A working, feature rich bid bot.

Introduction

For the last couple of weeks, I've been posting a lot less frequently - that's mostly thanks to a pet project I've undertaken - a working bid bot!

In this post I plan to detail all the features I've built in and also give you a few pointers to it's operation.

https://github.com/sisygoboom/bid_bot_steemit

Firstly, what is a bid bot?

If you don't already know what a bid bot is, take a trip to https://steembottracker.com/ and you'll have a pretty good idea. Every 2.4 hours, a bot shares its 100% upvote between users who have placed a bid for a share of that vote.

Well, people have already created bid bots, why is this code relevant?

Yes, there are already bots in existence, some of them are huge. But a lot of that code is closed source, it would be bad business practice to share it.

One bot owner, Hive account@therising made a post sharing their code which I thought was very generous...

However I like to do stuff from the ground up so I can have an intimate understanding of the code. I also noticed his code didn't have some features I was after and was difficult to read.

My bot, Hive account@steemroasted, is now finished, unfortunately I'm not able to get it onto Steem Bot Tracker because:

It has too little steem power.
I live in student accommodation and we're not allowed static IP addresses.

Feel free to send it a bid though, it still works.

Features

Auto-payout to delegators every 24 hours
- Choose payout percentage
- Blacklist delegators to prevent refund loops with other bots
- Choose minimum delegation ammount
- Keeps earnings in an external file
Steem Bot Tracker API compatability
Automatic refunds
- Memo explaining why bid was invalid
  - Age
  - Already voted
  - Already bid
  - Invalid URL
  - Bid too small
Comment upvoting
Can deal with blockstream downtime (still needs a little work)
- Updates JSON metadata to let people know bot is down
- Keeps a log of downtime
Accepts SBD and STEEM
- Payouts to delegators in both
- Converts both to USD at payout using Coin Market Cap for optimal accuracy

Use

Running this script requires a few other things.

Python anaconda

To make this I've been using Anaconda for Python and the Spyder IDE. I strongly recommend it if you're on windows as I had problems with the scrypt library on base python. Here's a great guide.

Additional Packages

Hosting

You only need this bit if you plan on putting your bot on steem bot tracker.

WAMP

My script saves the data file to c:/wamp64/www/

WAMP is an Apache server for windows and allows you to host files on your PC by making it into a server. Out of the box, it's only designed for local networks so you'll need to do some tinkering.

Of course, this is for windows users on home PCs, if you have a better option I urge you to go for it.

Set yourself a static IP (I can't do this thanks to my ISP so unfortunately haven't been able to test past this point).
Open port 443 on your PC (since steem bot tracker requires https, not http).
You'll also need to mess around with the settings files (there's loads of tutorials online) so Apache knows to use https/SSL port 443 instead of http port 80.
Change some more settings so Apache accepts connections from external machines.
Get an SSL certificate for your IP/domain name. Using openSSL won't work as a self signed certificate is considered unsafe. Hosting your own webside becomes a huge advantage here as you likeley already have SSL certificates and a domain name.
Buy a domain and bind it to your IP.

Alternatively

Online code hosting services

https://www.heroku.com/ lets you run python scripts on their site. However their services are more geared towards web hosting and dJango applications - I'm also not sure how file storage works on there and users have said applications hosted on there have a habit of going to sleep which would be unacceptable for a real-time script like this.

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ is also a possible choice, they do have limited hardware usage for free. You can only make so many requests or use so many process cycles per second - not great for a script running two threads at a time. I also tried installing steem python on their bash console and got errors, I tried the custom Scrypt fork from the Anaconda tutorial but it seems to be only for windows.

Maybe there's a way around this but I don't know of it yet.

Customisation

Most of the customisation you'll be performing will be in this section here. There are bits in the main part of the code that you'll need to tinker with as well such as the update_account_profile commands. I'd strongly recommend reading the code and learning what does what - I've annotated all of it to make the process easier :)

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors