Command-line Bitcoin price board

It saddens me that so much focus is being put on the price speculation aspect of Bitcoin. 9 out of 10 articles I see about Bitcoin are about its price. The last Senate hearing on Bitcoin was already quite aggressive about this, and some suggested that maybe Bitcoin should be regulated as a commodity instead.

Hopefully this price speculation frenzy of Bitcoin users won't lead to its demise, and to Bitcoin being declared (or at least thought about) as irreparably not a currency.

SkyMarshal3• 13 years ago

Agreed, I feel the same way, though I'm not surprised b/c price fluctuations (and ex-post narrative explaining them) is what the mainstream financial press pays most attention to anyway, no matter the medium.

bonestamp22• 13 years ago

If retail transactions reach significant volume, I think speculation will be significantly reduced since the value should be more stable like fiat currencies. So, hopefully it's just a short term problem.

lectrick3• 13 years ago

If its use as a medium of exchange continues to spread, it is quite possible that the volatility will go away. Even national fiat currencies have some volatility, but it's vastly subdued due to the sheer amount of people using it as a currency, I believe

gnaritas5• 13 years ago

I don't see how the volatility will ever go away when the supply of the currency is fixed; that's a recipe for volatility.

nilkn• 13 years ago

Bitcoin has a lot of strange features or flaws, depending on viewpoint, that many people seem to blow off. Right now, for instance, the entire network can only support something like 10 transactions per second. That's clearly not going scale. Also, the much-touted microtransactions are unlikely to really make any sense with onchain transactions due to miner fees, which will eventually become commonplace as an incentive to mining as the block rewards become smaller and smaller and the difficulty increases. As a result, offchain providers are becoming more popular, which for many of us seems to defeat the entire point of bitcoin--it reintroduces trusted third parties.

fsiefken• 13 years ago

Currently the average is 1 transaction per second. The transaction per second limit of 7 tps is artifical and will be lifted in the future: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability Bitcoin developer Timothy Lee explains more about it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/12...

atmosx3• 13 years ago

As a currency it has already failed but as an asset I think it's here to stay.

znowi• 13 years ago

How come btc-e is missing?

https://btc-e.com/api/documentation

guoyu2• 13 years ago

it will be supported in the next version :)

SkyMarshal3• 13 years ago

Nice work, quick & simple. Installed. Step 2: Make an ncurses version.

girvo• 13 years ago

I love ncurses. I love it so much, that on my Ubuntu laptop, on startup I swap over to tty1 and fire up WordGrinder to work on my novel, or Tmux + TextAdept to do some web dev. It's soothing :)

penberg• 13 years ago

I have written a Bitcoin terminal using ncurses in Ruby:

https://github.com/penberg/btct

azmenthe2• 13 years ago

Somewhat unrelated, but I made a bitcoin LED ticker, here's a link to an early testing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxRIeb22QGI

I later added some other price information (gold, usd, s&p500)

alfg• 13 years ago

This is great. Do you have any source code hosted anywhere? Or the software/hardware stack used?

azmenthe2• 13 years ago

I haven't put up the source because it's pretty coupled with the hardware, that sign in particular is a BetaBrite. I used a Raspberry Pi and a ruby script to drive it. I was able to find a ruby library for the sign.

cnp• 13 years ago

Just what I've always wanted :) :) :) :)

drcode2• 13 years ago

Looks nice- Everyone just remember that if you don't understand the source code or download it in a way that allows a "man in the middle" attack, there's nothing to stop this kind of program (or an MITM-altered version of it) from emptying out every bitcoin wallet you have installed on your computer.

(I for one will install this program though, on my non-wallet pc)

topbanana• 13 years ago

The same goes for any software

drcode2• 13 years ago

Agreed, the risk is just particularly high for little gizmos targeted especially at bitcoiners.

tmp3098512• 13 years ago

I built a Docker image so you can run the script safely in a sandbox without even installing Node.js:

$ docker pull mlgx/turingou-btc

$ docker run -i -t mlgx/turingou-btc

eyko• 13 years ago

You can also run it as an unprivileged user (in osx, I think the user `nobody` might be a good choice).

jakejake2• 13 years ago

There's nothing really unique about this compared to any other app that you allow to run on your computer. It's a great reason to only install from trusted sources and be very wary of cracked software, keygens, etc.

dllthomas4• 13 years ago

Well, a higher percentage of users of this are likely to be interested in bitcoin. Since what matters is "total number of bitcoin wallets you access" and misses don't really cost you much, I don't know that it matters, though.

drcross• 13 years ago

How would one install in OSX? Do you need nmp first?

atmosx3• 13 years ago

Macports or home brew for npm and you are fine.

traviscline• 13 years ago

Just pushed a tool that shows you your margins using the MtGox streaming api: https://github.com/tmc/btcmargin

VMG• 13 years ago

Interesting for Gnome3 users: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/648/bitcoin-markets/

atmosx3• 13 years ago

I wot my own... And was displaying the prices at the desktop... It's just 10 lines of ruby and geektool.

mariusz79• 13 years ago

CLI application in javascript? It's official - we're doomed. There is no hope.

newbrict• 13 years ago

don't know if this is much better but, https://github.com/Newbrict/bitcoin-prices

lcasela• 13 years ago

Why do I need NPM for this?

nyargh• 13 years ago

curl --silent https://bitpay.com/api/rates | jq '.[0].rate'

Is what I use to get the current BitPay rate in USD

Command-line Bitcoin price board

Related Stories