It just seems like a idea which would be useful for a very select few, and likely wouldn't offer too much to the vast majority of the forum.
Got you, though my guess is that many users on this forum actually are quite select
This post from theymos is what first prompted me to check a historical BTC quote. I'm sure many of you legends know the value of 6000+ BTC in 2013, but remember I'm a newbie.
I actually vaguely remember something about the infamous pizzas, from when it happened I mean, but I'll be darned if I can remember exactly which year it was, or how many coins were paid.
(I looked it up; I'm sure most of you already know this, but it was May 2010 when Laszlo Hanets bought two Jacksonville pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Two months earlier, user "SmokeTooMuch" auctioned 10,000 BTC for $50 but no buyer was found.)
I was thinking this myself. I don't think the forum would be able to handle something like that either - it has to do recounts every few weeks and those change numbers for older members quite a lot - I reckon there'll be a lot of errors with a system like that that just makes it too hard to edit (ie bitcoin is $0 on 1st January 2022 because the api broke).
APIs that do fiat conversions in wallets also get broken quite a bit too so I think that'd happen here - it's also a lot easier to get multiple reliable sources to find the value of bitcoin from a search engine (and they'll have native currencies too).
Basically, constantly fetching the values, and presenting that. It could even potentially slow down the responsiveness of the page if it's rather resource heavy. Depends on how it would be implemented.
You're right of course, it depends on how it'd be implemented.
However, assuming a local cache of the historical quotes (some 4500 day entries since 2010-07-17, a couple of KiB; this could be updated once a day or so), even a naive serverside implementation would be very lightweight; a simple
SELECT extension in the post loop and a tiny attribute addition to the date HTML (eg
title='$23,133').
In fact, I could even do it externally by proxy with little effort, even though this would incur several magnitudes of more overhead: for starters, my external proxy server would have to fetch the page from a real bitcointalk server, so I'll always be slower, even without modifications. Since I'm a single end-point, I'm most likely also rate-limited on the transport level. And of course I'd have to decrypt and re-encrypt since it's SSL. Also, instead of a puny addition to an existing post loop using a hopefully optimised DB engine, I'd have to parse and modify end-formated http data (150 KiB for this small topic before I post this).
It's
absolutely possible though, with only a modest time delay IMHO (
hover over any post date to see that date's BTC price in dollars).