I’m trying to get quicken to help me track my investment in a crypto currency named Ethereum.

stephenvalente

I’m trying to get quicken to help me track my investment in a crypto currency named Ethereum.

The investment is in my Coinbase account

How about … When will Quicken recognize crypto currencies?

I can get a current quote in Yahoo finance symbol ETH-USD

Quicken Francisco

Hello @stephenvalente

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I do apologize for the issue you're having. Currently Quicken does not recognize cryptocurrencies. It is currently planned to be added into Quicken. I would recommend adding your vote as well. I'll leave the link down below. I do apologize this is not currently offered.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7555856/track-bitcoin-btc-and-other-cryptocurrency-accounts-in-quicken-45-legacy-votes-3-merged/p1

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

Quicken Francisco

Hello @stephenvalente

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. I do apologize for the issue you're having. Currently Quicken does not recognize cryptocurrencies. It is currently planned to be added into Quicken. I would recommend adding your vote as well. I'll leave the link down below. I do apologize this is not currently offered.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7555856/track-bitcoin-btc-and-other-cryptocurrency-accounts-in-quicken-45-legacy-votes-3-merged/p1

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

Ehoxie

You can enter your security as ethereum and then go back to it and edit the security details. In the symbol field enter INDEX:ETHUSD200 and quicken should be able to retrieve quotes.

jacobs

Cryptocurrencies typically require 8 decimal digits, while Quicken supports only 6 digits. If you're okay with making occasional tiny adjustments to deal with this, you should be able to do a reasonably good job with a cryptocurrency account. It's a pretty big job to update all the parts of Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows, Quicken Cloud (mobile and web) to all work with 8 digits; that under-the-hood work is apparently underway, but it may be some time before it's complete enough to be added to the Quicken products. 

FAWAH50

RIGHT! How the heck does Quicken not have an update by now for Crypto's like ETH, come on.

jacobs

No one here can speak for the developers, who don't generally comment here. My guess is that for several years, cryptocurrencies were viewed as a novelty with no clarity whether they'd have staying power. Now that cryptocurrencies have amassed very high valuations, and a larger percentage of people are investing in them, it seems likely that Quicken will need to add the capability to track these investments. But as explained above, this is a significant process that involves changes in many places, and is taking a long time to engineer into the products.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Chris_QPW

sime3000 said:

> @Ehoxie said:
> You can enter your security as ethereum and then go back to it and edit the security details. In the symbol field enter INDEX:ETHUSD200 and quicken should be able to retrieve quotes.

Thanks Ehoxie. I just tried that and unfortunately that index seems to be inaccurate. As of right now Ethereum is a $3894 and when I update the quote via Quicken it comes back with $3483 so its not very usable in its current state.

And that looks like another pitfall for trying use Quicken for cryptocurrencies.
I just looked this up and noticed this.


So the index isn't "inaccurate" is is just not "real time".  Clearly cryptocurrencies are very volatile and at best Quicken's quotes are 15 minute delayed, but for options and indexes they use the previous close.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Chris_QPW

@sime3000 You are talking about the technical side and ignoring the business side.  Yes I'm sure they can get up to date quote, IF they pay form them.  They are a business and can't just get them for free.

So the real question comes down to do they feel that it is worth it to them (the business) to take this or that action.  It is no different than the decisions the financial institutions make in if they want to support Quicken or not, and at what level Direct Connect, Express Web Connect, Web Connect.  Quicken users tend to think of themselves as this large force of users with the financial institutions, but in reality they are a drop in the bucket and are also almost never willing to pay for such services.  As such they expect the other customers of the financial institutions to pick up part of the bill one way or another.

I can say without a doubt that the majority of Quicken users do not invest in cryptocurrencies.  Yes the users that are is increasing, but they are certainly still the minority.  And they were even more the minority a few years ago when this discussion started.

So this isn't just about the technical problems (and there are such problems), this is about "Are the rest of the Quicken users willing to pay extra for a feature they don't want?"

jacobs

Additionally: Quicken can't currently handle cryptocurrencies well because it is built around 6 decimal places of accuracy rather than the 8 required for cryptocurrency. There is a lot of under the hood work necessary to get Quicken's three product lines -- Mac, Windows and mobile/web -- all updated to support the extra precision for storage and calculations as well as display. There's no reason to add a quotes service until Quicken can handle cryptocurrencies accurately. It's hard to reconcile you saying you've worked in IT for a long time and your assertion that cryptocurrency support could be implemented in a few minutes.

Now, could you say Quicken should have started work to support cryptocurrencies sooner? Perhaps. But it's only in the past year or so that the number of investors in cryptocurrencies have surged. So, yes, Quicken is now a step behind -- although as Chris noted, Quicken user demographics skew older and likely have fewer people clamoring for cryptocurrency support. I have no doubt Quicken will add support for crypto in the future; it's only a question of when. And that will be determined by user demand and the complexity involved in updating the data storage across all of Quicken's products. 

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

It's hard to reconcile you saying you've worked in IT for a long time and your assertion that cryptocurrency support could be implemented in a few minutes.

I personally was giving @sime3000 the benefit of the doubt that this statement was about adding a new quotes to the service that they are already providing.

Because if if refers in any way to needed changes the actual Quicken programs to make those quote useful, that is so off base I would have to assume that IT doesn't refer to any knowledge about how programs work at all.

BTW from what I have seen from people posting (I haven't checked it out personally) there are some cryptocurrencies where even 8 digits after the decimal point isn't enough.  This to me a big red flag of how this can expand into a really big problem.  With current floating point processors and the max numbers Quicken currently supports, 8 digits should be no problem with the current storage/math system, but much more than that won't be possible and then you are talking VERY major changes, and performance impacts.

Rocket J Squirrel

Well, if there are C++ typedefs for things like dollar amounts and numbers of shares (as opposed to generic "double" variables everywhere), then it "may" be simple to change the typedefs in one or more header files to use some data types which handle more digits. Also, C++ arithmetic operators can be overloaded, so I can envision a scenario where changing to a type with more digit capacity might not be too difficult. (I can't envision any scenario which takes "a few minutes.") But without seeing the code, we're all just guessing.

Chris_QPW

Just because you can typedef C++ doesn't begin to solve the underline problems you would encounter by doing so.  Databases know nothing about derived C++ types.  So for storing/retrieval it will have to be converted to a different database type.  Right there you have a big decision to make.  Are you going to you use that type for all securities, with the ramification of slower performance and larger database fields for all investment transactions?

I might add that Quicken Mac's database most likely has database a type that has large enough precision, but Quicken Windows' database most likely doesn't.

Then there are the registers and reports.
In Quicken Windows the register code certainly has to be some of the oldest in Quicken which makes error prone to change.  Not to mention the performance hit to convert from/to the derived C++ type, to something like a string because it won't fit in double variable.  And you can't use the floating point processor for any needed calculation.

Rocket J Squirrel

Good point about the database. Pesky thing.

Chris_QPW

BTW I believe that Quicken Mac is written in Objective C, is is what is popular on the Mac, not that it matters that much for this discussion.  On Quicken Windows my best guess is C++ and maybe some C#.  Given the age of Quicken Windows it can't all be C#, but I wouldn't doubt they have used it for parts of the GUI.

Rocket J Squirrel

I think the oldest QWin code is in C. I haven't seen evidence of C#. But as I said earlier, without seeing the code, we're guessing.