/bitcoin_price_oracle

Primary LanguagePython

Bitcoin Price Oracle

This Python program estimates the daily USD price of Bitcoin using nothing except a Bitcoin Core node.

It is an adaptation of the script written by SteveSimple at utxo.live and available on GitHub.

Enhancements

  • About ~2x faster than original script (in test comparisons).
    • For 2023-10-08:
      • original: 62.7 seconds
      • this version: 30.9 seconds
  • Uses asynchronous RPC calls when possible.
  • Gets RPC config from bitcoin.conf file if available in default ~/.bitcoin folder. Accepts environment variables as alternative.
  • Args allow for getting a range of dates or a specific date.
  • Creates RPC class for async requests to the node.
  • Creates classes for BlockOscillator, PriceBins, and Stencil
  • Add GitHub Workflow with linting.

bitcoin.conf

In order to run the script successfully your bitcoin.conf file will need additional settings to handle the amount of async requests on the node.

# Accept command line and JSON-RPC commands.
server=1

# Set the number of threads to service RPC calls
rpcthreads=10

# Set the depth of the work queue to service RPC calls
rpcworkqueue=512

Run

Prior to running the program, you must have Bitcoin Core installed and running. If you attempt to run the script while the node is syncing, you may run into errors. Best to wait until the node is finished syncing.

  • Install requirements pip install -r requirements.txt
  • Run the script:
    • python run.py will provide estimate for previous day.
    • If you want a range of dates: python run.py --start 2023-01-01 --end 2023-01-07
    • If you want a specific date: python run.py --date 2023-01-06

config.py

The config.py module attempts to read the node configuration directly from the bitcoin.conf file itself. If not available (i.e. not in the default ~/.bitcoin folder or path is not provided in code), it checks for the necessary configs in environment variables.

These must be set for the script to work: datadir, rpcuser, and rpcpassword

Further Improvements

  • Instead of using oscillator to find the first block of a day, possibly load all block responses to a PostgreSQL database to further speed up the script.
  • Beyond increasing the rpcworkqueue, should figure out a way to increase the async abilites of the script. Right now, each day is done consecutively.
  • Dockerize
  • More unit testing