Are there any best practices to handle reorganisations, from the point of a merchant accepting BCT for web purchases?

Also, could it be that some kind forum member could point me to some statistics of historical reorganisations, showing f.x. empirical frequency of orphaned blocks, preferrably cathegorised on #confirmations, and perhaps even with a time axis, in case there's a trend? Maybe there already exists some reliable likelihood estimator, as a function of #confirmations?

I apologise if this is posted in the wrong place. The Trading sub seemed a bit non-technical.

When developing an API for historical BTC quotes yielding images, I had problems inserting the images in forum posts using the [img] BBCode - the forum image proxy replied Invalid image.

Since the image URIs worked elsewhere, I studied my server logs, and it turned out that my server blocked the requests, becuase no User agent was supplied from the image proxy. Removing the check on my server fixed the problem.

Before I found out, I searched the forum, and it seems as if more than I have had similar problems. In some of these cases it may have been because of the missing UA; maybe somebody wants to add it.

[Syntax examples]

When I fooled around with the BTC value at msg date demo, I implemented a simple API to get the BTC price in dollars at a specific date, as an image.


For dates between 2010-10-17 and 2023-01-27, I'm using the closing quotes from a static list, downloaded from https://coincodex.com.

From 2023-01-28, I'm appending this list daily, with the XBX average from https://www.coindesk.com.

Queries specifying dates before 2010-10-17 yield 0. Queries with dates in the future yield the latest known quote (this limitation will be removed in a future version ).

I store each quote in whole dollars - queries with large quantities (specified with nof) may suffer from rounding errors.

Because of time zones and daily volatility, the quotes should be considered approximate; in any case, I take no responsibility for the accuracy, performance or longevity of this service.


Syntax examples

[img]https://ztt.se/btc:quote[/img]	=>	No date equals today.
[img]https://ztt.se/btc:quote?date=2013-06-09[/img]	=>	Specific date.
[img]https://ztt.se/btc:quote?date=2013-06-09&nof=2[/img]	=>	Number of coins.
[img]https://ztt.se/btc:quote?img=col:green[/img]	=>	Image colour.

Here's a long one with date and nof parameters and an img parameter with options pointsize, colour, background colour (semi-transparent), font and border (remove white-space):

Code:

[img]
  https://ztt.se/btc:quote ?
    date=2021-11-09 &
    nof=1.5 &
    img=ps:24 + col:DeepSkyBlue4 + bcol:$FECC0280 + font:Snap-ITC + border:10x4
[/img]

The basic URI is https://ztt.se/btc:quote which yields a PNG image with text on a transparent background.

Append a questionmark ? to this if you want to add parameters.

Separate multiple parameters with ampersand &.

Separate multiple parameter options with plus +.

A parameter can be a singleton, or a name-value pair; use the equal sign = to separate name and value.

A parameter option can be a singleton, or a name-value pair; use a colon : to separate name and value.

Dates must be specified in YYYY-MM-DD format.


Note: This gives the price in dollars for bitcoin (1 coin or as many as specified with the nof parameter) at a specific date (specified with the date parameter). On its own, it does not show address balancies or anything else.

Newbie question: Some topic subjects are prepended with a word in square brackets.

In some cases I can guess the meaning of this, in others I'm clueless. Some words seem to indicate a topic type ([ASK]), others seem more like cathegories ([TELEGRAM]).

Is there a description of why, how and when to use this?

[Update]

As a newbie I've been browsing several interesting topics here, some really old. In several posts, amounts in BTC are mentioned (like "My bitcoin digital casino only allows deposits of max BTC50).

It would be nice to be able to quickly lookup the $/BTC at each post's date, perhaps by hovering over the post date.


Update

I made a quick demo, try it out:
https://ztt.se/test:bct_pdq/index.php?topic=92.20

Any subpage works, just replace bitcointalk.org with ztt.se/test:bct_pdq in the URL.

The <title> html tag (to show hover text) in the forum date div is already used (to show Last edit date), and anyway it's not always clear how to hover on touch devices, so I resorted to explicitly append the dollar quote to the date, in green.

Check out topic number five, where Satoshi welcomes users to this forum (1, 2, and 4 exist in the staff forum; 3 was permanently deleted at some point because it contained Satoshi's real name and address):
https://ztt.se/test:bct_pdq/index.php?topic=5


User profiles

The demo appends historical quotes to any date (if it's alone in its div), so it works on user profiles as well:
https://ztt.se/test:bct_pdq/index.php?action=profile;u=897509