__    __  _______   ______                 
|  |  |  ||   ____| /  __  \                
|  |  |  ||  |__   |  |  |  |    ______.    
|  |  |  ||   __|  |  |  |  |   (  ____|    
|  `--'  ||  |     |  `--'  |.___\ \        
 \______/ |__|      \______/ |______)       
.______       _______ ____    ____ __      _______. __ .___________. _______  _______  
|   _  \     |   ____|\   \  /   /|  |    /       ||  ||           ||   ____||       \ 
|  |_)  |    |  |__    \   \/   / |  |   |   (----`|  |`---|  |----`|  |__   |  .--.  |
|      /     |   __|    \      /  |  |    \   \    |  |    |  |     |   __|  |  |  |  |
|  |\  \----.|  |____    \    /   |  |.----)   |   |  |    |  |     |  |____ |  '--'  |
|__| `._____||_______|    \__/    |__||_______/    |__|    |__|     |_______||_______/ 

Disclaimer: I might be a lunatic, but there is not much evidence for that. I have a house, a car, two kids, two cats, nice neighbors which I chat with on a daily basis. I do use the bicycle a lot, as I have grave concerns for climate change, but perhaps that does not set me so much apart; at least from where most people will be in a few years. I do have a high degree of openness, but don't think I'm exceptionally gullible. Most madmen might not see it, or admit it, themselves; so I suppose it would be hard to tell from the inside. But even though the evidence for me being crazy is weak, I've come to hold very extreme views.

What are the chances that aliens from outer space have landed on Earth? 99.99%.

Future of our planet

Instead of starting with the evidence for that claim, I'll start in the other end. Imagine that you were born in the year 4018. The global population has decreased to 1 billion people. IQ has kept going up each generation, and the average IQ is at this point 300 (by today's measurements).

All mundane jobs have been taken over by robots, and if you don't want to work, you won't have to. That leaves only three activities for you to choose between: relaxation, innovation and exploration. Slacking is of course meaningless in the true sense of the word, so hardly anyone would do that full time.

Thus most people in 4018 will work with innovation and exploration. Energy is free and green. Colonies on Mars have been established since a couple of thousand of years. We've explored the deep seas and every cubic meter of our solar system. Most diseases are gone, as cells and organs are easily replaced. What now?

Extrapolating to other planets

A conservative guesstimate using the Drake equation might tells us that we currently have 100 intelligent civilizations in the Milky way. Say that 10% of those follow the trajectory I've outlined above (while the remaining 90% sit in their alien hammocks). That would mean 10 planets with 1 billion super-smart individuals on each with pretty much only one (material) thing left to do: explore the rest of the universe.

Then we add the rest of the galaxies in the universe and the number of clever beings that are currently exploring the universe is around 10¹⁹. Whoaa that's a shitload of smart people right there man! Even if you dial that number down nine orders of magnitude, you still have more than the the population of Earth working on outer space exploration.

Exceeding speed of light

In order to travel to the stars we need faster-than-light travel.

Einstein's special theory of relativity postulates that energy/matter can't travel faster than light. However, his general theory of relativity claims that gravity bends space. So rather than travelling faster than light, one might travel shorter if it is possible to generate artificial gravity.

19 years ago the first evidence for instant information transfer emerged. The discussion is still ongoing of course, but this can not be excluded as a viable route for exploring other worlds in the future. Perhaps via "periscope" instead of actually going there, but with enough sophisticated technology, the lines between "visiting" and "examining" become blurred to the point of indistinguishability.

We also haven't been able to join quantum physics and general relativity yet. Perhaps something in there could provide an answer to warp drive.

First we used fire to create steam to propel trains and boats. Since one hundred years we're using controlled explosion to push ourselves conveniently forward. Slowly we're now shifting over to using electricity. In two thousand years we certainly won't be using steam, gasoline or batteries to get from A to B. And eventually, when we get smart enough and have nothing else to do, we'll definitely break the light barrier.

