Speaking of BTC tickers, I also recently discovered this amazing, pure HTML, Bloomberg-terminal-like realtime BTC price site:

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/

I like this one as well. I doesn't have as much data, but I think the area chart is easier to read than the candlestick.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets/

Bitcoinwisdom lets you change the chart style under settings.

This is similar but seems to have more order book data: http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

If only it didn't hang on "Loading..."

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.

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

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.

Volatility won't "go away", but it may diminish over time if bitcoin becomes a currency and not a commodity. It will, however, still be a deflationary currency which means the value of an amount of bitcoin should trend upwards. So if this gains traction as a currency and the speculators stop rushing the numbers up higher than what the economy can actually support, BTC might find a stable deflation rate and its volatility should diminish. (I'm actually very skeptical of both deflationary currencies and bitcoin in particular, but this is the bitcoin proponents' theory as I understand it.)

To think bitcoin can acquire a stable deflation rate is to assume that the economy stops cycling, that's simply not going to happen. Every boom will cause a massive deflation period, it can't be stable.

Speculation is the least of bitcoin's problems. I think a crypto-currency is inevitable, but it'll be one that has a mechanism in it to inflate and deflate to match the demand for currency in the market. During a boom there's a higher demand for currency and the supply must increase if prices are to remain stable, otherwise deflation is going to happen in an amount that matches the boom; that's not stable.

So you're saying the Fed prints dollars by the millions during booms and destroys them again by the millions during busts?

Who cares if prices stay stable or not? The value represented by whatever price is attached to those things won't change

The government has more than one control over the current money supply, fractional reserve lending allows the money supply to grow and shrink as demand requires while the fed attempts to maintain an overall small inflation rate to avoid the ill effects of deflation.

> Who cares if prices stay stable or not?

Everyone who understand economics even a little bit.

> The value represented by whatever price is attached to those things won't change

People aren't paid in value and they don't spend value, they're paid in currency and they spend currency and they all care that prices are stable because their paychecks aren't going to suddenly change.

If it is not useful as a value store except to speculators, then it still has plenty of utility as a value transfer mechanism or a universal FOREX.

No one said it didn't have value, merely that it's not a good currency because it won't have a stable value if used as a currency.

Once something functions as a mature currency, everything is priced against it, so it is no longer volatile.

In contrast, when something functions as a commodity, it is highly volatile.

Right now, bitcoin functions as a commodity, but perhaps someday, it will function as a mature currency.

As a side note, your comment is bizarre. There is no reason to think a fixed supply would lead to volatility. Quite the opposite. A changing supply leads to volatility. You can still avoid high volatility in that case if the rate of change is well-established and the people controlling the rate of change are trusted (as is the case now with the USD, but perhaps that will not always be so).

> Once something functions as a mature currency, everything is priced against it, so it is no longer volatile.

The economy isn't nearly so simple. Pricing something in a currency doesn't automatically make the currency stable, a stable currency comes from the currency having enough liquidity to serve as a means of exchange for the wealth it's representing but not too much. Any sudden increase or decrease in that represented wealth will cause demand for the currency to either increase or decrease and a currency fixed in supply cannot increase/decrease supply to match the demand so it must necessarily inflation/deflate in value instead.

> As a side note, your comment is bizarre. There is no reason to think a fixed supply would lead to volatility.

It's not at all bizarre if you think about it, a fixed currency will always be volatile because the wealth it represents isn't fixed, markets grow and shrink and if the currency can't then a booming market automatically means currency deflation because that fixed amount of currency must now represent a larger amount of wealth creation. With a fixed currency, a boom in productivity and wealth creation will cause massive deflation in the currency.

I honestly don't know how anyone thinks a fixed amount of currency can possibly work when the wealth it's standing in for is not fixed. The market cycles up and down continually and the supply of currency, if prices are to be kept stable, must also.

You can't have stable prices with a fixed amount of currency, it's not logical. One of them will cycle to match the market's ups and downs. So either prices will be violate or the currency must allow inflation/deflation of the currency supply to keep prices stable.

I think you are actually making very good points, and I learned something.

That said, I am not assuming a major boom/bust cycle, so given that assumption, our two positions are easily reconcilable.

I am assuming a steady rate of growth of the global economy. In that case, there is deflation over time, yes, but investors known that ahead of time, so some of it is already priced into the value of the currency.

I think that the boom-bust cycles are vastly exacerbated by regulatory intervention. For instance, the current recession we are in in the US was entirely caused by Fannie and Freddie buying tons of shit mortgages for decades and the notion of "too big to fail" plus regulatory pressure leading to unhealthy consolidation and gambling in the banking industry.

In a truly free market (which maybe we will never see again so who cares), there may still be glitches in the market that cause temporary busts, but those should become increasingly rare over time as the economic system becomes more globalized, robust, and decentralized.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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)

The same goes for any software

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

The risk seems higher, but I'm not convinced that's anything but cognitive salience.

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.

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.

Definitely true a bitcoin-related app is going to have a much greater percentage of hitting people with bitcoin wallets than, say, a crack for photoshop. But, the point being that any software from an unknown or untrusted source should be installed with great caution.

Misses definitely cost something. PPI (pay per install) affiliate programs have a floor price (iirc about $0.10 - $0.50 per install last i checked). Its higher than e-mail spam, but even that has a price. Targeted traffic costs more, but has higher conversion ratios. I don't think bitcoin wallets are so generic that you'd get a measurable number of wallets on generic traffic. You'd have to get many thousands of installs to even get one.

Is there a pay-per-install affiliate program involved here?

Your claim that "misses don't cost much" wasn't about the OP, it was about a hypothetical thought experiment. At the very least, misses cost the labor/opportunity of building, marketing, and distributing a generic executable (eg malware inside a windows screen saver). PPI payout rate provides a market estimate of the cost for that service.

Ah, your argument was "a miss here is a missed opportunity to do something else, so they should be pricing in the opportunity cost." Valid, I think, but I've got to give the ramifications more thought for any sort of substantive response.

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

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

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

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 :)

I have written a Bitcoin terminal using ncurses in Ruby:

https://github.com/penberg/btct

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Not bad. One of the better price tickers I've seen.

thank you for trying :p

How come btc-e is missing?

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

it will be supported in the next version :)

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

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

Why do I need NPM for this?

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

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

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

Macports or home brew for npm and you are fine.