Anyone who has been around crypto for a while will be used to seeing the amount of FUD thrown around, particularly from the mainstream media. I remember reading the comments section on one particular article on the Guardian, and was blown away by the general ignorance of the commentary. People re-spouting headlines without context or understanding what they are saying, I guess it is a symptom of our fast/easy consumption lifestyles (probably a subject of another post).
Exhibit A:
It was reading such comments that inspired my latest little project, create a Crypto news headline generator, that would produce a complete string of randomly selected items (bollocks) and pose it in a way to create FUD or Hopium, in unequal and totally random measures!
Step 1: Plan how it would work and define the lists:
In this case it was fairly simple. Run the programme and a randomly created phrase would appear. To do this I worked out the structure of the phrase I wanted to generate, and decided to go with speculative, what if?, types of suggestions. I then built a short list to capture these:
For the next list, I wanted to define a group of actors that are causing the 'thing'/ 'event':
*I did have Putin in this list, but F*ck Putin.
The next step was to work out what were these actors were doing. I.e. what is the event that's causing disaster:
Added in late in my thoughts, I introduced a list to identify an item or asset at the centre of the whole controversy:
The last list defines what could happen if the event was to take place, this is where the phrase would create the FUD or generate hopium. Therefore it was important to get a good mixture of positive and negative outcomes.
Lists defined, how do I get them to randomly generate a phrase?
Surprisingly easy actually...
Step 2: Create the randomizer
A bit of revision of the code from my game (detailed in update number two) I imported the randrange function from he random module, and then created a while loop that would bring together the phrase.
This little bit of code prints out the phrase, by randomly picking an item from each list. I've tested it a number of times to varying degrees of comical success, but happy with where this programme is at for now. If you want to tickle it, I've added it to a public Repl here:
I've got more plans for this little bit of programme.
1. Make it look nicer to run, stick it on a canvas and create a button to get it going.
2. Add more items to the lists, but intending to do this using python to scrape twitter or crypto new services (upcoming project).
3. Game-ify it. I.e. create an idle clicker using the random phrases generated.
4. Correct some minor grammatical quirks
5. Print the generated phrase to a permanent log and run some data analytics.
I'm always open to suggestions or comments! I'm still learning and I appreciate other people may have some great advice or suggestions.
Some favourites that have been churned out:
Will the Fed mining DogeCoin enslave Donald Trump?
Could El Salvador mining Bitcoin liquidate the SEC?
Does El Salvador hacking Trumpcoin crash the Bank of England?
Edits:
The 'effects' list was way too ridiculous to begin with, so I toned it down a lot. I kept in the 'Cancer' item as a homage to the creator of a similar programme that did the rounds a long time ago.
I wrote this before recent events and well, I don't want to give the monster any more airtime than necessary.
There originally was an additional list that was for the recipient of the action, but it crossed over a lot with the evil actor list so I decided to scrap it and expand the actors list. Then just modified the while loop to reuse this list.
