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HodlFeed – a Cryptocurrency Newsfeed (hodlfeed.com)
62 points by colecut on Jan 11, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 62 comments


Hodling is the worst thing about cryptoccurencies most people don't realise. Deflating currencies act as value holders, not as currencies, they don't promote trading or commerce, buying and selling it for physical things. It promotes holding and not selling. This is the opposite of what a currency is.

The more people hold, the less chances there are that Bitcoin or other protocols will be ever used to buy a burger from local shop.

Look at this, even Bitcoin conference doesn't want to accept BTC in payments for tickets, so where can you use use BTC if not on a BTC conference?

https://news.bitcoin.com/miami-bitcoin-conference-stops-acce...


> Deflating currencies act as value holders, not as currencies, they don't promote trading or commerce, buying and selling it for physical things.

I know this is the commonly accepted reason why inflation is good and deflation is bad. But isn't this just coercion? Here's your paycheck. You better go out spend it like a good consumer because we're going to ensure its value is going to slowly erode over time.

Modern man already needs to buy and sell things to survive. It's not clear to me why his currency needs to further promote this behavior.


Yes, that’s exactly what it is, but with one crucial additional factor: investment.

Mild inflation does not discourage saving, it discourages saving the actual currency, which does nothing for the economy. It encourages saving in the form of investment, which stimulates the economy.

If my dollars were guaranteed to get more and more valuable over time, why would I spend them (more than absolutely necessary) or invest them in economic ventures? This is why deflationary currency is bad.


Your dollars already do get more valuable over time wrt consumer electronics and cars, yet people still purchase them en masse.

Many still spend in a deflationary environment, they just do so with far more care about the product and it's longevity.

People will invest also, though only with a expected return greater than deflation gains.

Instead the status quo is being forced into overvalued equities or real estate investments. There's no real option to be a saver in the western world anymore.


It might be bad for the economy/GDP but what about for the individual? Consider a blue collar worker just making enough to get by and saving a little cash on the side. Why are you forcing this person to learn about inflation, interest rates, the SP500, etc.


If they are saving a little bit on the side for the short term, inflation will not noticeably hurt them (I am speaking of a well-managed monetary system with mild inflation such as the US). If they want to save for the long term, then they should invest it if they want to maximize gains. That’s what’s best for the individual.


What if they're not interested in maximizing gains? What if they don't want to learn about investing? What if they just want their hard earned money to not evaporate on them?




My uncle told me these cryptocurrencies are an even better investment!


Inflation is either good or bad, depending on the circumstances. Same with deflation.

A currency is important only because it is a medium of exchange. A currency is actually working well if it is slowly decreasing in value, because if it does not then people will hold onto it and not use it, thus making it a commodity. In the longer term, what happens is that people will switch to another method to transfer value, and your currency then becomes worthless as the reason for it storing value is removed.

This is one of the reasons why a deflationary by design cryptocurrency is so dangerous. It seems intuitive in our current thinking to increase value by design, but actually this can have dusasterous consequences. Japan, for instance, has had massive problems with deflation and eventually had to work to counter this for their economic health.

Obviously rampant inflation is dreadful, but that’s not what we are talking about here. Low underlying inflation is, somewhat ironically, an excellent indicator of a healthy economy.


That's very true, but a huge percentage of people recently in the cryptocurrency space are only there to make money. Not many truly care about the technology.


But they make money when they stop holding; otherwise it's just a number.


There are many practices like that, though. E.g. you go for a run and then rest. The run still benefits you, just as holding crypto let's it increase in value. But you eventually stop running to rest, and in the same way, cash out your hold.


I agree with you somewhat, but before we even care about HODLing, BTC needs to get fees and transaction confirmation times way down for it to be used as a currency.

Right now, it can take 10 minutes and $20 to transfer any amount of money on the BTC network. That isn't reasonable to buy a hamburger.


BTC is old and deprecated. BTC is now what ARPANET is to the Internet. Without LN and SegWit BTC will suffer long transaction time and high fees before it dies. We all know it, yet, somehow no one cares.


Maybe it's time we stop calling these cryptocurrencies and call them what they really are, cryptostocks.


they're not stocks because stocks gives you equity in a company. there's no bitcoin, inc or ethereum, inc.


To be technical, some tokens are offering "dividends" these days, ex. sharing trading profits of a blockchain decentralized exchange. But I guess these tokens don't strictly represent a cryptocurrency, maybe a single cryptoasset more so. But those tokens could be traded like a currency...so it gets kind of confusing.


They also don't pay dividends.


People will hold whatever they believe will appreciate in value.

I would argue that the more people hold, the better. It is taking power from centralized government fiat and injecting it into crypto, even if for brief periods of time.

Sounds counter-intuitive but a society throwing their life savings into crypto is actually a good thing. Letting the early adopters get rich is probably a net benefit if it attracts widespread attention and adoption, which is what crypto needs to become a day to day currency.


