Bitcoin Calculator

Inspiration

Cryptocurrency has gained a lot of attention in recent years and it has become increasingly important to ensure the security of transactions. This, among other reasons, lead to the making of this project as it would enhance my understanding of the subject matter and provides a useful tool to estimate the hashrate of a block in terms of its difficulty. Thanks to Catallaxy, this Bitcoin calculator provides an opportunity to explore the world of cryptocurrencies without requiring in-depth knowledge about the subject matter. It sparks interest to further immerse oneself in the bitcoin world.

What it does

The calculator I made does the following self-explanatory tasks:

OPTION 1: CALCULATE HASH RATE WITH DIFFICULTY
OPTION 2: CALCULATE DIFFICULTY WITH HASH RATE
OPTION 3: SEE REAL-TIME GRAPH OF BITCOINS IN THE WEB
OPTION 4: WHAT CAN YOU MINE WITH YOUR CURRENT SETUP WITH THE CURRENT DIFFICULTY!!
OPTION 5: HOW MANY WILL IT TAKES TO MINE 1 FULL BITCOIN WITH MY SETUP?
OPTION 6: GENERATE GRAPHS (HASH RATE AND DIFFICULTY) WITH WEB DATA

How I built it

I used Python.

Challenges I ran into

Prior to starting this challenge, I had no knowledge of this subject matter and had to look up the meaning of most of the terms used in the wording of the problem. It allowed me to learn a lot but I had a little bit of trouble figuring out what to do. Also, to make accurate and meaningful graphs, I had to understand how Bokeh worked as I had never used that tool before. Making interactive graphs was important to me as it would allow a better understanding of block difficulty and hash power needed as a function of time. Exploring the limits of Bokeh was very interesting and improved the quality of this project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As I hadn't known the challenge ahead of time and had already planned a project with the rest of my team, I had very little time to try to accomplish this challenge. Also, with little to no knowledge on cryptocurrencies, learning and understanding everything I needed to make this project possible really made me grow as a programmer.