Silk Road forums
Support => Feature requests => Topic started by: hokusai on November 26, 2012, 03:02 am
-
I think it'd be easy and beneficial to code up a little calculator in the left side bar that allows a user to enter a number of BTC, choose a currency (probably only a few, such as dollars, euros, and pounds) and see how much something is actually costing them. I'm doing this constantly in my head to calculate the real world cost of the stuff I'm looking at, but refreshing myself with the exchange rate and doing all the calculations manually is getting tedious and messy.
It'd be a really simple input/output program with a couple stored variables and several very similar formulas depending on the currency. Very easy, assuming there is already a stored variable on the site controlling the conversion rate behind the scenes.
Assuming American Dollars:
User inputs BTC, assuming 5, as variable btc
User selects "To $" from drop-down list, clicks calculate
Program uses IF statement to determine formula, ie, IF currency to convert to = $, then...
Output = btc * "BTC to Dollar rate"
Program sends Output to a textbox
-
I just use Preev for this, works well with a load of different currencies
(its a clearnet website)
-
this would be easy to make, it would just rip the data from the web.
i dont really think its worth the time to make tho, unless it was inbuilt in the SR Webpage, that would be cool.
-
@ SNSD: Thanks for the preev recommendation. That's exactly what I was talking about
@ GUS: Yeah, I was talking about sticking it on SR. I'm thinking right below the "Shop by Category" panel. Just a little simple and unobtrusive tool.
-
SR already reads in the value of BTC from Mt. Gox. that updates I believe twice a day. Adding the calculator would require a lot of extra coding, and would more or less be pointless because you can go to Mt Gox live and check the current market value and use what ever calculator is in your OS.
-
Actually, this calculator program would be extremely simple to code so even a novice programmer could pull it off. All I'm saying is it would make things much simpler and eliminate the need for users to mess around with other sites and calculators, etc. I don't see any negative for making SR a user's one stop shop.
-
Actually, this calculator program would be extremely simple to code so even a novice programmer could pull it off. All I'm saying is it would make things much simpler and eliminate the need for users to mess around with other sites and calculators, etc. I don't see any negative for making SR a user's one stop shop.
I've learned that it's all about convenience. If you can eliminate hassle and make someone's life convenient, they'll pay you for it and eventually you'll swamp the competition. Kayak.com was just bought by Travelocity (was one of those big travel sites anyway). All they did was search a bunch of travel sites and book your order through the site of your choice. The price was about 1.5 billion I think... but this is off the top of my head, the numbers shouldn't be taken to be accurate. The point is that one-stop-shops really do make a big, big difference.
I mean, I always prefer one integrated, convenient service. Look at Pidgin. It doesn't do any of the protocols as well as the official programs, but it's a huge IM client. People even use it for IRC, and it barely even works for it :)
And yeah, it would be a really simple PHP script or whatever. It'll never happen though, because SR isn't open source so random people can't submit improvements, and DRP and his team are a) busy and b) have little to no incentive to make the site better than it is. I don't mean it sucks now or anything, just saying it's good enough not to lose customers over it, so there's little incentive to improve.
Disclaimer: I am not filthy rich, so when I say "it's all about convenience," I don't speak from having made millions this way. I do think I'm right though.
-
Open calculator
Enter current Dollar value in whatever currency,1$ is now 6.6932 SEK
Press Memory Save
now if i want to know how much 144.63$ is just press
144,63*Memory recall = 968,037516 Svenska kronor
Badaboombadabing