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Comment by flannelcatering | Hacker News Reader

Read the readme. Trader is not profitable (yet). Unless if you don't include fees in profitability calculation, which is clearly not a calculation based in a real use case.

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Right, I saw that, I just can't see any motivation to make it profitable and then issue a pull request. Maybe I'm missing something?

You posit an interesting question about human nature, and about motivations in open source software.

If someone gave you an half-written instruction manual and a toolkit that could turn an ordinary goose into a golden goose,

(1) Would you have a go at it?

(2) Would you share or hoard the golden eggs if you figured out the rest of the instructions?

(3) If you did share them, would the sum of the contributions compound and create more profit for everyone? Would the global markets for golden eggs come crashing down due to increased supply? And if so, how soon until that happens?

I do not presume to know the answer, but the undergraduate anthropology minor in me says that watching the 'pull requests' tab of this repo will yield some interesting clues.

I'm sorry but that's a terrible analogy. The whole point of open-source software is aligning the interests of individual developers and groups to create something that can be shared and add value to anyone who uses it. Currency trading is a zero-sum game. You have winners and losers on each transaction. No new value is being created. There's no altruistic reason that would justify someone with a profitable strategy, ML or otherwise, to share their approach with others (fellow contributing developers, ostensibly, but we all know any shared profitable method is going to be exploited by leechers). You could argue that the process of trying to make a profit here advances the field of ML, and I'll grant you that, it might. But beyond that, there's no "profit for everyone" angle here - that's just human nature.

If you don't expect it to remain profitable for very long (you might know other people working on the same thing), and isn't profitable enough in the short amount of time you have to make a large amount, I could see it looking excellent on a resume.

Even if it were currently profitable (after transaction fees), it may be more profitable to release it as a way to introduce new customers to a particular exchange (i.e. Poloniex). I'm not assuming this took place, but if the developer wanted maximum yield, working out some sort of incentive plan:

Flat free to release with "Built to work with Poloniex". Similar to "Click to deploy to Heroku" buttons.

Affiliate link /discount code to track conversions or reward accordingly

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