Add Native Support for Cryptocurrencies & Coinbase

adamnash

It's 2022, and Coinbase has great APIs. Please implement, at minimum, support for automatically downloading prices for the 100+ cryptocurrencies that Coinbase supports, as well as direct account linking for Coinbase. Manual entry is just too difficult.

adamnash

It's 2022, and Coinbase has great APIs. Please implement, at minimum, support for automatically downloading prices for the 100+ cryptocurrencies that Coinbase supports, as well as direct account linking for Coinbase.

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jacobs

First, please post new ideas only once; you posted the same thing in two separate categories, which makes it harder for either one to get enough votes of support.

Second, the whole issue of tracking cryptocurrencies is already a work-in-progress at Quicken. The first piece needed to track cryptocurrencies is changing Quicken to support 8 digits of accuracy; it currently supports only 6. Making that change — across Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows and Quicken mobile/web — is a significant job, as underlying math libraries need to be replaced/updated to support the additional digits of precision.

You will note if you

visit the existing idea thread

that it has been marked as "Planned" by the developers. We don't know how soon it will appear. The former Quicken Mac product manager said at one point that it was a significant job which would take them awhile. Whether they are early or late in that process isn't known; it's only know that they're moving in that direction.

After they add support for cryptocurrencies, then the next question will be whether they will provide downloads of crypto prices, and if so, which ones. It would be a logical next step, but one they can't implement before adding base support for tracking cryptocurrencies accurately.

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Forsaken1622

It is pretty ridiculous this hasn't been built in yet. Really a lack of foresight or caring.

jacobs

@adamnash As folks from Quicken have explained in other threads, the main issue is that they need to switch from 6 digits of decimal accuracy 8 digits in order to fully support cryptocurrencies. That may not sound like much, but it can require replacement of math libraries and re-writing significant code, as well as tweaking field lengths on dozens of screen. And this has to be coordinated across the separate development teams for Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows and Quicken Cloud (mobile and web), because the Mac and Windows programs both tie into the same Quicken Cloud system. And then they have to sign on with a data provider for price quotes, and sign on with cryptocurrency platforms/brokers. All of those pieces make it a big project. And it's one the developers have stated is currently being worked on.

While I'd agree that 2022 seems rather late to be getting cryptocurrency support built into Quicken, we at least know that it's coming; we just don't know when.

There are multiple other threads on this site about this feature request (such as here and here, plus this one you created yourself a month ago for the same topic — and they are all marked as "Planned". As such, there's no need to create this as a new Idea post and drive new voting for a feature the developers have said they are already working on.

thummper

It's been 'coming' for years. I know, this darn crypto stuff just snuck up on everyone last.... decade. Also, from an SD standpoint, changing to 8 digits is a cop out. Minor change with several valid approaches if your software isn't decades old spaghetti.

jacobs

thummper said:

It's been 'coming' for years. I know, this darn crypto stuff just snuck up on everyone last.... decade. Also, from an SD standpoint, changing to 8 digits is a cop out. Minor change with several valid approaches if your software isn't decades old spaghetti.

Well, Quicken software is decades-old spaghetti! Quicken Windows has more than 30 years of code from different eras of tools, languages and frameworks. Quicken Mac is newer, but the oldest code in Quicken Mac dates to about 2007 or 2008 when development of Quicken Essentials formed the basis for today's Quicken Mac.

It's easy for you say changing to 8 digit accuracy is a "minor change", but I think the development teams at Quicken would disagree with you. If it were a minor change, it would have been implemented a long time ago. 

adamnash

Well, here we are at the end of 2022... and no progress made.

We do not *need* 8 digits of accuracy to track crypto. It would be more accurate, but I've been tracking crypto in Quicken for years, manually, with 6 digits. Obviously, 8 would be correct, but as you state, it's a lot more effort and given the ludicrously slow time to market here, seems like you could phase this. E*Trade fractional share trading uses more digits of accuracy than Quicken provides, but it's still immensely valuable to have fractional share tracking in Quicken.

The idea thread you point to hasn't been updated since 2021, [Removed - Speculation] My company added crypto support for 130 different crypto assets using the Coinbase APIs in about 4 weeks with 2 engineers, for context. And our application actually deals with real crypto, not just tracking information.

Shipping cryptocurrency support without automatically downloading prices would make no sense given that the APIs available make this trivial to do at the same time.

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LB522

Upvote

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, in a recent update to Quicken Windows it got the option to use 8-digit accuracy.

BTW I think it was key that they made it an option.  When the changed from 4-digits to 6 there were many reports of people having "rounding errors" on shares from old transactions.  By making it an option that is defaulted to not using 8-digits I think they avoided a lot of similar problems this go around.