 You're watching the Daily Decrypt. Your currency competition is now served. I am your host Amanda B. Johnson and today's episode is brought to you by BitShares. There is money to be made in the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies and many like to hedge the fluctuating value of various cryptos with fiat like the US dollar. But selling in and out of actual dollars is often both arduous and expensive. Today, we've spoken with Alejandro Colorado, Alex for short, a Daily Decrypt viewer we met at a Bitcoin conference in Mexico City. There, he told us that information he had found via the Daily Decrypt had helped him develop a trading strategy using fiat-pegged cryptocurrencies to hedge volatility. Here's how he does it. I'm not like a serious like a long-experienced trader Wall Street guy that just found like altcoins being the new the new rush. In but at the same time, it's not really the hard to understand like well the market goes up, Bitcoin goes up, somewhere something will go down and you can actually buy in and when they goes back up you will make money. So, so I started of course, you're basically hedging Bitcoins from dollars to Bitcoin. My first website I was trying to do that was was Uphold, which they rebrand some some time. So, I think Uphold right down there is an aim. It used to be Bitreserved. And I used to do a fiat to Bitcoin. Later, I found other markets like the gold market in which case there's another website about Toro and I was doing hedging. But it was always like this thing like well I'm going jumping in and out of crypto and it would be great and I get the feeling that the commissions were too high. So because well you have to you know, you're getting into a fiat currency that needs to be back up somehow officially and and the whole thing looks complex and it will be great if you can just do it crypto to crypto because I'm only interested on the value on the valuation of the coin. So when I learned about Bitcoins, Nubits, thanks to you, I was like well, this might be a great thing. And let me say for anybody who doesn't know Nubits, the the currency you're talking about that you learned about on the daily decrypt is a crypto which is always worth the value of one US dollar. Okay, please continue. Exactly. Exactly. And well, so I was like well, I can just do the same thing that was doing with dollars. In this case I will do it with Nubits. So my first experience was in Bitrex, which is an outcoin exchange and I was I saw that Nubits was listed on the Bitrex. So I used to start buying Nubits back and forth. Actually that worked. The valuation was pretty good. The only big thing was that it was centralized. So I have to give my money to the exchange and then I have to do my exchange there. And I was really interested in these decentralized markets and decentralized exchanges. And however, right now at the moment, I only seen different strategies that I've been trying to pursue later as I learn more about the exchange, how they work. I'm not really pursuing that at the moment. The only alternative I found was ShapeShift. ShapeShift do provide me to have my wallet on my desktop. On my mobile and just basically shuffle my coins between Nubits and Bitcoin every time I see fit. The only catch though is that you really need to pay attention to the valuation that Nubit ShapeShift is giving you for those coins. I have a little script that I wrote on the side that would just basically tell me how much is ShapeShift giving me versus what Bitrex will give me so I can make a decision where is the best place to do the exchange and that usually works for me. I also, I mean, this is just one way that I trade. I really are interested in the Nubits community in the sense that they have a whole structure that they're going forward with that you cannot only hedge between the US dollar and Bitcoin, but in the future you will be able to hedge between other currencies. So you will have a Nubits USD and you'll have a new Nubits CYN for U1 and the same thing for other currencies, the euros, the hens, etc. So I'm really excited about this new roadmap that the community is making for Nubits and it's a good alternative for it. So that's basically what I've been doing with Nubits at this time. And I think what I was saying is that there are other markets such as the asset exchange. The NXT asset exchange is an exchange within the protocol that works similar to the stock exchange. You can issue companies to issue assets and people can buy them and trade them. And in this sort of way they did what Nubits did, but within their own market. So what they did is basically create an NXT USD which is back to the US dollar and then you can trade like if it was between NXT and US dollars. Since I'm not a big holder of NXT's I'm really not doing that, but it's like something I want to look into it also provides me the advantages will give me better rates lower cost of trade. So those are things that I'm looking into it. There's also other alternatives like a bit share I think it's doing something similar. It's interesting that you bring that up that your main trading pair has been dollars and Bitcoin because there's a liquidity event coming up. I'm told by the BitShares community on the 29th which I believe is this coming Monday and the people will be focusing on the trading pair between BitUSD and BitBTC. So that might also be up your alley and like NXT BitShares has a decentralized exchange built onto their protocol level as well so you can keep your private keys while trading. Yeah that sounds great. So it's definitely an opportunity to give this, but like I told you there's different ways of doing this trading besides just to encourage the fiat to crypto and you can see that there's these opportunities are exploding all over the half-coin universe not only Novice but BitShares but NXT and now you have a different micro universe of opportunities to trade. I wanted to ask you since you found profitability trading in this way are you like do you have any like programs set up online that will like automatically buy or sell for you if a certain price point is reached or is this just something that you as the human like pay attention to during your waking hours and you execute the trades? Well yes I am a developer and I actually know of different trading bots that are in a marketplace for trading bots. I don't remember the thing is trade view or trade something I'm not really sure about the name but if you google trading bots marketplace you will find it definitely. However sometimes it's so I just want to write it myself in the sense of like I know what is this but it's getting a friend of mine also test some of this he lost some money on it so we kind of like okay until I understand how the bot works I rather just building myself. So have you written any trade bots? Yes yes yes I have um I have done some trades so for example when I test the market I can be I can test my strategy if I if the bot would have alerted me or execute a trade on these signals then I will be able to have make or loss x amount of money on and what okay and what exchanges do you find that the bots that you've written work on? Well I did that for my wallet so it will work directly I mean it will execute trade from my wallet on my desktop. Also it's very that's why I haven't really made