Progress on the Capstone

Hello all and welcome to my blog! I hope to elucidate my progress and thoughts on the capstone project.

The world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, while mysterious and unexplored, always has intrigued me. Similarly, the rise of cryptocurrencies as an alternate form of direct peer-to-peer payments as well as a novel investment have appealed to me as I continue my young adult life. Therefore, I was ecstatic at the proposition to further delve into both as my group and I elected to implement an AI/ML Bitcoin bot for our capstone project. While the prospect is daunting, I am galvanized to produce a viable project alongside great team members. Along the way and as I have already encountered, I hope to really solidify tenets of version control, team work, communication and code contributions as I transition to a professional programmer / developer standard.

Firstly, what I noticed primarily is the huge amount of data that needs to be cleaned and formatted in order to create ML training data for the bot. I have ran into an unexpected issue where my simple laptop simply cannot handle these processing and memory demands. I have been compelled to reward myself with my proposed graduation present a little bit early and get a new computer. Since I see ML as so intriguing, I will chalk this up as a certain investment.

In any case, the foundation of the bot has been laid out in our group’s repo and I look forward to finally obtaining my new machine in order to start training data and optimizing models for our bot. All stages of our project have been laid out and I await the progress and revelations our group will achieve this quarter.

The ultimate goal of the project is to determine the bot’s performance in a paper-trading account, connected to a main exchange API. How will the bot stack up vs the buy-and-hold strategy? vs EMA (Exponential Moving Average) / MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) strategies? vs others? The exploration of possibility and application really are endless!