I've never jumped into a nascent market like this before. I would imagine historical data sets with sufficient depth aren't available yet to run stat driven strategies. Is some form of selective liquidity provision the most sensible way to enter a market at this stage?
There are no historical datasets in message by message resolution, that's correct. In addition the infrastructure is so crappy that potential HFT players are angrily flipping tables.
So at the moment, it's pure discretionary trading skill that makes the most money. The fact that you cannot run some math over a dataset you bought from Nanex, hire a bunch of FPGA programmers to set up your algo at the colocation site while you pay a fortune for a priority datafeed is what makes this market so great at the moment.
It's an environment for cowboy traders and not a pay to play market for popped collar ivy league arugula and white wine douches.
There are some bots out there but most of them are market makers quoting from another liquidity source 1for1 and even they get their balls kicked when an exchange has 20 second lags because of a spam quote attack or a hot market.
I honestly don't give a flying fuck about crypto currencies, but the market is a free for all at the moment so the one with the most skill wins...not the guy with the deepest pockets and microwave towers...that is about to change when CME comes in.
On the other hand, you cannot trade size. It's not worth it for the big boys and you'll even have trouble trading like 100k notional intraday depending on the exchange.
BUT: even if you don't trade it, it's worth having a look at crypto's because there aren't those layers and layers of cross correlated algo quotes (Like ZN gets hammered->dollar spikes 20ticks->Bids in Hard Red Winter Wheat gets pulled).
So you can learn a lot about how markets actually work when they aren't distorted by monopolist middlemen (HFT), artificial barriers of entry(regulation, exchange memberships) and schemes that only cater a few (payment for orderflow, ISO's).