I got into bitcoins back in 2012 after placing an order for my first mining rig from Butterfly Labs. I wasn’t sure if it was going to ship or just another scam in this brave new world. After a few months, I got an email that it had shipped and I got my first taste of mining.

After a few days of mining, I wanted to dive deeper into the code. Now at the time MtGox was the biggest exchange and although I never used it, I wanted to make a simple notification system when the price hit specific highs or lows.

I created BTCPop

As you can see by the price, this was the early days. I initially wrote the code in PHP using the MtGox API to fetch the price every 5 minutes. I would store the notifications in MySQL and check if any of the notifications should fire and email them with the current price and their notification price.

Although I wanted to rewrite the code in Node.js using streams and sockets I never got around to it as I have since gotten rid of all my mining rigs and bitcoins as the ups and downs have been a crazy train.