Investigating Cryptocurrencies using R

Cryptocurrencies are a fascinating phenomenon and excellent data source for analysis with R.  This post will introduce how to get a list of available currencies into R.  Wikipedia maintains a page with a list of cryptocurrencies.  These can be read from HTML into a data frame.library(httr)library(XML)results = GET("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies")doc = readHTMLTable(doc=content(results, "text"))View(doc[1])This list is not complete.  Also, an API would be preferable to reading a wiki page.  A publicly available API at cryptocompare.com provides similar information in JSON format.library(jsonlite)library(data.table)response = fromJSON('https://www.cryptocompare.com/api/data/coinlist')df = data.table::rbindlist(response$Data, fill=TRUE)View(df)With a bit of shiny code, this data can be served up in a web application and published to shinyapps.io... so you can skip the R coding and review the data here if you prefer:https://casimir.shinyapps.io/cryptocurr/