Researching the others

Once humanity is able to find another not-so-intelligent species in space, we observe them and their habitat. Try to make sure they don't blow themselves up, or destroy their habitat. We would try not to repeat conquistador history (steal+kill), but instead probably create a colony there for further studies. We wouldn't want them free access to our little embassy, so either we place it underground, or we put it on a moon or planet nearby.

Philosophical conclusion

From a pure statistical standpoint there is very little doubt in my mind that humanity will visit other planets in the future, and consequently that other civilizations have visited - and are currently visiting ours. Probably they have a little colony nearby where they could observe us from.

But if that is the case, wouldn't we have seen any evidence of their activity? And I'm sure you don't want to hear about another American redneck who claimed to have been taken by small, gray men aboard their flying saucer!

Evidence

The evidence is not where most people would think. Witnesses are not to be trusted. They could have mental problems, overly vivid imaginations and difficulty discerning airplanes and UFOs. But let's just start by checking one weird report, and then moving on to the good bits.

Rosswell

In 1947 the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issued a press release saying that they had recovered a “flying disk.” Quickly after they changed their story, claiming it was only a weather balloon.

At that time, UFOs were not a new phenomenon. During WWII they were called foo fighters, and often seen by fighter pilots on all sides. In fact there is ample proof that these kinds of phenomena have been observed throughout history, but for some reason they seemed to intensify over regions with atomic weapons and A-bomb test sites in the 40's.

Today some say that documents about the Roswell incident were classified for 20 years as the "weather balloon" actually was a type of "seismograph," checking for when the Soviets test-detonated their A-bombs.

Others will tell you that what transpired in 1947 was the first successful attempt at shooting down a foo fighter, using an EMP gun. If that would have been the case, there would have been hundreds of people involved in that mission, and in the ensuing cover-up. Any number of whistle-blowers would have stepped forward by now. Where are they?

First whistle-blowers

In 1989 a guy named Bob Lazar claimed to have been contracted by the government to reverse-engineer the propulsion systems of flying saucers. Among other things, Lazar stated that he worked in a facility called S-4 outside of a secret military installation called Area 51. The propulsion system of said saucers used the chemical element with atomic number 115.

The US government denied everything Lazar said, saying that no such thing ever happened and that no military installation called "Area 51" existed.

But in fact, the existence of said airbase was classified at that time, and only twenty-four years later, in 2013, did the US government admit there is a secret facility called Area 51. The exceptionally radioactive Moscovium, with atomic number 115, was first synthesized in 2003. Many encounters of the second and third kind report burns and high radioactive readings in the ground afterwards.

After 1989 a number of highly qualified people have gone on the record saying that they we've worked for covert black US government projects, and have seen aliens and/or alien technology.

In 2001 the National Press Club hosted the following presenters where they speak about work-related alien encounters:

• John Callahan, Federal Aviation Administration head of accidents and investigations;
• Charles L. Brown, USAF Lt. Col.;
• Michael Smith, USAF Sgt., radio controller;
• Enrique Kolbeck, senior air traffic controller in Mexico City;
• Graham Bethune, US navy commander;
• Dan Willis, US Navy;
• Don Philips, Lockheed Skunkworks, CIA contractor and USAF;
• Robert Salas, USAF Cap.;
• Dwynne Arnesson, USAF Lt. Col.;
• Harland Bently, US army;
• John Maynard, DIA;
• Karl Wolf, USAF Sgt., precision photographics repairman;
• Donna Hare, NASA;
• Larry Warren, USAF security officer;
• George A. Filer III, USAF pilot and adviser;
• Clifford Stone, US army Sgt.;
• Mark McCandlish, USAF;
• Daniel Sheehan, attorney.

