Hi James, bitcoin is an interesting one to trade, unfortunately you cannot actually buy bitcoin using Quantopian, it can only be used as a signal. You could use Quantopian's backtester Zipline locally, that would let you simulate trades using the bitcoin data.

I used bitcoin data from quandl and wrote a quick script to test a 5/20 MACD algo locally, maybe something like this will work for you.

import Quandl  
from zipline import TradingAlgorithm  
from zipline.api import *


# Gets a trailing window of prices  
@batch_transform(window_length=20)  
def _history(data):  
    return data['price']['BTC']


def initialize(context):  
    context.invested = False


def handle_data(context, data):  
    price_history = _history(data)  
    if price_history is None:  
        return  
    fastMA = price_history.tail(5).mean()  
    slowMA = price_history.mean()  
    macd = fastMA - slowMA  
    if macd > 0 and not context.invested:  
        order_target_percent('BTC', 1.0)  
        context.invested = True  
    else:  
        order_target('BTC', 0)  
        context.invested = False  


if __name__ == '__main__':  
    # Download the price data from Quandl, you will want to get  
    # an auth token from them otherwise the requests will be limited.  
    data = Quandl.get('BAVERAGE/USD')  
    # Select the price column - 24 hour weighted average price  
    data = data[['24h Average']]  
    # Change the name to BTC  
    data.columns = ['BTC']  
    # Localize the dates to UTC otherwise you will get an error  
    data.index = data.index.tz_localize('UTC')  
    # initialize the trading algorithm with the  
    # initialize and handle_data functions  
    algo = TradingAlgorithm(initialize=initialize,  
                            handle_data=handle_data)  
    # Run it. results will contain all the stats for the test.  
    results = algo.run(data)  
    # Plot it  
    results.portfolio_value.plot()

Awesome! Thanks!!

David this is an interesting post. How i can keep a live trading on the BTC zipline algo. If I understand zipline runs as a backtest not a live production? is there any parameters to be send to keep running in travelling and pull data from Quandl?

Thanks
EG

Errors..... File "", line 18
results.portfolio_value.plot()
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax