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Show HN: Coinmon – Check Bitcoin Prices in Terminal

68 points by bichenkk 9y ago

bichenkk 9y ago
Just made a tool for you to check bitcoin prices on terminal for fun!
- LansanaCamara 9y ago
  Good stuff! Works nicely.
vnglst 9y ago
Nice work, I like it!!
gergderkson 9y ago
This is cool. It would be nice if it live updated.
JosephRedfern 9y ago
Looks cool. Live updating would make it even better. I've reported a very minor bug that I'm experiencing: https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1 https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1
- estsauver 9y ago
  You could use `watch -n 1 coinmon`.
  - JosephRedfern 9y ago
    That's true (with `--color`). An alternative way would be to connect to one of the various websocket APIs that stream pricing data, might be a bit friendlier than constant polling... but that'd be quite a lot of work!
TekMol 9y ago
By the way, what is up with Bitcoin? Why did it rise 10x this year?
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  Because I haven't had any money in it for most of the year. The couple of times I did have money in it -- for up to two months at a time -- it either fell slightly overall or stayed fairly flat. As soon as I sold, it jumped back up again. I'm currently accepting offers from Bitcoin investors to prevent me from buying back in again.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    The trick with Bitcoin is to do fuck all. Buy and forget. Come back in 10 yrs.
- kakarot 9y ago
  It's been doing that for years.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Higher general awareness would be my guess? Regular-money people start to invest. Too bad it only works as an investment and not something useful (considering how much energy is wasted on it).
  - wolco 9y ago
    A lot of people are using it for payments.
    - rplnt 9y ago
      For other currencies, sure. But minority of moved value would be used to pay for goods/services. Also, isn't the fee extremely high right now?
      - 9y ago
criddell 9y ago
Last week I listened to an interview with a man that has written some books on Bitcoin and other crypto currencies and in it he stated that he lives as much of his life on bitcoin as possible. He asks to be paid in bitcoin, he pays his employees in bitcoin, and generally uses it wherever possible. I was thinking about this and to somebody like that, it must seem like the USD is crashing. If bitcoin is your currency, then deflation is happening everywhere! Does he look at the housing market and marvel how everything is now around 80% less expensive than it was at the start of the year?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- equalarrow 9y ago
  Sounds like Andreas Antonopoulos. https://antonopoulos.com https://antonopoulos.com
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bryanculver 9y ago
  If it's from @aantonop on The Kevin Rose Show (which I just got done listening to myself) he did mention that until the volatility comes down, prices can't be pegged to the Bitcoin (or many cryptocurrencies for that matter). Example: At the moment of me writing this, let's say I wanted to be paid $50/hour for to develop a website. That is my desired value for my work. It's value today will large in part be the same next week, month, maybe even year. That would be 0.006086BTC. If I were to list that as my asking price instead of the less volatile $50, next week I could very quickly price myself out of the competition, surely goes the same next year (either direction). I continuously re-evaluate the the BTC asking rate based on the exchanged value to me. One day though, that won't be the case. Once the market stabilizes and dips and gains are less than 5% over the year, I can expect this to be unchanging and start valuing directly in BTC. He mentions it in the podcast that several countries with highly volatile national currencies actually use a more stable currency (such as USD) to list an asking price for a good, but are actually paid in the their currency's exchanged value to that amount. (I'm still looking for a reference to such occurrence). Although the value of what he was paid in yesterday has gone up (Got $5 worth of bitcoin yesterday, now worth $6) the cost of the product he buys tomorrow will inevitably go down (0.00075 today, 0.00060 tomorrow).
egeozcan 9y ago
Idea: Show bitcoin prices in terms of my hour's worth! $ coinmon -c X EUR/month You have to work Y hours for a bitcoin! I think this aligns just a little bit more with the idealistic view of BTC. Next step would be getting paid in BTC, and then, getting a fixed amount of BTC.
- jaymzcampbell 9y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted (maybe offtopic I guess?) but this is how I view pretty much all transactions I do. If I buy a fancy craft beer in a bar for £5 then that's not £5 to me but "X minutes" depending on where I'm working. I've also been comparing "time to earn X for Y bitcoin" when I purchase on gdax to give me a sense of relative grounding.
onion-soup 9y ago
why?
- purerandomness 9y ago
  How else would you check Bitcoin prices? Launch a whole web browser and visit a random site?
  - 0xJRS 9y ago
    I have these in my zshrc btc='echo "Btc(usd): $"$(curl -sL https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/ https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/ | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )' eth='echo "Eth(usd): $"$(curl -sL https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/ https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/ | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )'
adtac 9y ago
$ coinmon() { > curl "https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/?convert=$1" | jq ".[0] .price_$1" > } $ coinmon eur "6988.4723188" In case you don't want to install 61 packages [1] :) I don't know when/where nodejs development went wrong, but there's definitely something wrong. [1] http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon
- progx 9y ago
  and curl did not have dependencies? The installation of coinmon and all its deps is faster, as i can your post. But you are right, it uses incredible 33 MB of my disk space, so i now have only 300000 MB left. OMG doomed!
  - adtac 9y ago
    You're missing my point: nodejs is really not a suitable candidate for tiny CLI programs like this. If the author is just learning node, there's nothing wrong with it, of course. In any case, the bash one-liner is just an alternative :) Also, this kind of "it uses just 33 MB" culture is exactly what's wrong with node: 33 MB is small enough, but what about real programs? Would you still freely add trivial dependencies? This would get unwieldy very fast. There's also the security aspect that comes with relying on 61 dependencies. What if one of the dependencies is compromised (as it happened recently)?
  - psyc 9y ago
    And if we had exabyte drives, would there be nothing suspect about a CLI utility taking petabytes? Are we not engineers / programmers?
- joshbaptiste 9y ago
  Indeed.. I'll probably write a Nim version as I prefer a single binary and not rely on having a JVM, Node, Python etc.. VM and associated libraries pre-installed.
  - cobookman 9y ago
omurphy27 9y ago
Awesome work! I'll no longer have to keep a browser tab with coinmarketcap open.
renas 9y ago
Same stuff in euro for Dutch exchange bl3p, with colors and little graph, all CLI https://github.com/renasboy/bl3p-cli https://github.com/renasboy/bl3p-cli
sleavey 9y ago
Here's my almost pure Python equivalent [1]. [1] https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote
Btcpx 9y ago
Hi can you explain this in plain English please?
uberswe 9y ago
I wrote something similar with Go a while back which is configured via a json file and runs in the terminal https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang-cryptotracker https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang-cryptotracker
ddxxgg 9y ago
I was bored, so I decided to make a Nim equivalent using only the standard library. Turned out to be exactly 55 lines https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead3aa66a https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead...
xkln 9y ago
> 61 packages That is truly disgusting. WTF are we doing?
lee101 9y ago
Awesome stuff :D I'm founder of https://bitbank.nz https://bitbank.nz I would love to see someone build something based on the live crypto forecast data we have, I'm happy for you to reverse engineer/use the same api that our frontend uses, we also have a firebase API so people can subscribe to live updates, Let me know your email if your from HN and ill give you some free time to use the platform :) We also have a referral program where you can make .003btc each paying user. Thanks!

68 points by bichenkk 9y ago

bichenkk 9y ago

Just made a tool for you to check bitcoin prices on terminal for fun!

LansanaCamara 9y ago
Good stuff! Works nicely.

vnglst 9y ago

Nice work, I like it!!

gergderkson 9y ago

This is cool. It would be nice if it live updated.

JosephRedfern 9y ago

Looks cool. Live updating would make it even better. I've reported a very minor bug that I'm experiencing: https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1 https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1

estsauver 9y ago
You could use `watch -n 1 coinmon`.
- JosephRedfern 9y ago
  That's true (with `--color`). An alternative way would be to connect to one of the various websocket APIs that stream pricing data, might be a bit friendlier than constant polling... but that'd be quite a lot of work!

TekMol 9y ago

By the way, what is up with Bitcoin? Why did it rise 10x this year?

thaumaturgy 9y ago
Because I haven't had any money in it for most of the year. The couple of times I did have money in it -- for up to two months at a time -- it either fell slightly overall or stayed fairly flat. As soon as I sold, it jumped back up again. I'm currently accepting offers from Bitcoin investors to prevent me from buying back in again.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  The trick with Bitcoin is to do fuck all. Buy and forget. Come back in 10 yrs.
kakarot 9y ago
It's been doing that for years.
rplnt 9y ago
Higher general awareness would be my guess? Regular-money people start to invest. Too bad it only works as an investment and not something useful (considering how much energy is wasted on it).
- wolco 9y ago
  A lot of people are using it for payments.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    For other currencies, sure. But minority of moved value would be used to pay for goods/services. Also, isn't the fee extremely high right now?
    - 9y ago

