[HN Gopher] Show HN: I learned to code and built a crypto analyt...
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Show HN: I learned to code and built a crypto analytics platform
Hey everyone! I am an enthusiast trader and a year ago I had this
idea to create a free-to-use website that would feature all the
most essential tools that traders would use on a daily basis. So I
learned to code and build it--I did everything including design,
texts, code, and SEO--which took me 12 months to launch and a year
and a half to make it look like it currently does. I was into
marketing and design before, but I didn't know barely anything
about coding. The website is built using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and
Typescript with Framer Motion animations and lots of APIs. I'm
actively working on the project and in the following months I will
release a huge update that will feature a renewed interface and
access to real time on chain data and analytics. Feel free to ask
any questions and thanks a lot for reading this, it means a lot to
me. Any feedback and your opinions would be highly appreciated.
Author : buckwhitzer
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-10-10 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tradingdigits.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tradingdigits.io)
| Gibson_v1 wrote:
| awesome. i'm trying to get better at coding myself and going to
| try a financial project soon. i wanted to do something with the
| current earnings reports coming out but that'll probably have to
| wait til next quarter at the rate i'm moving
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Just do it bit by bit and eventually it will get done faster
| thank you think. I'm working on this since May 2022 so it's
| been a massively long road.
|
| Good luck, man!
| tornato7 wrote:
| Looks nice. You should definitely add Grayscale trust discounts!
| root_axis wrote:
| fading transition animation is fine when clicking around, but
| it's an antipattern in the back button.
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, I'd never have noticed it myself. I
| kind of normalized it. Will fix it in this month's update.
| chompychop wrote:
| This is pretty cool! :) What resources did you find most helpful
| in your learning journey?
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thanks so much! Most definitely can recommend scrimba.com, it's
| basically the only resource I used. I took a paid Frontend
| Developer Career Path, but there are lots of free courses too.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Really cool.
|
| Are all the data feeds you are using free?
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thanks, man! Yes, all APIs are free. Also, it's hosted on
| Vercel so it's free too because their free tier is really
| generous. The only thing I pay for is the domain name.
| tornato7 wrote:
| That's one thing you really have to love about crypto.
| Getting the equivalent data from a stock exchange would cost
| you $$$ and come with all sorts of license agreements and
| restrictions on republishing the data.
| ladberg wrote:
| FYI minor bug: if you sort the exchanges table, within a few
| seconds it'll refresh and go back to the original ranking
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thank you for noting that! I just checked and yes, the table
| gets rerendered upon data refetching every 60 seconds,
| resetting the table sorting.
|
| Will fix it in this month's update, which will be released in
| around two weeks together with new Wallet Tracker tool and
| other improvements.
| mark_mart wrote:
| Curious what would Wallet Tracker feature does?
| Nevermark wrote:
| Might be nice to be able to include crypto relevant stocks or
| funds.
|
| Might be beyond your scope, but any tax estimates regarding sale
| decisions is always helpful, and can save some grief.
|
| That is a serious request, though I don't recommend anyone else
| doing this.
|
| But the legitimate context here is a crypto tool, so here is my
| use case:
|
| Microstrategy's market cap reflects a growing fortune in Bitcoin,
| as well as its business value. The result is it's share price can
| both magnify & buffer Bitcoin changes on different time scales.
|
| (If anyone does ever invest in anything highly volatile, I
| recommend (1) you don't, (2) if you do, learn _everything_ you
| can about the security, market, political, social, technological,
| and key player contexts, (3) constantly pay attention to changes
| in context & events, (4) only do this with a small fraction of
| your money, and if you lose it - stop!)
|
| That being said, IRA's, with their lack of tax implications,
| vastly simplify investment change decisions, by removing tax
| timing and loss issues. This is tremendously helpful for volatile
| type investments, because transaction timing constraints and
| house vigs (taxes) both significantly magnify risks.
|
| _I really wish there was a time-agnostic way to invest for taxed
| accounts. Like taxes that reflected the time between a purchase &
| sale so that taxes did not create perverse incentives for timing
| purchases or sales._
|
| Dancing around non-neutral tax implications creates a terrible
| drag on performance & adds headaches to straightforward rational
| value analysis.
|
| TLDR: Don't read anything I wrote! Max out your tax protected
| retirement plans every year, and invest all funds cautiously and
| diversely!
|
| And thanks for sharing your project!
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thank you for your comment and for the advice! I was thinking
| to add both crypto and stocks heatmap in the future.
| robertlf wrote:
| Nice job!
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thank you!
| gumballindie wrote:
| No questions - just here to congratulate you! This looks amazing
| and it's amazing you learned AND built all this in one year. I
| love reading about such stories and more people should dare share
| them!
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| franky47 wrote:
| Great job! A couple of pointers for UX improvement:
|
| - Animations look nice, but don't abuse them. Eg: on the
| Exchanges page, animating the tab switches between Spot & Futures
| makes it difficult to focus on the actual values.
|
| - Your "share" feature could use a way to restore table
| filters/sorts based on the URL query. I have recently released a
| library that helps with that in Next.js:
| https://github.com/47ng/next-usequerystate
| withinboredom wrote:
| I wrote an arbitrage bot and gave it $100 ... then promptly
| forgot about it. Several years later, when I stumbled across it,
| still faithfully running on my server, it had nearly 11 million
| worth of coins. I opened the project and had it start shuffling
| everything off to bitcoin, slowly, over days/weeks to bitcoin. I
| was going to just cash out.
|
| Well, it turns out that when I originally wrote the code, time
| was calculated in milliseconds, not seconds. So, when I thought I
| calculated out 17 days, it was like half an hour-ish. It caused a
| small crash trying to dump everything almost all at once, on some
| of the alt-coin markets, and lost almost all the money.
|
| I walked away with ~$700.
|
| I was literally in tears, as I went from so excited and I'm going
| to "just retire" ... to just as broke as I was an hour prior. The
| emotional roller-coaster of euphoria, to 'oh shit, what did I
| do!?', to 'well ... fuck' was not fun.
|
| Anyway, good luck. There might be a lesson in there, but mostly,
| be careful where the intersection of money and programming lie.
| mm263 wrote:
| How exactly did 11 million dollars turn to 600?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Easy, you have 1000s of some shit-coins, where if you sell it
| off slowly, you'll get a reasonable value for it. However, if
| you try to sell it quickly ... you'll eat through any
| reasonable value in minutes. For example, say you have 100
| coins. There are 20 people willing to give you 100 bucks, so
| you sell them to those people, then there are 50 people
| willing to give you 50 bucks, and the rest are willing to
| give you 10 bucks. We'd call the 50 people willing to give
| you 50 bucks 'resistance' (at least that is what it is called
| in FTX-land). So, I cash out for (20 * 100)+(50 * 50)+(30 *
| 10) = $4,800. A nice slow sell-off could result in selling
| the whole 100 coins for $100, or $1,000,000, whereas dumping
| it, like in this example, can result in "losing" a ton of
| "potential cash." I was dealing with volatile coins, so often
| there was very little resistance (if any) to retain any kind
| of value.
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Sorry to hear that! I am being pretty cautious when trading
| lately whilst the website is pure independent analytics and
| doesn't require me to risk any funds.
| CPLX wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better the money was never actually
| there in the first place.
|
| If $11,000,000 turned into $700 then the "market cap" was
| bullshit and the coin was bullshit and whatever "price" it had
| was bullshit. Maybe you could have done a little better than
| you did but there wasn't any there there, in the sense that
| there were actually eleven million real greenback dollars in
| the hands of people that had any interest at all in owning that
| coin.
|
| This dynamic completely underpins the entire concept of crypto,
| with the possible exception of a couple big ones. It's just
| market manipulation and people trading with each other. Turns
| out nobody wanted to own digital apes either it was grift all
| the way down.
| endofreach wrote:
| Ouch. I do hope you don't miss the millions. Still: 700 bucks
| could feed some people on this planet for at least one year, if
| not even two.
|
| And another upside: the valuable lessons you learned are
| probably worth... well... millions of dollars!
|
| Back to topic: How did the crash lead to losing the money
| technically? What happened here? How did too many requests of
| selling lead to ,,devaluation"?
|
| You should definitely write a longer form story about this and
| include some code.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > How did too many requests of selling lead to
| ,,devaluation"?
|
| This is not specific to cryptography, it's a feature of all
| markets: if there's a scarce resource that a lot of people
| want, people will pay more for it. Parent flooded the market
| with whatever cryptocurrency instruments they held, suddenly
| making them a lot less scarce and so reducing their value.
| They could have avoided losing that by selling much more
| slowly (as they intended) or refusing to sell below a certain
| fixed price. In either case, they would probably not get
| quite as much as they had hoped for the whole lot due to a
| lesser version of the same effect.
| december456 wrote:
| I dont think reputable alt-coins with liquidity could turn into
| 11mil->700$ in an hour, so i consider it pretty safe to assume
| that 11 million wasnt actually 11 million: it doesnt matter if
| nobody wants it. Nevertheless, great work on processing such
| emotional burden.
| tornato7 wrote:
| Sounds like your bot hit some edge case and was min-maxing on
| long tail shitcoins with no liquidity on Uniswap. You maybe
| could have done a bit better than $700 via TWAP but likely not
| much more than $10k or so. It's just not that possible to turn
| $100 into $11M via arbitrage.
| timack wrote:
| 11,000,000 to ~700? -- I'd call that more than a "small crash".
| ge96 wrote:
| Props for picking up TypeScript
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Makes troubleshooting so much easier!
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| If there are some other crypto analytics tools or calculators
| that you'd like to see on the website please let me know and I'll
| include it in the list of things to code.
| Galanwe wrote:
| Make it point in time, add an API, more data, and sell a
| registration fee.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Great job! Shipping an actual product is a huge milestone!
| Although I'm not that into crypto trading myself, I can see that
| a lot of work went into this.
|
| I spend most of my professional time as a front end dev and am a
| UX enthusiast, so I thought I'd some feedback regarding the UX.
|
| 1. I'd work on establishing some strong patterns on what is
| clickable, what's an input, and what is information. If you look
| at /positionSize, you'll see what I'm talking about. "Loss" and
| "Stop Loss" both use identical design language, but one is an
| input, and the other is just information. You have a similar
| problem when looking at "Risk" vs "?". One appear to be a label,
| while one appears to be a toggle.
|
| 2. I'd consider using a different font. Hyper-stylized fonts like
| the one you have are super fun and can be a great way to express
| a brand identity, but it can come at the cost or readability and
| can even undermine a user's willingness to trust the security and
| reliability of the platform. I'd challenge you to spend an hour
| tuning it to something a little more mainstream like Roboto, Open
| Sans, or Ubuntu just to know what it would look like (you could
| even leave the existing font on the headers if you like).
|
| 3. Keep the minimum font size above 10px or 11px. You have some
| right now that is 8.4px and that's going to be impossible (quite
| literally) for some people to read without the use of
| magnification.
|
| Once again, good job and cheers!
| mellosouls wrote:
| Great job! How do you find your new identity as a coder -
| enjoying it enough to pursue as a main line or sticking with the
| trading and other skills you used here?
| buckwhitzer wrote:
| Thank you! I'm pretty comfy spending most of my time coding the
| website and adding/planning new tools as well as its promotion,
| but I still trade occasionally and I also have some passive
| income selling photos on stocks (I don't upload anymore, it
| keeps on selling old photos).
|
| But yes I really enjoy coding and may even take some freelance
| projects when the website requires less work.
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