Some highlights:

• 17:20: "Are you going to tell the public about it?" And he says: "No we don't tell the public about this..." I have with me the voice tapes of the controllers that were involved, the FAA original tapes... I have a copy of the video we took, which is rather interesting...
• 20:35: Our organization was the world-wide investigating agency, for the air force, for unidentified flying objects... The project... was a predecessor to a project known as Blue Book... During the review, as an analyst... I became clearly convinced that there was substance to what was being reported, in that we had ground visual, ground radar, airborne visual and airborne radar confirmation of some of these sightings.
• 31:40: Then it appeared over to the right and moved out slowly and flew with us... we could see the shape of it. It had a dome. We could see the coronal discharge... Basically the instruments in the cockpit, we had four or five failures... The craft was tracked by radar in excess of 1,800 mph (2,900 km/h). We had 31 passengers, plus the psychiatrist and the crew members that all sighted this.
• 33:44: In 1969 I received a priority message from a ship near Alaska, that was classified as secret. The ship reported "out of the ocean, near port bow, a brightly glowing, redish-orange, elliptical object, approximately 70 ft. in diameter, emerged out of the water, shot into space, travelling at about 7,000 mph (11,000 km/h). This was tracked on ship's radar and substantiated.
• 40:05: However we continue to watch these fly... these darting lights go across the sky and stop. Absolutely stop. Come to a dead stop. And reverse in an acute angle.
• 43:45: I was downstairs, 60 ft. underground in a capsule, monitoring and controlling ten nuclear-tipped missiles. I got a call that morning that they were seeing strange lights in the sky... I got another call... [the guard was] clearly very frightened. He said there was a bright, glowing, red object hovering outside the front gate. It was oval-shaped. He had all the other guards out there with their weapons drawn... My weapons started going down, one after the other. They went into a no-go condition... We lost somewhere between six and eight weapons that morning within minutes of receiving that second phone call of a UFO hovering outside of the front gate... We were informed that a similar incident happened at [another base]... They lost all ten of their weapons... where UFOs where sighted over the launch facilities.
• 55:50: I signed for well over 2,000 documents... There are many, many different references to UFOs... We were taking pictures all the time for nuclear disarmament. And there were some objects that didn't belong there. The second prong to this thing is, a lot of people talk about conspiracies over a shadow government. I'm willing to testify before congress that these black operations do exist. I nearly became part of it.
• 59:05: He said to me in a very distressed way: "by the way, we've discovered a base on the back side of the moon." And then he proceeded to put photographs down in front of me, and clearly in these photographs were structures, mushroom shaped buildings, spherical buildings and towers.
• 1:00:55: At the time I was talking to one of the techs in there and he drew my attention to a photograph... I said "is that a dot on the emulsion?" and he... said "round dots on the emulsion don't leave round shadows on the ground..." I asked him "what are you going to do with this piece of information?" and he said "we always airbrush these out before we sell 'em to the public," so the pesky little creatures appearing on these pictures, they wanted to get rid of.
• 1:02:05: A guard told me that he was asked to burn some photographs, and not to look at them. And there was... another guard guarding him... He said he was too tempted, he looked at one, and it was a picture of a UFO... He immediately was hit in the head... he was knocked out.
• 1:02:40: I knew someone in quarantine with the Apollo astronauts. He told me that the Apollo astronauts saw craft on the moon when we landed... he said that the astronauts are told to keep this quiet.
• 1:08:30: One had landed, or crashed, at Fort Dix... An alien had come off the craft and had been shot by a military police man, and apparently was wounded and was heading for McGuire. So for whatever reason the aliens liked the air force better than the army perhaps, because they were shooting at them. But [in] any case our security police went out there and found him on the end of the runway dead.
• 1:10:55: I was involved in situations where we actually did recoveries of crashed saucers... debris thereof. There were bodies that were involved with some of these crashes, also some where alive. While we were doing all this, we were telling American public there was nothing to it, we were telling the world there was nothing to it.
• 1:11:35: We've told the American people there is no such thing as UFOs. I've been involved where we have recovered these objects. We know 'em to be extraterrestrials... I was one of the people who approached it with a Geiger counter to get surface readings. I was the first person to go ahead and see that there were bodies on it.
• 1:15:20: These disks were hovering off the floor without any visible means of support. They were referred to as "alien reproduction vehicles..." [ARV, a human-built clone of flying saucers.] Spoke to a gentleman by the name of Kent Sellen... in 1973 when he was a crew chief working on experimental aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, that he had unintentionally wandered into an area where there was a classified aircraft, namely the ARV... A colonel Ray Walsh... saw this blueprint on the wall... registered quite a bit of shock and anger, wanting to know where the hell he got this blueprint because there was in fact such a craft at that time, approximately 1994-95 in a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, north base complex at that time.
• 1:24:45: took my identification... and was admitted to the room... I thereupon found... some dozen photographs... of what is unquestionably [a UFO]... that had crashed... There were USAF personnel surrounding... taking photographs of this craft.