criddell 9y ago

Last week I listened to an interview with a man that has written some books on Bitcoin and other crypto currencies and in it he stated that he lives as much of his life on bitcoin as possible. He asks to be paid in bitcoin, he pays his employees in bitcoin, and generally uses it wherever possible. I was thinking about this and to somebody like that, it must seem like the USD is crashing. If bitcoin is your currency, then deflation is happening everywhere! Does he look at the housing market and marvel how everything is now around 80% less expensive than it was at the start of the year?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
equalarrow 9y ago
Sounds like Andreas Antonopoulos. https://antonopoulos.com https://antonopoulos.com
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bryanculver 9y ago
If it's from @aantonop on The Kevin Rose Show (which I just got done listening to myself) he did mention that until the volatility comes down, prices can't be pegged to the Bitcoin (or many cryptocurrencies for that matter). Example: At the moment of me writing this, let's say I wanted to be paid $50/hour for to develop a website. That is my desired value for my work. It's value today will large in part be the same next week, month, maybe even year. That would be 0.006086BTC. If I were to list that as my asking price instead of the less volatile $50, next week I could very quickly price myself out of the competition, surely goes the same next year (either direction). I continuously re-evaluate the the BTC asking rate based on the exchanged value to me. One day though, that won't be the case. Once the market stabilizes and dips and gains are less than 5% over the year, I can expect this to be unchanging and start valuing directly in BTC. He mentions it in the podcast that several countries with highly volatile national currencies actually use a more stable currency (such as USD) to list an asking price for a good, but are actually paid in the their currency's exchanged value to that amount. (I'm still looking for a reference to such occurrence). Although the value of what he was paid in yesterday has gone up (Got $5 worth of bitcoin yesterday, now worth $6) the cost of the product he buys tomorrow will inevitably go down (0.00075 today, 0.00060 tomorrow).

egeozcan 9y ago

Idea: Show bitcoin prices in terms of my hour's worth! $ coinmon -c X EUR/month You have to work Y hours for a bitcoin! I think this aligns just a little bit more with the idealistic view of BTC. Next step would be getting paid in BTC, and then, getting a fixed amount of BTC.

jaymzcampbell 9y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted (maybe offtopic I guess?) but this is how I view pretty much all transactions I do. If I buy a fancy craft beer in a bar for £5 then that's not £5 to me but "X minutes" depending on where I'm working. I've also been comparing "time to earn X for Y bitcoin" when I purchase on gdax to give me a sense of relative grounding.

onion-soup 9y ago

why?

purerandomness 9y ago
How else would you check Bitcoin prices? Launch a whole web browser and visit a random site?
- 0xJRS 9y ago
  I have these in my zshrc btc='echo "Btc(usd): $"$(curl -sL https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/ https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/ | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )' eth='echo "Eth(usd): $"$(curl -sL https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/ https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/ | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )'

adtac 9y ago

$ coinmon() { > curl "https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/?convert=$1" | jq ".[0] .price_$1" > } $ coinmon eur "6988.4723188" In case you don't want to install 61 packages [1] :) I don't know when/where nodejs development went wrong, but there's definitely something wrong. [1] http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon

progx 9y ago
and curl did not have dependencies? The installation of coinmon and all its deps is faster, as i can your post. But you are right, it uses incredible 33 MB of my disk space, so i now have only 300000 MB left. OMG doomed!
- adtac 9y ago
  You're missing my point: nodejs is really not a suitable candidate for tiny CLI programs like this. If the author is just learning node, there's nothing wrong with it, of course. In any case, the bash one-liner is just an alternative :) Also, this kind of "it uses just 33 MB" culture is exactly what's wrong with node: 33 MB is small enough, but what about real programs? Would you still freely add trivial dependencies? This would get unwieldy very fast. There's also the security aspect that comes with relying on 61 dependencies. What if one of the dependencies is compromised (as it happened recently)?
- psyc 9y ago
  And if we had exabyte drives, would there be nothing suspect about a CLI utility taking petabytes? Are we not engineers / programmers?
joshbaptiste 9y ago
Indeed.. I'll probably write a Nim version as I prefer a single binary and not rely on having a JVM, Node, Python etc.. VM and associated libraries pre-installed.
- cobookman 9y ago

omurphy27 9y ago

Awesome work! I'll no longer have to keep a browser tab with coinmarketcap open.

renas 9y ago

Same stuff in euro for Dutch exchange bl3p, with colors and little graph, all CLI https://github.com/renasboy/bl3p-cli https://github.com/renasboy/bl3p-cli

sleavey 9y ago

Here's my almost pure Python equivalent [1]. [1] https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote

Btcpx 9y ago

Hi can you explain this in plain English please?

uberswe 9y ago

I wrote something similar with Go a while back which is configured via a json file and runs in the terminal https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang-cryptotracker https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang-cryptotracker

ddxxgg 9y ago

I was bored, so I decided to make a Nim equivalent using only the standard library. Turned out to be exactly 55 lines https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead3aa66a https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead...

xkln 9y ago

> 61 packages That is truly disgusting. WTF are we doing?

lee101 9y ago

Awesome stuff :D I'm founder of https://bitbank.nz https://bitbank.nz I would love to see someone build something based on the live crypto forecast data we have, I'm happy for you to reverse engineer/use the same api that our frontend uses, we also have a firebase API so people can subscribe to live updates, Let me know your email if your from HN and ill give you some free time to use the platform :) We also have a referral program where you can make .003btc each paying user. Thanks!