[GNC] Accessing online currency rates

[Eric Coates]

Good Evening

A query of absolutely no real consequence.

In the past (a) for as long as I can remember, currency conversion rates 
appeared "by magic" on demand and (b) I used AlphaVantage to get the 
price of shares and thus, of course, had to have an AlphaVantage key. 
But it became possible to avoid the frustrations of Alphavantge's 
throttling by using Yahoo as JSON but I didn't bother to remove the 
AlphaVantage key from gnucash.

Recently, I did a complete reinstall of my operating system (Ubuntu) and 
installed gnucash from the standard repositories. I didn't think to 
re-input the AlphaVantage key (I'd rather forgotten about it). But I 
noticed that I was failing to get the conversion rate for Euros to GB 
Pounds. That wasn't of any real concern as I only revalue my portfolio 
once a month (and you'd not believe how pretentious that sounds to my 
ears!) and adding in a single conversion rate by hand was trivial.

However, prompted by Samantha Payn's note I added the AlphaVantage key 
back into gnucash and now (it seems) I can get the Euro/Pound rate.

So, the "no consequence query": Is it necessary to have an AlphaVantage 
key to get currency conversion rates?

Take care, keep well

Eric