American comedy series Silicon Valley which traces the journey of the life of six programmers in the San Francisco region has just inspired a new cryptocurrency price notification website. A technology company Viska has brought the bitcoin price alarm featured on an episode of the show to life.
Silicon Valley’s Version
In episode three of season five, one of the show’s lead characters Gilfoyle mentioned his hobbyist bitcoin mining operation. To remain profitable, however, he decided to mine only when the price of a bitcoin rose above a certain threshold.
(Source: Youtube)
The show then went on to show that Gilfoyle had programmed a tool to play the death metal song “You Suffer” by Napalm Death every time the price of bitcoin fell below a specific value, indicating that it was no longer profitable to mine it.
The episode depicted the alarm being triggered to play “You Suffer” every time the price of bitcoin went above or below a certain level. Gilfoyle’s mining setup was installed at his residence, which he monitored and controlled from his workplace.
Given that bitcoin uses proof of work (PoW) consensus algorithm for transaction verification on the blockchain, it is a very power intensive process. Thus, it becomes economically unviable to mine when it dips below a particular value.
The system notified Gilfoyle when the threshold was breached, suggesting that he could then switch on or off the mining machines. This way, the show also took a light-hearted dig at the wild price fluctuations currently faced by the cryptocurrency market, especially since the alarm was shown to go off repeatedly within short spans of time.
From Reel to Real
Iceland based tech company Viska has developed a web version of the same alarm, even going as far as playing the 1.36 second-long clip of the song “You Suffer.”
Sindri Gudmundsson of Viska said that it has almost become a ritual for his entire office to watch Silicon Valley whenever a new season airs. He added that the team wrote a simple JavaScript plugin that fetched the price of bitcoin from Coincap.io. It took another three hours for the entire website to go live.
Shortly after, the company formally announced Bitcoin Volatility, an online tool where users can be alerted every time the price crosses a certain threshold. While the price set by Gilfoyle on the show was not revealed, the website allows the user to set a custom value of their choice.
(Source: Bitcoin Volatility)
Cryptocurrency Price Notifications
Bitcoin saw a dramatic prove rise in 2017 and is now trading at moderate levels between $8,000 and $10,000.
Most cryptocurrency investors use applications provided by their cryptocurrency exchange, including those offered by Coinbase and Binance. These applications are quite basic and often lack the functionality to be repeatedly alerted for specific time intervals.
Nevertheless, it seems as if cryptocurrency is the theme for Season five of Silicon Valley as episode seven is focussed on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Details about the episode will only be known once it airs on Sunday, May 6, 2018, though.
The post Icelandic Tech Company Brings Silicon Valley’s Bitcoin Price Alarm to Life appeared first on BTCMANAGER.
Author: BTCManager.com
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