================================================================
  LONG DEGENERACY — paper trading bot
  Your machine. Your data. Nothing at risk.
================================================================

WHAT THIS IS

  A practice run. The bot watches the real Lighter order book and
  works out what your orders WOULD have done, on a pretend account
  of $10,000. It sends nothing to the exchange.

  At the end you get a table of which markets paid you and which
  quietly bled — so you can decide whether this is worth real money.


WHAT IT CANNOT DO

  It cannot place an order. Not "will not" — cannot. The code that
  signs and sends orders is not in this download. You can check:
  there is no signer.py in the lighter_bot folder.

  It never asks for a wallet key, a seed phrase, or a password.
  It never asks for money.

  The only secret here is your dashboard token, which lets the bot
  post progress to your account page and does nothing else.


HOW TO START

  Windows      double-click  run.bat
  Mac / Linux  open a terminal here and run  ./run.sh

  First run asks for your token, then takes about a minute to set
  itself up. After that it starts in seconds.

  Get your token from the site: ACCOUNT tab ->
  "RUN IT ON YOUR OWN MACHINE" -> GET MY BOT TOKEN


HOW TO STOP

  Press Ctrl+C in the window,
  or create an empty file called  stop.txt  in this folder.

  Either way it exits cleanly. Closing the window works too — the
  bot holds no real position, so there is nothing to unwind.


WHILE IT RUNS

  It will often say  IDLE — none of 40 markets passes your gates.
  That is the bot working, not the bot broken. It refuses markets
  where the spread is too thin for how fast the price moves. Some
  days nothing qualifies for hours. A bot that always trades is a
  bot with no standard.

  Leave it running as long as you like. Your laptop sleeping is
  fine; it picks up where it left off.


FILES THIS CREATES

  settings.json   your token and settings  (treat like a password)
  paper.db        your results             (SQLite — yours to keep)
  status.json     what it is doing right now
  .venv/          its private Python setup
  stop.txt        create this to stop it


IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG

  "Python was not found"
      Install from python.org/downloads
      On Windows, tick "Add python.exe to PATH" on the first screen.

  "could not install dependencies"
      Usually no internet, or a company firewall blocking pip.
      Try again on a normal connection.

  Nothing appears on the dashboard
      The token may be wrong or revoked. Delete settings.json,
      mint a fresh token on the ACCOUNT tab, and start again.

  It crashed
      It restarts itself and backs off. If it keeps crashing,
      send us the last 20 lines the window printed.


THE HONEST BIT

  Market making earns a small edge many times and loses when the
  price runs one way. In our own testing the same settings made
  +5.5 basis points per trade in a quiet market and lost 5.9 in a
  trending one — same asset, same day.

  This week costs you nothing. Real money later can lose. If your
  paper week is not clearly positive on its own, without counting
  any points, do not fund an account.
