In the next article we are going to take a look at Coinmon. This is another tool to check the prices of cryptocurrencies. Some time ago, in this same blog I published a small guide on Cli-Fyi. This was also a very useful command line query tool. Using Cli-Fyi, we can also easily find the latest price of a cryptocurrency, in addition to many other useful details.
Unlike Cli.Fyi, Coinmon only serves to know the price of cryptocurrencies, nothing more. This will review the prices of cryptocurrencies and their changes, all directly from our terminal. This tool will get all the details using the API of coinmarketcap. This utility will be quite useful for both investors and anyone interested in this type of currency.
For who does not know it yet to this day, a cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency or crypto asset, is a digital medium of exchange. The first cryptocurrency to start operating was the bitcoin in 2009. Since then, many others have appeared in the world. All of them with different characteristics and protocols such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ripple o Ethereum.
In cryptocurrency systems, the security, integrity and balance of their states is guaranteed through a network of agents called miners. These, mostly the general public, actively protect the network (the fabric) by maintaining a high algorithm throughput rate. Breaking the existing security in a cryptocurrency is mathematically possible, but the cost to achieve it would be unaccountably high, so it is not profitable.
Install Coinmon
Before we start to install and use this utility, we are going to have to make sure we have Node.js and Npm installed in our system. If you don't have Node.js and / or npm installed on your machine and you use Ubuntu (in this example I am using version 16.04), you will be able to install everything by opening a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and typing in it:
sudo apt install nodejs npm
Once Node.js and Npm are installed, run the following command from the same terminal to install Coinmon.
sudo npm install -g coinmon
In case the installation returns an error and does not allow installation, you may have to install one more package. Type in the terminal:
sudo apt install nodejs-legacy
Now retype the command for the utility installation.
Check cryptocurrency prices from the command line
If we execute the following command, we will be able check the top 10 cryptocurrencies classified according to their market capitalization:
coinmon
Like I said, if you run Coinmon without any parameters, it will show the top 10 cryptocurrencies. But we will also be able to find the number we want of the main cryptocurrencies, for example 15. For them we will only have to use the option "-t" followed by the number that interests us. The format to be used in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) will be the following:
coinmon -t 15
All the table prices will be shown in dollars default. But like almost everything, this can also be changed. We will can convert the price from USD to another currency using the option "-c". For example, to convert prices to EUR (euros), we will execute the command as follows:
coinmon -c EUR
Coinmon currently supports: AUD, BRL, CAD, CHF, CLP, CNY, CZK, DKK, EUR, GBP, HKD, HUF, IDR, ILS, INR, JPY, KRW, MXN, MYR, NOK, NZD, PHP, PKR, PLN, RUB, SEK, SGD, THB, TRY, TWD and ZAR.
It is also possible look up the price of a particular cryptocurrency using the symbol of this:
coinmon -f btc
In the example above, btc is the symbol for Bitcoin. They can consult the symbols of all cryptocurrencies available in Wikipedia.
For more details about this program, we will be able to consult the help section from Coinmon. We just have to add the option "-h" as it's shown in the following:
coinmon -h
Uninstall coinmon
We can easily remove this application from our system by opening a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T). In it we will only have to use the npm uninstall option, so we will write the following command in it:
sudo npm uninstall -g coinmon
If someone needs it, they can consult the source code of this utility in the GitHub page of the project.