Crawling BitcoinTalk for New Cryptonight Coins

If you aren’t already familiar with BitcoinTalk it is a cryptocurrency focused forum where the majority of coins make their launch announcements. Crawling a forum isn’t rocket science to be sure but the fun happens in how to go about identifying a new coin as a Cryptonight coin of interest.

You can crawl the forums with Python and early versions of my scripts did just that even using a Github repository I can no longer find. I chose NodeJS instead this time using the Chrome Remote Interface and Puppeteer to handle the data collection.

In the first pass looking at the BitcoinTalk announcement forum my script just saves off the index number of the announcement and the subject line. This allows the script to not wait and load up each announcement page but just leaf through the forum threads list. Before inserting an announcement into the database it verifies that the index isn’t already there. After a successful insert of a new announcement that new record waits patiently for the next script to come and give it some more attention.

This second script has the job of loading each announcement page and deciding if it is a Cryptonight coin or not. It looks at the body of the first post, the subject and whatever images it finds on the page as well. Some announcements are 100% images with not actual text. Each image is saved and parsed using Tesseract then the combination of all the text found there, the body text and the subject are checked to see if they contain one of these two strings. ptonote or onigh. As easy as that looks I’ve been able to identify a large portion of announcements as Cryptonight coins accurately.

Then a message is sent out to my private and public Discord servers telegraphing the new found announcements and highlighting those which look like they could be Cryptonight coins. I toyed with ideas like collecting links or saving significant words but they didn’t add any value. As of now I have around 27,000 announcements saved off. Many of which have since been deleted.

This was part of a series: Ephemeral Projects as Performance Art

How to Calculate Mining Profits for Cryptonight Coins

How do you go about calculating or estimating your mining profits for Cryptonight coins? Honestly it was a mystery to me and I can’t take credit for the final simple formal. However much I’d like to credit the source s(he) prefers to remain anonymous in all things.

(price * block reward / difficulty) = profit per hash per second

Anonymous

This results in a tiny multiplier that can then be used with different hashrates and spans of time. Just multiply the result by how much hash per second you get on that algorithm and again by the duration of time you wish to estimate in seconds.

profit per hash per second * hashrate per second * duration in seconds

Anonymous

At that point you can tweak the numbers to try and get better averages and estimates as I attempted to do getting the averages for values over hours, per day, week and month. No prediction of real future performance thought the main value for this data was in moment to moment mining choices. Using it you could automatically switch between mining many coins to maximize your potential profits if you were to dump all rewards immediately on the exchanges.

For each pass of calculations I would get the current price of BTC, LTC, XMR, DOGE and ETH from CoinMarketCap and use them for all values found in that cycle. Each value I would translate back into BTC to attempt tracking how much was on order for buy or sell on each exchange. I started off storing the order books but that quickly ballooned in size with no apparent value so I switched over to just storing the sum values of the buy and sell books.

This was part of a series: Ephemeral Projects as Performance Art