CryptoCaster | Devpost

Inspiration

We were inspired by the current trends in Cryptocurrency and its extreme volatility due to various major social, political and economic events all over the world. A major barrier to newcomers becoming involved in Cryptocurrency is its perceived volatility and uncertainty. So, we attempt to show some rationale behind its massive fluctuations in price, to perhaps allow it more acceptance in the mainstream

What it does

Uses the massive power of large-scale Deep Learning systems today to accurately predict Bitcoin prices in the near (and not-so-near) future

How we built it

Used the Aylien API to collect relevant articles related to a keyword from all over the web, even rating sites based on their 'authority'
Used the Google Natural Language Processing API to classify these articles based on a sentiment value
Collected historical Bitcoin price info (using Coinbase), and stored it on a Microsoft SQL database running on Microsoft Azure, along with the sentiment values
Used a TensorFlow-based predictive model running on Google Cloud ML, trained on the above historical data, to predict future Bitcoin pricing
Tested this model by stepping back into various points in the past, and verifying that the predictions made by our predictive model correlate with what we now know to be reality

Challenges we ran into

Finding a (free, proper) news API
Connecting to a SQL server running on Microsoft Azure from multiple endpoints
Understanding TensorFlow
Creating a good machine learning model
Getting TensorFlow to run on Google Cloud

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The amazing amount of relevant information that we were able to scrape from the web
Just being able to do anything with TensorFlow
Manipulating massive amounts (along the order of 10^6) of data, and making some sense out of it

What we learned

Make sure the thing you want to attempt is even possible before you want to do it
Ensure that there are enough resources out there already that you can utilize and build upon
Do lots of research first
Buildings are really cold