This article discusses a famous money-burning scheme that most newbie cryptocurrency traders fall into. Fun fact, I actually fell for it when I first got into cryptocurrency, so stick around to learn from my mistakes.

The spark

Imagine this, you lost almost half of your money, you are depressed and angry, and at the same time, you want to get your money back in any way possible. Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened to me.

You remember a famous YouTuber who did an automated trading experiment and ended up with a nice small profit. So you go back to that old video and try to download the software. It turns out that it’s paid. You buy it anyways because it’s just five bucks.

Start the car

You connect your trading account to the software, run it, and leave your PC running all night. The following day, you wake to be 150% in the green. You jump from happiness and tell all your friends that you made that much literary overnight.

You transfer more funds into the trading software and earn even more. Then, you tell everybody about the software and think about finally buying a new PC with the latest Nvidia GPU series.

I woke up to a 90% loss on my third day of doing this. The software apparently used too much leverage, and everything blew up.

I made my own trading bot

A few years later, I decided to use my developer skills to create my own custom trading software and combine it with artificial intelligence. I made it and released it to the public in the form of a Twitter bot.

A few months after its launch, after many algorithm tweaks, I decided to test it with real money. I day-traded based on its signals for an entire week and lost a small chunk of money.

Unveiling the curtain

Let’s go back to our YouTube story and explain what happened in detail. But first, let me ask you a question, why do almost all crypto-related YouTube channels make videos about them experimenting with trading bots?

You might think they do it for views or just for entertainment. Wrong. Most of these videos result from trading software companies paying these YouTubers to promote their products indirectly.

An average user can even get paid for promoting their software through referral links. Invite as many users as you possibly can, and in return, you get a commission on your referrals’ deposits.

But why do we lose money?

Imagine this, you have a magical money-making machine that duplicates the amount of money you put into it. Would you tell anybody about it? Probably not, unless you want your house to be invaded by the FBI.

The same applies to trading bots. If you have a trading software that makes money consistently, would you share it with the public? Probably not, unless you want your trading strategy to be exposed and no longer be profitable.

Now comes the question, why on earth would anybody sell a profitable trading bot? Can’t they just make money from it? The answer is that the bot is not profitable.