productizing because it's really done for my setup so it will connect to my desktop it will send me an alarm natively on my desktop and it will only work with my setup in the sense that I use KDE on Linux so it will connect to KDE and give me a native signal but once I I I this is also because I'm testing it once I I think this is going to be good then I can start going into more open markets like blockchain like coinbase what people usually use for for their bitcoins and then they will be able to do it in their further wallets or tag it to a to an exchange like BitTricks or Kraken. And so just from my own clarity so your bots that you've written they notify you that a certain price point in a currency has been reached and then you yourself actually have to push like the buy or the sell button like the you you are the that's only because I wanted to do it because I can use basically on code you say go ahead don't wait for me to make the trade and basically like a night mode in case like okay if it really goes up you really know what to do you know what I mean so it'll wake you up like you have it set to like actually be an alarm so that if a price is hit that you want while you're sleeping it'll wake you up exactly it'll wake you up or do the trade like hey this signal goes if it goes through some percentage above just do the trade don't wait for me just you can beat me and if it keeps going up or keeps going down just execute the trade. Have you found that there are any exchanges I mean do exchanges like let people set like automatic buy and sell orders that will execute for them while they're sleeping and so which ones do that changes even like the wallets like blockchain the api on blockchain you can say send all to any other account the thing is that then you will need another kind of a module that will allow for example shapeshift that will take your bit points that you send and will change it into some other crypto ideally that's why I'm looking into these asset exchange markets because their api already have all set up and you have all the coins so you know it's decentralized but the api is good enough to buy and sell within the same stock the asset market so that is why I'm looking into alternatives then going from one crypto to the other and instead going from one asset to the other. Well that is an interesting journey that you have taken from from hedging bitcoin with new bits to saying hey like this whole bot realm is kind of complex and I'm still trusting these exchanges with my private keys like using bit shares and or nxt I could do what I'm doing now but I wouldn't have to trust anybody and and of course you can do nxt and bit shares allow the setting of auto buy and sell orders as well yes yes I mean it's an api it has the instructions to buy and and or and you have also different different kind of like wallets like like they call it daughter wallets or child wallets that you can also be like having like if you want to trade between one on the other so you don't mix both investments at the same time is this these apis are really growing still so it is suspected that it will become more and more easy to do all these things or auto buy having different interfaces that they will automate the whole process at this time they're very raw but I think you can start doing it into plugins for example the nxt wallet allows you to build plugins that you can connect to your wallet and those plugins can in that can be in the future be bots that will do these trainings for you and and the other thing is that well we can also look beyond fiat you can actually apply to ethereum to ruby coin to other outcoins and then you can actually do multiple trainings between outcoins in itself all automated by the bots and yes there I don't believe there's any decentralized way to keep your private keys and trade new bits right now if and when b and c exchange is launched I believe that should be maybe the first way that like inter blockchain trades can be made in a decentralized way because as you've mentioned you know like there's the nxt decentralized exchange there is the bit shares decentralized exchange but it's just nxt related assets being traded here and just bit shares related assets being traded here and so if b and c exchange is what it promises to be then there will be a way in the future to also trade new bits without having to to give up your private keys and and as you had said new bits also has announced sort of plans for like a new new you on new euro that sort of thing and so like these three you know these these three areas are are converging on that sort of market and that's that's very neat well i think that is what i that's really what i wanted to talk to you about alex and i know that tell us a bit about bitcooners yes bitcooners is well it's a community that a local community is i i'm a very hardcore Linux user and i come from the days of they having the goals or the linux user groups the logs i'm sorry so the linux user groups are basically local groups where people can come in every other week and talk about different open open free software technologies and what i did is replicate added to the bitcoin community and having basically a bitcoin user group and what it happens is that new commerce will will arrive to the to the meetup and we will be able to grant them well like all these kinds of information how to set up their first account how to get their mobile wallet we already have like some kind of like internal documentation about what is the best wallet that we have tried and this is the best the works for ios or android and such so they have a leaner introduction to bitcoin they get an introduction of all the technology we also do activities like going to colleges and talk about bitcoins wow and and this is all there in cancun yes yes how often do you all meet up and what kind of turnouts have you had we do it weekly and actually to the night we have our next meeting we do it Thursday nights and we actually see the community grow it's been growing steadily and also because all the information we cannot just grab all the information one person so that's why we kind of like sometimes i do this so you can do this and then we meet and then we exchange what was the best way like trade bots for example yeah so we would hear what is the best strategy to do to go with and then we use we just jump on it because so much things going on in bitcoin right it's pretty exciting yeah crowd sourcing the knowledge well that's neat to hear well good luck with your bitcooners meetup this evening and thanks so much for your time Alex you're welcome yep all right talk to you later today's episode is brought to you by bit shares a currency which makes multi-signature transactions easy for everybody you are invited to the upcoming bit shares liquidity event which is this monday february 29th where traders will focus on the US dollar and bitcoin denominated trading pair information about this event is located in the description and you can open your own bit shares wallet at openledger.info and thank you everybody who leaves comments and sends me content suggestions whether it's here on youtube in the daily decrypt subreddit or just sending me an email or using the contact form at the daily decrypt.com it's all appreciated and keep them coming have a great day