I decided to launch my new site on the 12th birthday of Bitcoin… or should I say the genesis block (the first bitcoin transaction ever)? I don’t know if anyone envisioned what they were really creating, or if it would ever take off, but it did. It changed the world. It touched so many lives, taught many of us about volatility and what store of value truly is, and how money can come and go.
It redefined money.
Since this is just the beginning and Bitcoin hit its record high (peak was around around $34500 as of writing) today (coincidence? nope, there is no such thing) I decided to create a very simple yet working Bitcoin ticker. It’s a small HTML file that connects to Bitstamp’s websocket API and displays the current price in huge type on the middle. The code is available on my GitHub repo. I recently bought a display for mounting on my wall and a Raspberry Pi 4B to display my photos and illustrations on the wall, but since I had a fully functioning computer connected to a 32″ display at my arsenal I decided to tinker with it to see some crypto on the big screen:
It looks nice on the screen, though I’ve got something cooler. See it in action with the current price below (yup, it’s the actual thing, what’s below is the actual BTC/USD price as you are reading this):
I named my humble project Tickle, and feel free to copy or fork the code from GitHub and customize as you like. Go creative: display more things based on price changes, visualize data in unexpected ways, and explore the websockets API as there is a lot of public realtime data for streaming in.
After a disastrous 2020, Happy new year everyone (and Bitcoin)!
