Put your cryptos to work! Automate Poloniex or BitFinex Lending with poloniexlendingbot & pythonanywhere

For the last year or so I have been experimenting with some web based automated lending bots for the Poloniex exchange. Because I only know a very little bit about programing, I thought that this was the only option available to me. However, today I read through the documentation for poloniexlendingbot on GitHub (https://github.com/BitBotFactory/poloniexlendingbot). As it turns out, very little programming knowledge is needed to get your own, custom lending bot up and running.

Originally I was going to try to set up and run everything on a raspberry pi (though I still might do some experimenting with this). However, reading the documentation, I discovered that you could create and run the bot using a (free) account at www.pythonanywhere.com.

By taking the following steps, I was up and lending in about an hour (assuming you already have a Poloniex or Bitfinex account with some cryptos to lend):

1. Go to www.pythonanywhere.com and sign up for a free account
2. Go to https://github.com/BitBotFactory/poloniexlendingbot
3. Click on the README.ME link
4. Under documentation click the "Click here to read the Documentation, hosted by readthedocs.io" link
5. scroll down to section 1.2. Installing on Pythonanywhere.com
6. Follow the instructions exactly

NOTE: after adding your API Key and API Secret make sure you delete the # in front of exchange = Poloniex. From what I can tell this is the only thing not mentioned in the documentation.

In order to get up and running quickly, I chose to keep almost all the defaults with the exception of sleeptimeactive and sleeptimeinactive which I set to the max (this is recommended for a free account as it preserves CPU). When I started the bot it opened my first order instantly. Now that everything is up and running I will do some more reading to see what can be done to optimize the lending.

There are some limitations with the www.pythonanywhere.com free account. First, you can only have 2 consoles running and they limit CPU usage. In addition, they only allow you to run a web interface for a few months before it becomes inactive. I am also going to look into paying for an account on www.pythonanywhere.com so that I can overcome these limitations. At $5 per month, it is very reasonable, especially if you can run the bot on both exchanges.

Hope this is helpful to anyone who wants to leverage their cryptocurrencies and get the amazing compound interest machine working for them. Anyone else using these tools? Any tips for optimization?