The Bisq price relay node ("pricenode" for short) is a simple HTTP service that fetches data from third-party price providers and relays that data to Bisq exchange clients on request. Available prices include:
- BTC exchange rates, available at
/getAllMarketPrices, and - BTC mining fees, available at
/getFees
Price relays are deployed as Tor hidden services. This is not because the location of these nodes needs to be kept secret, but rather so that Bisq exchange clients do not need to exit the Tor network in order to get price data.
Anyone can run a price relay, but a relay must be discoverable in order for it to do any good. For exchange clients to discover your relay, its .onion address must be (a) hard coded in the Bisq exchange client's ProviderRepository class or (b) specified explicitly via the exchange client's --providers command line option.
Price relays can be run anywhere Java and Tor binaries can be run. Instructions below cover deployment on localhost and Heroku, but nothing in principle prevents these nodes from being run across a broader selection of platforms and regions. Note however that the exchange client is currently naive about selecting price relays (it does so once randomly at startup), but this could be improved in various ways to accommodate a larger number of better-distributed nodes.
Price relays should be cheap to run with regard to both time and money. The application itself is non-resource intensive and can be run on the low-end of most providers' paid tiers, and possibly even on some providers' free tiers.
A price relay operator's main responsibilities are to ensure their node(s) are available and up-to-date. Releases are currently source-only, with the assumption that most operators will favor Git-based "push to deploy" workflows. To stay up to date with releases, operators can subscribe to this repository's releases.atom feed.
Operating a production price relay is a valuable service to the Bisq network. Accordingly, operators should issue BSQ compensation requests that cover their time and money costs.
To run a price relay, you will need:
- BitcoinAverage API keys. Free plans are fine for local development or personal nodes; paid plans should be used for well-known production nodes.
- Tor Browser to verify .onion URLs.
- JDK 8 if you want to build and run a node locally.
- The
torbinary (e.g.brew install tor) if you want to run a hidden service locally.
Run the following commands:
./gradlew installDist
BITCOIN_AVG_PUBKEY=[your pubkey] BITCOIN_AVG_PRIVKEY=[your privkey] ./build/install/bisq-pricenode/bin/bisq-pricenode [capacity] [max-blocks] [request-interval-mins]
curl https://localhost:8080/getAllMarketPrices
To register the node as a Tor hidden service, run:
tor -f torrc
When the process reports that it is "100% bootstrapped", leave the process running, copy your newly-generated .onion address from build/tor-hidden-service/hostname and then open https://$YOUR_ONION/getAllMarketPrices in your Tor Browser. You should see the same response as produced in the curl request above.
NOTE: It may take a few minutes for your new .onion address to get registered and become resolvable. Registration of Tor hidden service descriptors can take some time.