Hi all 👋
Been meaning to post this for a while, so here goes.
A bit of context first. For the last year or so I've been tinkering on a little
thing called
btcprice.is and honestly, at first it was a rather silly idea.
I just wanted a simple page where I could glance at the BTC price without being
assaulted by six cookie modals and half a dozen "subscribe to our newsletter"
pop-ups.
Every BTC price site I visited felt like Piccadilly Circus at rush hour. Ads,
trackers, modals, widgets, a video auto-playing somewhere in the corner I couldn't
find. I just wanted the number. Big. Centred. On a black background. Glance, done.
That was the entire brief, really.
Now, a small confession, I'm a 45+ year-old bloke 👴. Not exactly the "teenage
whizz-kid in a hoodie" archetype the tech world likes to celebrate. And truth be
told, the idea of building my own little BTC page had been rattling around in my
head for years. I'd think about it, get intimidated by the thought of "learning to
code from scratch at my age," and shelve it for another day. Then another few
months would go by. You know how it goes.
Then Claude AI and others models arrived and, rather suddenly, everything shifted.
For the first time I had something that could answer the small, embarrassing,
"I don't even know what to Google" questions without making me feel daft. Things
like
"what's the difference between let and const" or
"why does my build
say 'cannot find module' when the file is right there in front of me" -
questions, honestly, I'd never have dared put to a human mentor because I didn't
want to look foolish at my age. Claude just... answered. Patiently. Every time 🙏
And something rather magical happened. That old, shelved idea started to feel
possible. Not easy - still plenty of 2 a.m. head-scratching, plenty of breaking
things and fixing them and breaking them again - but possible. Suddenly the wall
between
"I have an idea" and
"I can actually make the idea" was far
thinner than I'd assumed it to be for the last decade.
So I sat down. Next.js. TypeScript. Tailwind. Learning why server-rendered pages
beat client-heavy ones for something this daft and simple.
The project itself is deliberately boring and I mean that as the highest
compliment. It loads fast. It shows the price. It gets out of the way. No ads, no
cookies, no analytics, no "premium tier", no sign-up, no newsletter. Just a number.
https://btcprice.is/bitcointalk_org_for_forums.png🔗
https://btcprice.isBut the real reason I'm sharing the story rather than just the link is this: if
you're lurking on this forum thinking
"I'd love to build something but I'm too
old / too busy / not technical enough" - please don't let that thought stick.
It was wrong for me for a decade, and it's probably wrong for you too. The tools
have genuinely changed. An afternoon with a cup of tea and Claude beside you gets
you further than a whole weekend banging your head against docs you don't
understand.
btcprice.is is a BTC price tracker. That's the surface of it. But for me it's also
the project that taught a man in his mid-forties that he can, in fact, still make
things ₿
Now - a small ask of the lot of you.
The site is intentionally minimal, but I'd love ideas on small,
usefuladditions things that could live quietly in the footer or a secondary page
without cluttering the main view. Off the top of my head:
- a tiny sats <--> USD / EUR converter
- a Lightning fee estimator
- "what was BTC doing on this day in history" fact box
- extra fiat pairs I haven't thought of
- something Nostr or Lightning-native I'm not aware of
Anything you personally wish existed on a simple BTC page I'd genuinely love to
hear it. Typography, layout, dark-mode quirks, mobile niggles, all fair game. If
you think a part of the site could look nicer, say so plainly; I'll not take it
personally.
Cheers for reading, and all the best 🙏
https://btcprice.is
