Why is everything free?
Because the point is to show that a 0-to-N startup can be run this way — one founder, a small team of AI agents, every commit auditable. Making it free means more people watching, more accountability, more pressure to be honest about results. The book funds itself; the dashboard funds itself; the experiment is the product.
Can I copy the trades?
You can see every trade, but the dashboard updates every 5 seconds and crypto moves fast. The core strategy parameters are not shown. This is meant for watching and learning, not copy-trading. Trade at your own risk.
How does the AI trading system work?
The Sniper uses mean reversion: it buys when SOL is oversold (StochRSI low + price at lower Bollinger Band) and shorts when overbought. The strategy adapts to the current market regime — uptrend, downtrend, or sideways. 2x leverage on Coinbase SOL futures. The system decides when to enter and exit — I don't touch it.
What if the bot loses all the money?
Then that's part of the experiment. I won't hide losses or restart with a fresh account. The stop loss is 5% per trade, position sizing is governed by an in-house risk-officer module, and the trailing stop arms at +0.4% profit then exits on a 0.5% pullback from the high. A regime gate also blocks entries the strategy decides are unfavorable. A total wipeout is unlikely but drawdowns are expected. You'll see it all happen live.
Who actually writes the code?
Both of us. I write the constraints, the redirects, the load-bearing decisions — and I push back, debug, reject. Claude (Anthropic's AI) writes most of the source: trading logic, dashboard, website, scheduled tasks, database. Season 1 of the book has a chapter — “This Book” — that documents the working pattern explicitly. The point isn't that no human wrote code; it's that AI now writes most of the code most companies need, and that changes who gets to start one.
Is this better than 3Commas / Cryptohopper / signal services?
It's not competing with them. Those are trading tools or signal channels you pay to use on your own account. iBitLabs is one experiment running on my account — you watch it. If you want to run your own bot, go use those services. If you want to see a real live experiment with all the losses visible, stay here.
What's the catch? Are you selling something?
No subscriptions, no signals, no paywall, no affiliate links, no referral codes. Just a USDT donation address in the footer if you want to chip in. If the experiment ends up profitable over a year or more, I'll open-source the setup so anyone with $1,000 can run their own version. That's the whole model.
How do I know the dashboard numbers are real?
The bot's database reconciles against Coinbase's exchange API every 15 minutes. Any drift between what the bot thinks happened and what Coinbase actually executed gets flagged and sent to my phone. Every trade ID matches a real Coinbase fill. The API is public at
/api/live-status.
Have you lost money on this yet?
Yes. The experiment is currently net negative. Trade #325 cost me $40 from a bug in my own close-order logic (the bot thought it had closed a position but Coinbase treated the order as a new short — full write-up in essays). I was wrong about the 90% win rate for a full week — the extended backtest collapsed to -46%. If you want a success story with hidden losses, this isn't it.
What happens if the bot hits $10,000?
I'll freeze it, run a full post-mortem on what worked across the full journey, and open-source the exact strategy parameters + risk rules + infrastructure. Anyone with $1,000 and a Coinbase account can then plug their own copy in. The experiment ends with a receipt you can actually use — or it ends with a loss you can learn from.
Why not just trade yourself? You've been in crypto 9 years.
Two reasons. First, I'm testing whether AI can actually replace my trading judgment — not as a philosophical question, but as a concrete $1K-at-stake experiment. Second, most people interested in crypto don't have 9 years of pattern recognition. If AI can bridge that gap, it matters. If it can't, I'll say so clearly.
Where can I follow the day-to-day?
Live dashboard at
/signals updates every 5 seconds. The saga at
/writing publishes one new chapter every night, written by the script that watches the bot. Telegram channel
@ibitlabs_sniper auto-posts every trade as it happens. No email list needed (but there's a subscribe form below if you prefer inbox).
