I'm rather pleased with a little app project I made.
The "Satoshi Bitcoin Converter" (satoshibitcoinconverter.com) was recently updated to version 7 (v7) and it's just better. The app is very, very simple. That's the way it was started and that's the way it is now.
Origins
Indulge me with a little Bitcoin history and background on the Satoshi Bitcoin Converter. Pull up a chair and I'll tell you a story...
Beginnings
Bitcoin first crossed my radar in 2011. I bought 0.01 bitcoin and sort of messed up in the process because of decimal units in BTC. My second-ever post on Hive relays the story, but the upshot is: I got my prices and decimals wrong and paid too much. Like 10x too much.
In case you're wondering, no, I didn't buy a ton of cheap BTC then. I only bought 0.01. Are you kidding me, only 0.01?!!! Argh!!! Plus, it was lost in a wallet hack anyway (online non-custodial wallet Flexcoin, article here). I had no clue then. So... 🙁
Learning occurs best with scrapes and scabs, and I was learning. I learnt that I needed something to help with BTC units and decimals.
It's funny, but back then, there was a lot of talk about "mbits" and "ubits" or just "bits". (No such talk now.) My go-to price checker then was Preev.
At some point, I believe during the run-up to $1,000, Preev switched their default view from BTC to bits/ubits. Their logic: everyone will soon talk about how many bits they have, not some decimal BTC. Then, when the bear came, they switched back to full BTC as their default.
I loved Preev's simplicity (still do). However, with the mbit and ubit talk, as well as with "millibits" and "microbits", I found it hard to trace what people were talking about. People would write, "I got 3 ubits!" and someone else would say, "I got 0.00000012 BTC!" and someone else would say, "Well, I got 5,000 satoshis, so take that!"
It was difficult to follow. So, in 2013, I made the Satoshi Bitcoin Converter. The link in BitcoinTalk is no longer active, but you can kind of see the guts of it in a somewhat later, 2016 version below.
The SBC had a simple and clear purpose:
Show BTC units and show how much they're worth in current USD.
Now, when someone wrote, "I have 1,234 bits!", I could quickly type it in and see where that unit fell on the BTC unit spectrum and I could see how much those were worth in USD.
Growth
As the cryptocurrency space grew, so did the Satoshi Bitcoin Converter. Just as with BTC and its units, people started talking about ETH units, particulary Gwei because that was what Ethereum gas was measured in. Things were getting tricky and even more convoluted. I added a converter for Ethereum.
Then, I added more crypto: Litecoin, Doge, some others. It was a lot of copy/paste, but also a ton of manual adjusting of things.
And then, per some requests, I began mixing in other fiat currencies: Euros, the Pound, and other big ones. Eventually, I added quite a few links to fiat-to-crypto converters on CoinGecko. These were just links, evidence the app was getting oversized.
The SBC still worked great and did what it was supposed to do, but it was getting bloated. And, it was getting hard to manage, getting trickier and more persnickety to troubleshoot and maintain.
Wen app?
At that time, any self-respecting internet-tool needed its own app. That seemed like a good goal...to turn the SBC into a standalone app. I pursued that, and in short, the Apple Store was too expensive for me to sign up for as a developer, but the Android Play store was not. So, I figured out how to make the SBC into an Android app and stuck it in the store.
It did okay there, 10,000+ downloads (which I'm kind of proud of), and I think it helped some people. I tried to keep track of nations using it, and counted 134 countries (see map below).
But, again, the app was getting hard to maintain. Add to that the fact that the Play store itself got hard to maintain. The rules and hoops and format changes in the Play store were frustrating to me. I kind of gave up on the SBC. Whereas it had hovered around like 4.5 star ratings in the app's heyday, I see it's rated down to 3.9 stars currently...no doubt due to my negligence in upkeep.
In all honesty, it's been a couple of years since I've done anything there in the Play store. And, I realized a couple of weeks ago, that I can't even login to the developer console now for some reason (gotta work on that).
An itch
Though I've left the SBC to fend for itself for some time, a scapegoat in the wilderness, an itch has been pestering me to nurture it. The Satoshi Bitcoin Converter is my first real project dealing with cryptocurrency and I don't want to just let it slowly fade away.
So, I got back to it and got it back to its roots.
All that said, version 7 is here. 😀
There are three main changes in v7
1. On Fleek with https
Change 1 is that the guts of the app were moved to Fleek. I like Fleek and services like it, such as Netlify or Render. Having a website in such a place means updating a GitHub repo is all that's required for the site to immediately go live with new changes. No app stores. No FTP file transfer headaches required. Plus, I like Fleek's ethos of "Open, trustless, permissionless, borderless, and user controlled." I'm not sure how non-centralized it is, centralization often occurs along a spectrum, but they seem pretty good. They use the IPFS too, which is neat.
With regards to the SBC, the main beneifit of Fleek is that the SBC now uses https (see image at top). Prior, there was only http, no "s", meaning there was no security between server and a user's browser. With https, there is encryption between them.
Usage of the SBC had been in the decline in recent years. I see two reasons:
- My dereliction of maintenance.
- The lack of https. This meant users got a browser "Warning!" about a possibly unsafe site. Such a danger warning, especially in dealing with anything crypto, is a deal breaker. I'm sure people just backed away. (I would have.)
Even though the SBC has nothing to do with anyone's crypto or private keys (it's just a price checker at heart), that little warning was a death knell.
Although I knew of this issue and tried to fix it, there was something about my code that didn't jive well with https. The app worked with http, failed with https and I couldn't figure it out. Then, recently while fuddling with Fleek, I noticed that it actually did work with https there. Alleluia! I still don't know why it worked, think it was a change on their end, but anyway, it did work with https. 😀
So, now that danger warning should be gone, the SBC has a new breath of life breathed into it!
2. Focus on BTC, sats, and USD
For some time, I've pondered giving the app a good scrubbing down. The Satoshi Bitcoin Converter was originally meant to convert BTC, sats, and USD values, period. I've considered going back to just that. Well, I finally pulled the trigger and made that revert-progess. That's what it did then, and that's what it does now.*
*Why the asterisk, you ask?
The "Legacy" version, with more fiat and crypto currencies, was left intact on the app. I figured, "Why not? Someone might wish to use it, it's there and not hurting anything, so, why not leave it?"
Nowadays, there's much usage of sats. They're gaining in value alongside BTC, they're usable with Bitcoin Lighting Network, there's a use case for every single sat with Ordinals, and more recently with Nostr and zapping, sats are in. I considered getting rid of the middle Bitcoin units (mbits and ubits) and going purely BTC and sats, but I just couldn't do it. Like a sentimental figurine collecting dust on a shelf which you just can't toss out, they survived the purge. (What would that figurine be, a honey badger maybe?)
Still, now on the SBC home screen, there's bitcoin, sats, and USD only.
3. Installable Progressive Web App (PWA)
Change 3 is that the SBC v7 is now an installable PWA. Prior versions of the SBC were "pseudo"-PWAs, meaning, you could put a link on your phone's screen, but that was all it was, a link in the form of an icon.
Such a situation is not a real PWA. Tapping the icon/link opens a browser tab, and then closes when you close the browser...useful, but not a true PWA. A true PWA has a few extra things about it that allow a user to "install" the app on their phone. A real PWA looks like a native app and behaves like one, but it lives outside the browser. Although a PWA does actually use a browser as its backbones, tapping the icon of a PWA opens it independently. Opening or closing the browser has no effect on the PWA, it's its own thing. In the end, you can't even tell that a PWA is not a real native app.
Note: to add a PWA, you simply install it when prompted. Each OS and each browser is different, but upon loading, it should give you an "Install" prompt somewhere. Tap it.
Plus, there are benefits to a PWA:
- It occupies much, much less storage space on one's mobile device than a standalone native app.
- Updates are instant and automatic.
- Freedom from any app store. There's no reliance on an app store's rules or for updates, and I'm free from having to wrangle with the Play store's developer console.
- Ethos: less centralization and fewer points of failure is better.
Summary
The Satoshi Bitcoin Converter has updated to version 7. There are three main changes:
- It's on Fleek
- It's focused on BTC, sats, and USD
- It's a Progressive Web App (PWA)
And, I'm kind of pleased with it.
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