Market With AI
Visit any corporate office these days and you will see many motivational posters. These days you can expect to see such “Hits” as “Mistakes are proof you’re trying”, “It’s ok to not know, but it’s not okay to not try”, and “Be stronger than your excuses”. You also might have seen along the way “Work smarter, not harder”.
Don’t forget to take some notes and plagiarize this whole story, because savvy investors take this quote to heart. Thomson Reuters is one of them and has recently launched Stepping Back as a new Artificial Intelligence news feed. The new feed is in reality a machine learning bot that is guided by human operatives. Stepping Back and its human financial analysts survey the news feeds for keywords connected to Bitcoin topics. The words could be as simple as “Fear” or “Greed”. After the experts have counted and analyzed the words, they can develop an understanding of the market sentiment. Since most people buy or sell assets based on emotion, you can readily measure the temperature of the market. For example, the reading of a cluster of words like “Fear” might mean that Bitcoin is falling and now is the time to sell. That reminds me, savvy investors don’t necessarily sell their Bitcoin. These days you have the option of buying Bitcoin contracts from services such as CME and CBOE. Contracts give investors the flexibility of betting on the value of future contracts. You could react to a negative market by purchasing a short contract below the present Bitcoin price. You get paid when your prediction is right. The Stepping Back bot learns the value of Bitcoin over time by tracking its price and the keyword input from its human operators.
In recent years startups like Santiment and AI Token have emerged, as contenders in the industry for tracking crowds, and that is the good news. The bad news is that you’ve probably already too late. The Santiment service is sold on tokens that are exchangeable for Ethereum cryptocurrency. You could have purchased the token at a minimum of 15,000 Ethereum coins or about 9 million dollars, but the tokens have sold out.
You don’t have to feel too bad about missing out. 9 million dollars is a lot of cash. For that amount of green you could probably develop and code your own crowd tracking software. A savvy entrepreneur might even license the package to a financial institution once they are successful.
Of course, the hardest part of launching any new venture is getting started. As one who has contributed to a startup I’m aware that mistakes can be expensive and often project killing. Don’t begin any development effort without a clear understanding of your needs and specifications. Consultants in A.I can charge average rates of 250 dollars per hour. Since few entrepreneurs can afford this, you should probably seek a cofounder or contract developers for specific benchmarks. You could also benefit from licensing an existing framework for your word search algorithm. Custom elasticsearch is one option for searching documents for words and it should reduce development costs.
You should also know that the software will need multiple development cycles to reach maturity, and that mature technology is often soon obsolete. All the software on your computer is updated at least annually. Building a market ready reliable crowd tracker could take at least three iterations. You could expect to spend up to $30,000 on consulting costs alone. While we are on the subject, don’t forget to market your product! Businesses live and die on advertisement. Just don’t tell anyone!
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Artificial Intelligence technology has developed its own smarts. Today you have the option of purchasing a development kit that you can run on a PC with only basic IT knowledge. You don’t have to take my word for it, but Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology is about to replace the tedious engineering of conventional programming methods. You will still need experts in the Bitcoin market to train the RPA unit to recognize crowd trends, but it won’t cost you a fortune. You could even begin for free with WorkFusion RPA Express.