The sentiment section filters out "blocks" and "block" as negative words. I feel like you should block it from doing that, considering the subject matter.


Thanks, we will add these to the excluded words


Can you make an API available to paying customers? I'm trying to contact you directly but there is no contact information on the website.


Yes we will make it available shortly as well as a way to contact. In the meantime info@hodlfeed.com will go direct to us.


I like this feed - a more centralized collection of cryptocurrency news, however it is unfortunate that left sidebar does not show currency. At the moment of writing this comment it BTC is worth 13081.8 of something.. is it USD, EUR, LTL?


Currently its in USD, but good point. I will show it in USD and add the ability to change the currency of your choice.


The first thing I went looking for, was a way to set this to EUR, because I am european. There is no such setting.

A small word of unwanted advice for anyone developing anything related to crypto-currency tickers: don't add "multi currency" as an afterthought. E.g. coinmarketcap's API, or the CoinCap interface have hacked this in. It's ugly, inconsistent and feels amateurish. Nothing wrong with adding "mutli-currency" in a later phase, but this is certainly not a "YANGI" thing: There are far, far more people out there, who will want to use your product, but who don't use USD than there are that use USD.


Multi-currency selector is live.


I tried it, but somehow it does not store my setting. It looses it after every state change (page navigation).

This is on Firefox, latest stable. I cannot see any session, cookie or local-storage that would've stored my setting, nor do I see any network activity that would've stored the setting in my account.

It looks like a bug of some sort.


Ah yes, thanks for catching that. Will fix.


We are working on getting this out asap.


Takes about 6 secs or more to fully load the feed on my work desktop.

Looks like this API request is to blame: https://api.hodlfeed.com/coin-types?


cryptocurrency types are used to long transaction times.


I can send you an XRB in < 1 sec


Oh, just let someone make a joke without doing an "um actually." Jeez.


It's either a worthless joke post, or I can respond to it with real information. Some people might think that cryptocurrency by it's very nature has this latency problem.


after bad ethereum api experiences I for one found this interesting


Where can I find more information about the API? I think this would be great to incorperate in a trading bot.


We plan on adding a real-time socket option for trading bots once we add additional sources and ensure sentiment analysis is solid.


Great news. I'll be keeping an eye out.


Thanks for this feedback!

This is my friend's website, and I posted here without giving him a heads up. This is my first Hacker News submission, so I was not expecting to hit the first page.

We are doing a quick reboot to scale up and should be back shortly.


It's already loading much faster :) Great looking website and I wish all the best with this project!


Just from a frontend perspective, it's a great-looking site/webapp. I would be curious to learn more about your tech choices and the application architecture.


Looks like a React (maybe create-react-app) and Redux job, with:

- lodash

- JSS (cssinjs.org)

- Material-UI (mui.org)

- Highcharts.js

- Popper.js

- Moment.js

- React-select

- Redux-form

judging from the bundled main.js file. [0]

[0]: https://hodlfeed.com/static/js/main.3593bf21.js


Likewise. A blog post like that would go to the top of my To Read list.



They don't compete, they compliment each other. Cryptopanic gives you manual user ratings, Hodlfeed gives you text sentiment ratings. It's a perfect combo, especially if you add in another site like http://solume.io


Dark theme hurts to look at, light theme isn't contrasted enough. HodlFeed seems to be the clear winner in terms of UI design. Can't speak for algorithm effectiveness and whatnot.


Seems that the sentiment analysis speedometer graphic can go "too positive" and the needle disappears.


Nice catch, will be fixing.


any details to methodology, which news sites are being used?

also, any plans to add analysis from medium / twitter?


Yes medium and twitter are in the pipeline. Sites are being selected based quality of articles.


cool - i find a lot of useful analysis from medium and twitter.

how is quality of articles determined? is there a working list of sites currently included / excluded?


Right now its crypto focused sites, but I find some of them to be positive leaning. Likewise the traditional finance sites seem to be negative leaning. My goal is to add source sentiment so you can see all the sources and which way they lean for all articles. You will also be able to filter the sources you wish to see. Quality of sources/articles are based on reading though the articles, comparing them to similar articles from other sources and making a determination whether or not its a unique article or a spin off another one.


Awesome! I think it's important to segregate social media, blog and news media sentiment data. The differences are important, for example, news media will usually run a story on something that already has social buzz. People who post on Medium are probably already invested (in the financial and effort sense) in some side of the conversation. Twitter posts might be fleeting thoughts on a project.

To help beginner's, you might consider some combined number that weighs each rating differently according to what you think is important.


Great points. I think showing all of them on a graph separated will allow you to see how each is affecting the overall sentiment. Being able to make custom feeds will also empower you to make your own weights.


Can't sign in after registration.


Try again, working on my side.


The website needs comments!


Agreed, will get working on that.


great site! all in one




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