Crypto Bot Father

Botfather for all cryptocurrencies for Telegram - Ask him anything about crypto

What?

A Telegram chat bot for crypto. The one that rule them all!

Why?

Crypto Bot Father can be used in Telegram parse requests from clients and return useful information about crypto (like Bitcoin).

This information could be anything like market price quotes, network stats, block or address details and much more!

How?

This bot is written in JavaScript using Node.js.

The bot is using JS Finance to retrieve general cryptocurrency data like the latest prices. On-chain data is retrieved from the Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) in order to retrieve information from the Bitcoin Cash network.

Crypto Bot Father will also leverage the BCH Explorer REST API as well as Fulcrum to retrieve additional data, which is otherwise too complicated to retrieve from BCHN directly.

Who?

Hi, it's me: Melroy van den Berg.

Docker image

There is a Docker image available on DockerHub.

Developer

Requirements

• Docker Engine + Docker Compose
• Bitcoin Cash Node
• Telegram bot via @bothfather

Running

Create Telegram bot via @bothfather. Fill-in the applicable tokens/secrets in .env file, by using the template (see .env.example):

TELEGRAM_TOKEN=xyz
BITCOIN_RPC_HOST=localhost
BITCOIN_RPC_PORT=8332
BITCOIN_RPC_USERNAME=bitcoin
BITCOIN_RPC_PASSWORD=xyz
TELEGRAM_BOT_URL=https://yourdomain.com
CHART_IMAGE_API_KEY=aaaabbbbcccc

Where:

• TELEGRAM_TOKEN = Secret Bot API token
• BITCOIN_RPC_HOST = Bitcoin core host (default: localhost), optionally.
• BITCOIN_RPC_PORT = Bitcoin core RPC port (default: 8332), optionally.
• BITCOIN_RPC_USERNAME = Bitcoin core daemon RPC username (default: bitcoin)
• BITCOIN_RPC_PASSWORD = Bitcoin core daemon RPC password (default empty)
• FULCRUM_RPC_HOST = Fulcrum RPC host (default: localhost), optionally.
• FULCRUM_RPC_PORT = Fulcrum RPC port (default: 50001), optionally.
• TELEGRAM_BOT_URL = your public domain name you use to communicate against the Telegram web API server.
• CHART_IMAGE_API_KEY = API key for retrieving TradingView images from Chart-img.

Finally, starting the bot server: npm start (or node src/index.js)

Note 1: Reverse proxy (eg. Nginx) is required to put between the bot and the world-wide-web. Expose the webserver on port 443 (with SSL). See nginx_example.conf.

Note 2: Assuming you are running the bitcoind deamon (see requirements), with JSON RPC enabled and txindex enabled. Example of the local client ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf config:

# Change RPC login credentials
rpcuser=your_username
rpcpassword=your_password

Linting

Run lint: npm run lint

Fix lint issues: npm run fix

Bitcoin Cash Node setup

• Create or edit the Bitcoin Daemon (BCHN) configuration file: /etc/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf, used by the Bitcoin Cash Node Daemon service. Example of the content of this file:

maxconnections=80
maxuploadtarget=2500

# Transaction index (full index)
txindex=1

server=1

rpcthreads=7

• See bitcoind.service systemd file for Debian based distributions. Place this file into /etc/systemd/system folder.
• Core data will be stored into /var/lib/bitcoind
• Be-sure the bitcoind binary is installed into /usr/bin directory
• Create an user bitcoin the unix machine (adduser -M bitcoin)

Useful links

• BCHN Docs