A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Typically it does not exist in physical form (like paper money) and is also typically not issued by a central authority. Instead, there’s decentralized control.
Cryptocurrencies have not only had an impact on the world’s expectations surrounding money. They’ve also continued to evolve since the first Bitcoin block was mined back in 2009. Since then, thousands of unique cryptocurrencies have appeared.
Of these, Bitcoin remains the most popular. Some economists, including several Nobel laureates, have characterized it as a speculative bubble. But Bitcoin could be on the verge of adoption by professional investors which would send its price higher.
Digital Assets is a GUI that lets you monitor movements in the prices of cryptocurrencies. The program is written in Python. Digital Assets uses the Nomics API to retrieve the prices.
Installation
It’s easy to build the program from the source code. First we need to clone the project’s repository, and create a couple of directory.
$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/fgrabenstaetter/digital-assets.git
$ cd digital-assets
$ mkdir build && cd build
Then run Meson, a build system that is designed to be as user-friendly as possible without sacrificing performance.
$ meson ..
Finally, we install the program using ninja, a small build system with a focus on speed.
$ sudo ninja install
If you don’t want to compile the source, there may be a package available in your distro. For example, for Arch-related distro users, there’s a package for Digital Assets in the Arch User Repository.
There’s also a Flatpak available. Flatpak provides a sandbox environment in which users can run applications in isolation from the rest of the system.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary