Hi, my name is @Tony and I've finally created a dedicated account for my Bitcoin-only educational project, Bitcoin Calendar. I'm excited to bring the project to SN because it's starting to outgrow my personal account and deserves its own representation.
SN community is unique in a way that it gathered knowledgeable, curious and likeminded people like no other platform managed to do. That's why I want Bitcoin Calendar to be a part of it and to be a separate, easily addressable entity here.
Essentially Bitcoin Calendar is a swarm of mini apps designed to store and distribute major Bitcoin & Freedom Tech historical milestones. The main goal is to provide people with info on important events in Bitcoin history, so that the curious ones can better understand why Bitcoin exists, why it is what it is and why it is important to protect the fundamentals of free and censorship resistant money.
As an educator, not a developer, I was super excited to leverage modern tech to bring my long-living dream to life. I've been actively working on the technical side of it for over 6 months, while the Calendar itself was started back in summer of 2022 (as a Google calendar at the time).
Here are a few post dedicated to Bitcoin Calendar I made from my personal SN account in case you want to have a bit of a timeline:
Let's move on to recent updates:
Web
Bitcoin Calendar web app is a one-stop-shop for everyone to browse Bitcoin milestones and dig deeper into historical archives. It displays all the findings I managed to document. There's a lot more planned ahead, but I believe in the "worse is better" approach, so do not judge as you see imperfections, and be sure there are many cool things coming.
Categorization
The most obvious and exciting recent update is about the web app. I've added categorization of Bitcoin events and enabled filtering by topics. All events are now color coded and visitors can now easily constrain browsing solely to the events they are interested in.
Search
Search became a bit more polished, but I am yet to figure out the best way to let visitors search by the date range or have some complex date-related search. Full text search is supported, so you can search by month-date (like August 25), but there is no way yet to search for events from a specific month and year (like August 2016). I'm working on that.
Bots
Automated posting is what got me to develop Bitcoin Calendar in the first place – I wanted to deliver historical milestones to bitcoiners on the dates these events happened. It started with big holidays like Bitcoin Pizza Day, and then snowballed into 500+ events – from Satoshi reaching out to Adam Back regarding Hashcash to Hal Finney's bitcointalk posts.
Nostr
Nostr bot has been consistently relaying Bitcoin Milestones to the community for nearly 6 months now (the account itself is much older) and its follower base and engagement gradually grow, though still leave much to be desired. I've set it up to post both kind1 (tweet-like notes) and kind20 (instagram style) events. The latter are not too popular so far, but I believe media-first clients are quite far from reaching their full potential, so I keep my hopes up.
Telegram
Yesterday I launched a Telegram bot to widen the reach – there are normies out there who are not comfortable with bitcoin-oriented platforms yet, so I am gradually building open source tools to educate them and pull them towards more reality-conscious platforms and protocols. You can find the bot launch announcement with more detailed reasoning here #1092853
Twitter (X)
I actually got a Xitter (formerly Twitter, now X) developer account last week and want to try and build a bot for Elon's walled garden to see if there are people in need of orangepilling. This endeavour is already promising to be entertaining to say the least. I covered the ridiculousness of X's actions in a Nostr post here. I'll keep you updated.
Stacker News
The most exciting development in the Bitcoin Calendar bot army is a chance to create a bot for Stacker News. Yesterday I reached out to SN team asking if this was possible and (almost instantly) got a reply from @ek that this is in fact a possibility and I may be able to do it. See details in this thread here #1092875
Behind the scenes
There's a lot going on under the hood – Bitcoin Calendar aims to become a project independent of third-party services. All of its components are self-hosted, all the associated data is stored on a dedicated server and relayed over own Nostr relay.
Essential parts of the project are:
- Database. Holds historical events.
- Blossom server. Holds media files and documents.
- Haven relay. Relays events to Nostr.
- ArchiveBox. Stores archived web pages of all the events' sources.
- Website. Interactive web interface with a calendar view.
- Nostr bot. Ensures timely posting of historical events to Nostr.
- Telegram bot. Posts events to capture a wider, less technical audience.
- Website. The web app displays all documented events and provides search and filtering functionality. Still under development, but already proves to be useful to some.
That's basically it for now, fellow bitcoiners.
If you want to receive historical Bitcoin milestones on a daily basis or share the project with your friends, please find relevant links here:
Wanna see the code? Welcome to the project's GitHub page: https://github.com/Bitcoin-Calendar
Bitcoin’s timechain is timeless — its history should be too.