MtGox used for currency exchange rate

[wozz]

especially with recent issues with mtgox, I don't think it's a good idea to use it for the exchange rate. Coindesk bitcoin price index is supposed to be a weighted average of exchanges, which would be a better indication of value. Ideally, there should be an option to pick from multiple exchanges depending on which exchanges each user uses.

[nighthawk24]

picking from a single exchange does not make sense, either an available average
+1 using coindesk should be better http://www.coindesk.com/price/

[langerhans]

Yep, I agree that this needs to be addressed. I'll look into coindesk, or maybe bitcoinaverage. Both provide more reasonable values. Thanks :)

[wozz]

coindesk has a simple json api, not sure how mtgox supplies its data, but it may be quite simple to just repoint the url and possibly change some parsing: http://www.coindesk.com/api/

allowing a more complex selection of dogecoin->bitcoin or ltc exchange and then a separate bitcoin/ltc->usd/eur would obviously take a bit more work

[langerhans]

The MultiBit base uses a library called XChange for all this. There is another branch of it with support for more exchanges which also trade doge. I hope this gets to the master soon. Until this happens I'll look into just integrating one of the suggestions here. Json is a breeze to use anyway :)

[langerhans]

I migrated XChange to v2 which provides the BitcoinAverage API. So we now have a weighted price over virtually all btc/fiat exchanges (according to their docs)
Commit 74d9d24