What it does

BitVision is a terminal-based dashboard for Bitstamp that shows real-time Bitcoin charts, news, technical indicators, and blockchain network stats. It can also log into your exchange account to track balances, record transactions, and place manual or automated buy/sell orders.

The interesting bit

The authors are admirably honest: they know efficient-market theory says this shouldn’t work, and they built it anyway. The “automated trading engine” is a logistic regression retrained daily on technical indicators (RSI, MACD, Williams %R, etc.) plus on-chain data like hash rate and block difficulty. The model’s accuracy on held-out data is 56.7% — barely better than a coin flip, but the best of three classifiers they tried.

Key highlights

• Runs entirely in the terminal via Blessed.js; no Docker or server setup
• Fetches Bitstamp data, blockchain metrics from Quandl, and headlines from Coindesk
• Stores state in local JSON files; spawns Python child processes for data services
• Includes preprocessing pipeline: LOCF imputation, 3-day lag features, power transforms, random undersampling to counter BTC’s upward bias
• Authors explicitly label it alpha and a “proof of concept, not something you should trust to make money”

Caveats

• Still in alpha; README warns that “some of the trading features are buggy and not fully tested”
• Portfolio metrics (Sharpe Ratio, buy/sell accuracy, net profit) are marked “[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]”
• Cross-language Node.js/Python architecture is described by the authors themselves as complicated; they want to rewrite everything in Node

Verdict

Grab it if you want a slick terminal UI for watching Bitcoin data or you’re curious how far you can push a logistic regression in public. Skip it if you’re looking for a battle-tested trading bot — the authors would agree.