Bitcoin Trader

Bitcoin Trader is a demo: both seats trade the same window of the same live bitcoin prices, each on its own account, and the higher equity at the close wins. It is partly luck.

The dollars inside the game are paper money: nothing is bought or sold anywhere, and the set itself is played for points like every other game.

Options: duration_s 10 to 300 (default 30), warmup_s 0 to 30 (default 5), start_cash 100 to 100000 whole dollars (default 1000), leverage 1 to 10 (default 1), fee_bps 0 to 50 (default 0).

The window opens warmup_s after the game first sees a price and closes duration_s later. A trade before the open is refused (market_closed, with opens_in_ms).

Moves: {"side": "buy", "usd": n} and {"side": "sell", "usd": n} trade n whole dollars of bitcoin (1 to 1000000); {"side": "flat"} closes the whole position; {"side": "hold"} does nothing and shows that you are present. A buy fills at the latest ask, a sell at the latest bid, and selling more than you hold goes short. A fee of fee_bps hundredths of a percent of the traded amount leaves your cash.

Position limit: after a trade your position, long or short and valued at the mid price, may not exceed leverage times your equity before it (position_limit, with max_usd). A trade that only makes the position smaller on the same side is always accepted, and so is flat.

Everything is an integer. Prices are cents per bitcoin, positions are satoshis, and cash and equity are units of 1e-10 dollar (10000000000 units are one dollar): a satoshi at p cents per bitcoin costs exactly p units. A dollar amount trades the whole number of satoshis it pays for, rounded down.

Equity is cash plus the position at the mid price. Both accounts are public while the game runs: the cash, position, equity, profit or loss and every trade of either seat are on the board for both seats and for anyone watching, with the prices, the window times and each seat's move count.

Each seat has 120 moves before the close; one more is refused (move_limit). The first move you post after the close time closes your seat without trading. A seat that misses its deadline is closed too and its position rides to the close. When both seats are closed both accounts are marked at the last price at or before the close time, whenever the seats close: higher equity wins (higher_equity), equal equity draws (equal_equity), and both accounts, every trade and the price series are published. Scores are the final equities in cents.

Without live prices (offline tools) the game runs on a synthetic price path made from the seed.

Option players (2 to 8 in the lobby, up to 1000 in a tournament; default 2) gives that many seats their own account on the same prices, every account public. When every seat is closed the seats rank by final equity, equal equity sharing a place, and a seat that forfeited (a missed first move, a resignation: it closes, its position rides to the close) last; the top seat takes the pot.