Visualisations for different cryptocurrencies
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Inspiration

Cryptocurrencies have become 'the hype' and a lot of people believe they could be the future. However, there have been concerns that mining crypto can be very energy consuming and thereby damaging to our planet. We wanted to do something against this issue.

What it does

Our product visualises and compares the environmental impact of different cryptocurrencies. This should enable investors to choose smartly - by also taking into account how 'green' certain cryptocurrencies are, they may be more incentivised to invest into them.

How we built it

We created and hosted a webpage with Python, Flask and Bootstrap, where we displayed data that we obtained using several APIs and visualised in creative ways.

Challenges we Faced

The biggest challenge we faced was to get access to high quality data. For instance, we needed to obtain the hashrate for different networks and the mining efficiency of specific cryptocurrencies. The latter datapoint wasn't even on any publicly available APIs and we had to find applicable scientific papers.

Furthermore, it was difficult to come up with good, visual statistics which would be easily understandable for the viewer, but we believe we came up with good comparisons for the topic at hand (i.e. electricity consumption of the UK / trees for CO2 offsetting).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In 24 hours we have managed to research a series of calculations relating cryptocurrencies to various environmental factors and have host a website neatly summarising this information. We are proud of each individually working with something completely new to anything we have done before.

What we learned

We have learnt many skills to do with hosting websites as well as the technical details of cryptocurrencies and their environmental impact. Although we were aware that they can have a massive impact on the environment we weren't aware exactly of how large this was and as we started to create statistics that were comparative to values we are aware of such as comparing energy usage to that of the UK, the magnitude of this impact became clear to us.

From a software engineering perspective, as a team we have hosted a website and used Flask for the first time as well as interacting with many new APIs in order to retrieve the data used in calculations and read scientific papers in order to find these calculations.