Is my partner being unethical?

I'm a programmer, pretty competent in my field.

This summer an acquaintance of mine (lets call him Mr.R) approached me with an unusual offer - he wanted to make a crypto trading bot. From him explaining the trading algorithm to me - I figured that writing the actual code would only take a few hours, one day tops, so out of curiosity, I decided to give it a try. Although it seemed fishy, It wasn't illegal, Mr.R didn't seem crazy, and the time investment wasn't big. He offered me a 50-50 partnership, and I agreed.

After some research, I wrote the code in Python, it worked with poloniex API. It took me only a day.

We launched the bot the next day and ran it for a few weeks - it was working as it should, using his trading logic and my code. It wasn't making money though, it had a slightly negative ROI, mostly bacause of trading fees.

After this Mr.R asked me to code some changes that would improve the bots performance (he was observing the trading troughout all this time, working out the things that needed to be improved). I oblidged and v2.0 was born. It was still losing money, but not as much anymore, the ROI was close to break-even, even with high fees that we were paying.

After a few more weeks Mr.R presented me with v3.0 of the trading logic. It was a lot more comprehensive then v1.0 and 2.0. At this point the coding became more difficult, required more research and tinkering with API timing and limitations. The code itself started to present a challenge. But I did as he asked, and we launched v3.0. And the bot actually performed well, it started trading at a positive ROI. Frankly, I was surprised, at first I just did it out of pure curiosity and not much faith, but now I saw that perhaps Mr.R was on to something.

In the following few month the bot was actually doing well and making a consistant profit, it traded enough volume for us to be sure that its not just a fluke ("not just positive variance" as he said). Mr.R was observing the trading and contacting me with minor changes that needed to be made. v3.01, v3.02 and so on. At first it wasn't a lot, but over time he started contacting me a lot more often then I was comfortable with. Constant changes, new ideas, new improvements etc. Sometimes he would just call to rumble, talk about whatever unrelated stuff that seemed to have no importance whatsoever, frankly, he started to annoy me. Like I had no other life outside of this bot project or Mr.R (maybe he didn't).

After a few month, at Mr.R's request, I actually had to code v4.0, which was a lot more difficult then anything before. I had to figure out an undocumented push API, tinkered a lot with timings and limitations, the logic was convoluted and required a lot of research to code properly. It was a big and stressfull project for me, on top of other things I was doing - I had to sacrifice a lot of my time and effort. And Mr.R kept hurrying me, trying to impose his initiative on my coding process, despite knowing nothing about coding.

The bot performs well, its profitable, but its not making a lot. Pennies every trade on average. 0.03-0.07% ROI after the fees. And the bad part about it is that the profit will not increase if we start trading bigger amounts. Its not scaleable - making a $100 trade will yield a $0.05 profit, but making a $1000 trade will not yield a $0.50 profit. Its too technical to explain why - but its like this. There is a treshhold at which the increase in position size will start to decrease the EV ROI of the trade, to a point of it becoming negative if increased too much. What this means is that the bot makes money by making a whole lot of very small trades, very often. Its trading many different currency pairs simultaniously, and tries to make as many small trades as possible, as fast as possible. And there is a limit to how many trading pairs are available, and how many API calls you can make, so, since position size can't be increased, and there is a limit on volume of trades, there is a limit on the bots hourly rate. As it is now, running on poloniex and trading up to 5 pairs at the same time - its hourly rate is not big. Its not worth the time investment so far.

At present day, we are on v4.6. The trading logic, according to Mr.R, can't be improved much any more. Only some minor things, maybe a v5.0 that will maybe push the ROI a bit further.

At this point, I sacrificed a lot more time and effort on this project then Mr.R did.

And recently he dropped this bombshell on me - we have to launch this bot on all the big trading platforms and trade as many pairs on all of them as possible! He made it sould easy - lets just do it and we become rich, we increase our volume of trades by many fold and buy a lambo in no time. Yeah, lol. That may be so, but he makes the work sound trivial, of course, he's not the one who will have to do it. He's almost delusional. He doen't get it - how much work this will be, how much time and effort it will require of me. Maybe he thinks hes project is the most important thing in the world, but I have other work too. "Yeah, just do it" - go figure out all the different API's on two dozen different trading platforms, half of which are not even documented, so easy! And in the meanwhile, Mr.R will just do nothing and get his 50%. Yeah, sounds fair! Some partnership this is...

However good Mr.R might be at writing trading algorithms - he doesn't know how to code, he doesnt even have a degree in anything. He's good at analythical thinking, but his math is rudimentary, hes limited by a lot of things. He didn't spent years of his life stydying and learning things like I did, at this point - he is just using me, and is too stubborn or greedy to to offer me proper compensation. He believes that he's entitled to 50% of the profit, despite not putting in almost any work and not even having the ability to do so even if he wanted to, due to lack of knowledge and education. He spend his college years wasting his life/drinking while I was sacrificing mine for knowledge and career. How is this fair?

Anyway, I like the project and I think it has potential. Mr.R's plan to launch it on many platforms is a solid plan, probably a profitable one, hes not really wrong. But no way I'm agreeing to him having 50% and doing close to no actual work to make it happen.

I had this discussion with him, not for the first time, and he just stubbornly disagrees, he admits that I'll be doing most of the work, but still thinks he is entitled to his 50%, as its his idea.

A few times I thought about it, that maybe somehow he's right. Frankly, I don't have much experience in the business world, and he's been doing some business before, nothing major though. He was a professional poker player for many years too.

We couldn't agree at the end, and we decided to part ways. I'm sure Mr.R will now look for another naive sucker who with agree to his conditions. He's good at convincing, he can talk people into things.

Before parting ways Mr.R asked me to confirm that I agree that I won't make any more bots using his trading idea without his permission. He's paranoid that I will cut him out. Just shows how "necessary" he actually is for the project...

We did agree that the current running bot on poloniex is still "ours", and whatever profit it generates over time will be shared.

​

Given the situations, what is your opinion on the following:

- Is there, by any stretch, a possibility that I'm wrong and Mr.R is entitled to his 50% despite me doing all the work from now on?

- Does Mr.R have the right to ask me not to write bots using his idea and use them myself (or sharing the code/alghorythms with others)?

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