Decisions, decisions

This week has not been very productive. I’ve been learning the Rust programming language. I don’t have much to say about it quite yet; I’ve been reading over documentation and trying to follow along with the Rustlings tutorials. I was spurred to do this following the release of the new Cosmos developer environment, Parity.

I finally decided what to do with my Uniswap airdrop: I sold half of it and staked it in the Uni-Eth pool, and I’ll let it sit for now.

I read Infinite Detail in a day earlier this week. The author’s name came up in my feed and I was interested, so I found a copy and blazed through it. It’s good. A more dystopian version of Rainbows End, I suppose. Given the backlash to all of the tech companies, it’s also a bit of wish fulfillment as well, to see “the network” get shut down.

Still reading The Bitcoin Standard. I wonder how it’s affecting my politics. Ammous does not hold back his disgust for leftists. There’s a lengthy note about Harry Dexter White, a senior US treasury official, who dominated the Bretton Woods conference. Apparently White was performing some sort of espionage with the Russians, and Ammous goes into this long rant about progressives. He also has zero respect for Keynes, who he said had no academic or professional insight into economics.

The markets are very volatile right now, and it’s probably only going to get worse as we approach the election. I’m still sitting on cash, and am considering buying gold, or maybe some put options on SPY if I can figure out how to do that. Now’s probably not the time to be taking huge risks like that.

I had a dream two nights ago that I pulled cash out of my IRA so that I could quit my job and focus on my own business, building masternodes or validators for various blockchains. Probably not a great idea either, but maybe it deserves more thought. I was listening to an Invest Like The Best podcast with one of the Y Combinator judges, so he had some interesting advice.

I think part of my problem is my lack of a network; I don’t have others who I could trust with a venture of this type. Que Sera.

I’m reminded of another quote from The Bitcoin Standard, something about the capital flight from unsound to sound money systems. It reaches a point where it’s more lucrative for people to gamble, or speculate, than it is to actually build things. I sort of feel like that’s what’s happening, in a way. There was a scene in infinite Detail as well, when one of the main characters has an interaction with a tech bro. They’re watching a BLM protest from the vantage on top of an NYC skyscraper, and the bro admits that no one knows what’s happening, the algos are just running things and no one knows how they work.

It made me think of all these Vaults and AMMs.

There’s a scene later in the book, where the bro runs into the same protagonist a few days later. The finance bro has made a killing on a short following their earlier conversation, and the social hacker is disgusted, ready to burn it all down.