It is an interesting time for the Bitcoin, with a lot of speculation, volatility, and investment in the wildly popular cryptocurrency. Providing a great examples for demonstrating how to use Streamdata.io for staying in tune with what is happening minute by minute, by streaming bitcoin market changes the browser, desktop, or mobile phone. To help demonstrate what is possible, we’ve proxied the Blockchain Exchange Rates API, providing a streaming bitcoin conversion rate into a variety of global currencies.
To get real time Bitcoin currency conversion, all you have to do is proxy the API using Streamdata.io, allowing you to fire up the stream at the command line using the following command:
curl -v "https://streamdata.motwin.net/http://blockchain.info/ticker&X-Sd-Token={your_streamdata_token}"
(You can get a token by registering, you’ll be granted a free account)
Now you can keep an eye on Bitcoin exchange rates in real time, and update any web, mobile, or desktop UI with the latest exchange rates. Bitcoin has a websockets API for getting real time updates, but the overhead to handle the stream is higher than a simple Server-Sent Events (SSE) version, and if you aren’t making purchasing decisions, and buying or selling in the same connection, then a websockets API is just overkill.
If you need an example of how you can visualize currency exchange rates in a simple, real time interface, we recommend checking out the 1Forge currency conversion widget, which provides a solid example for standard currency conversions, which could easily be reworked to showcase Bitcoin exchange rates. Embeddable widgets represent a great opportunity to provide usable cryptocurrency utilities, but also provide a great way to develop a distribution network, where you can begin to monetize every destination you can get to publish your widgets–all you have to do is create a suite of useful widgets that website property owners will want to embed on their web pages.