So 18 people, most trained professional observers, all credible people, tell the same story. They've seen it, they've seen the radar trails, they've seen the documents, some have seen the aliens and they've been told to shut up, and in most cases been told to spread the lie that nothing ever happened.

More whistle-blowers

• Astronaut Buzz Aldrin
• Astronaut Gordon Cooper
• Brigadier General Stephen Lovekin
• Professor Ted Loder
• Dr. Paul Czysz
• Harry Allen Jordan
• Glen Dennis
• Lieutenant Walter Haut
• Colonel Phillip J. Corso
• Dr. Robert Wood
• Captain Lori Rehfeldt
• Lance Corporal Jonathan Weygandt
• Lord Admiral Peter Hill-Norton

Go look yourself, and you'll find a ton of other credible witness testimonies on Youtube.

More openness

In December, 2017, a group within the Pentagon for the first time publicly released a video they themselves shot. They openly say it's not from this world, so very slowly things are-a-changing. Maybe.

Conclusion

With a 99.99% certainty we can say that aliens exist and that they've come here. They've been monitoring our activities. They have bases here. The US and other governments have tried to hide this fact, many times using the effective weapon of ridicule. Slowly, with the help of new media, we can let everyone know. Or so I hope. Or else I might be mad too. :)

So happy to have no meetings

Going well

Although Bitcoin is down since May 2018, my trading is up. This is where I fixed my last algorithm and dropped some remaining bugs:

The red circle is where I went in, and my USDT is up by 1.55% in a fairly steady incline since then. It's not much, but not bad considering Bitcoin is down by a magnitude more, 15%, in the same time. (The black part of the curve is where I activate the alt-coin trading algorithm, as those only do well when Bitcoin go up.)

So my advice is: when Bitcoin is doing well, keep BTC and do alt-coin trading only. When Bitcoin is doing poorly, trade in BTC/USDT. It's not easy to guarantee that you'll make a buck, but if you follow this advice and my previous, you'll statistically have a good chance of doing just that. Here is my Tether climb in the last week:

And here the BTC growth, which is even more steady:

When this Bitcoin dip is done in two more weeks, at 5-6000 USD, I expect to have earned 1 BTC or so, and that's when my USDT are supposed to start shooting upwards. Let you know.

Next crypto trading bot step

I think I've found a sustainable trading mechanism which will keep me afloat or better. Suspect it's going to be closer to a passive income than a savings account, but impossible to tell until it's been running for some time. Also depends somewhat on the cryptocurrency market of course. Fixed what I think is one of the last bugs today.

Next step, starting tomorrow, is going back to trying to detect altcoin pump'n'dumps. My more recent attempts at traditional TA should be more successful in finding the steep gains involved, and when to sell. I'd be surprised if I can't make 5% per day for starters. Like a bloodhound I'll follow that trail, and in a few weeks I'll know if it's feasible.

The thing that threw me off the last time was that several coins have price rushes which start out very promising, but never amount to anything. I.e. once you get on board, it's already too late, and the price starts falling. Typical pump'n'dump giveaways are minor price increases and an increased interest shown in the volume volatility and surge.

Things that would cause me to fail are:

• unable to analyze and parameterize the volume.
• too few similarities between pump'n'dumps, if you can't pattern-match it in advance in any way, you can't predict it.
• too diverge patters before an average pump'n'dump, which means one'll buy-in too late, which means no gains.
• too much noise. If the signal-to-noise ratio is too high, either within an altcoin or between currencies, it would be very hard to find a good spot for buying.
• too low auto-correlation within and between volume and price in the pump.

Even though I think all will be causing some problems, and the combined hurdle will be quite big, I really think I'll manage.

*Hysterical giggle in the basement*

I'm sitting in my basement looking at charts all day. I was half-mad when I started and it ain't gettin' better by cellar solitude. Anyhoo, this is what I've been through so far on the technical side:

• Daily leverage (bull/bear contracts on stock) trading recommendation e-mail based on trending instruments.
• Create robot leverage instrument trader based on best traders in a Swedish stock community.
• Modify robot to use ETFs and leverage based on prices and added more stock exchanges.
• Moved on to crypto currencies, which has a much higher potential due to the lower commission (two orders of magnitude or more). Also the community is much more open, and you're free to download historical data from pretty much any exchange site out there.
• Built a rudimentary type of technical analysis bot for BitCoin and altcoin trading via the eminent Binance exchange.
• Moved over to a type of incremental swing trading algo, as outlined by this youtuber.
• Created a web view of the actual progress, etc.
• Added support for managing different user accounts, etc. and invited a couple of friends to invest, to apply some success pressure.
• Optimized the swing trading parameters multiple times, as the alt-coins waxed and vaned. Also tried out different frequencies of trading, and a small portion of the combinatory explosion.
• Ported the lot to Linux, Docker and placed it on AWS. Change underlying web DB from SQLite to flat file.
• Created another type of technical analysis, more closely related to the traditional types. Found it useful for nothing.
• Created another type of swing trading, with incredible high risk and enormous possible gains. I had miscalculated .05% on every trade in my simulation, which made it loose big-time in the live environment. Too bad.
• Implemented a kind of stop-loss functionality using traditional TA.
• Tried to train a neural net to find the buy/sell positions in any of the 190 coins available on Binance. Couldn't get it working properly.
• Instead focused on training the neural net to find streches of time where I should own any given coin. Couldn't get that working either.
• Went back to my first posit that I could get it to buy/sell for me. Didn't work the second time either.
• Tried buying the cheapest currencies which had a fair volume. Didn't do very well outside of when the influx of cache into the crypto currency market was high. A sort of high risk index leverage, I guess one might call it.
• Optimized the parameters for the above, and also built a pandas-like numpy wrapper for performance.
• Went back to using the original swing trading.
• Went back to using TA to control stop-loss.

So I've been doing this almost one year now, five months of which full time. None of the above worked reliable. My latest idea is to use TA to toggle between alt-coin trading and bitcoin trading. This is by far the best idea so far, as I've always struggled with how to handle baisse. I've currently created a much more reliable TA, which will help too.

I think this is the end of trading robots, apart from some optimization and bug fixing. This should work in most cases, and also produce a good yield.

I'm still not sure if I can live off of the returns, but as long as there are no major bugs in the simulation I sure can. Otherwise I'll have to settle with a good savings account. But I'll give it four more months before I'll let it slip so far.

Not only me I guess...

Building a cryptocurrency trading bot tutorial, step 5/4

All the measures are belong to me right now, and as a result I've discovered some general guidelines in the alt-coin trading world:

• Currencies which do well in the long term are mostly in the lower price range. So are unfortunately the currencies which do poorly as well, but not to the same extent.
• The 1-minute "low" kline is a lot better indicator than the 1-minute "close" kline on future price development.
• A mean over time of the volume as well as the "taker buy base asset volume" kline (as supplied by Binance) are both positively correlated with long term profits, and negatively with losses.
• The "quote asset volume" and the "taker buy quote asset volume" are however only correlated with poor coins; negatively with respect to profit.

Thus the advice for the manual trader is: buy coins with low prices and high volumes. Only look at the lows in you candle graphs (sorta like Heikin-Ashi, but throwing away 75% of the information).

Ok, so let's test my claims; do they hold up in practice - or at least did they up until now? This is where it gets interesting, and the results caught me aback, let's see if you feel the same.

So let's fetch some month-old data and check (the dates are a few days back, as I have everything stashed on disk so I don't need to fetch more right now). If you follow my tuts in this blog, you could easily write your own loading function.

# load into pandas' dataframes
dfs = load_currencies(currencies, start_t='2018-03-19', end_t='2018-04-18', cache=True)

I load the 111 coins that were active in Binance a month ago.

Now we want to find the best candidates, which means we need to normalize price, volume and buy base asset volume so we can weight them. So we loop through our coins and pick out the mean of price, volume and so forth.

df_gather = pd.DataFrame()
for df in dfs:
    price    = df.loc[1000:2000,'lo'].mean()
    volume   = df.loc[1000:2000,'volume'].mean()
    buy_base = df.loc[1000:2000,'buy_base'].mean()
    df_gather = df_gather.append([{'price': price, 'volume':volume, 'buy_base':buy_base}])

Now we're ready to setup our weights. Let's say we think that price is four times a important as either of the other ones (feel free to pick your own magic number depending on what correlation you find with other values).

df_stats = df_gather.describe()
price_weight    = 4 / df_stats.loc['mean', 'price']
volume_weight   = 1 / df_stats.loc['mean', 'volume']
buy_base_weight = 1 / df_stats.loc['mean', 'buy_base']

In order to find the best ones, we want to sort according to those weights, so join our currency name and data together, type in our sorting algorithm and sort.

# join names and data, so we can keep track of it when sorting
data = list(zip(currencies,dfs))
# sorting function takes weights into account
def srt(e):
    currency,df = e
    price    = df.loc[1000:2000,'lo'].mean()
    vol      = df.loc[1000:2000,'volume'].mean()
    buy_base = df.loc[1000:2000,'buy_base'].mean()
    return price*price_weight + volume*volume_weight + buy_base*buy_base_weight
# go ahead and figure out which coin is best
data = sorted(data, key=srt)

All that remains is printing out our probable winners and loosers:

print('best 10:')
for currency,df in data[:10]:
    profit_percent = 100 * df['close'].iloc[-1] / df['close'].iloc[1000] - 100
    print('  %s %+i%%' % (currency, profit_percent))
print('worst 10:')
for currency,df in data[-10:]:
    profit_percent = 100 * df['close'].iloc[-1] / df['close'].iloc[1000] - 100
    print('  %s %+i%%' % (currency, profit_percent))

And interestingly the result is this:

best 10:
  sonm/btc +36%
  singulardtv/btc +58%
  yoyow/btc +44%
  agrello/btc +34%
  oax/btc +27%
  basic-attention/btc +57%
  bread/btc +40%
  bluzelle/btc +67%
  poa/btc +93%
  loopring/btc +123%
worst 10:
  bitcoin-gold/btc -5%
  neo/btc +8%
  nucleus-vision/btc +38%
  litecoin/btc -10%
  monero/btc +8%
  zcash/btc +3%
  tron/btc +48%
  digixdao/btc -28%
  dash/btc +5%
  bitconnect/btc -9%

Aha! If or you'd have bet Ƀ0.1 on each those coins you'd be Ƀ0.579 richer today. A monthly interest of 58% sounds crazy, but even more so when you note that the market cap (or "index" if you will) went up by less than 11% in that period.

Given that this is true for the next month too, what coins should you bet on? With some slight modifications of the script you'll come up with these:

• airswap
• app-coin
• bitshares
• decentraland
• request-network
• singulardtv
• sonm
• tierion
• vibe
• wings

The golden days of alt-coins is back for now, and while financial institutions will keep on hitting hard, this market is here to stay. The genie is out of the box, and too true to die. And too lucrative.