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Spring Cleaning Day

It takes a village to clean my house

Pre-COVID, we hired a woman to come and clean our house twice a month. She or her daughter-in-law would come out as a group or by themselves and spend about four hours vacuuming, dusting, sweeping and mopping, cleaning clutter, changing the beds and that kind of general housework that we couldn’t keep up with because we were too “busy”. We paid them $130 every time they came out which was much cheaper than hiring one of the professional franchise companies.

When lockdown came we weren’t comfortable having them come to our home anymore, so Missus gave them a couple months pay as severance and let them go. So for the past year we’ve gotten into a bit of a system where I would take the kids out of the house for a couple hours each weekend and Missus would do as much decluttering as possible, cleaning bathrooms and the like. No one is really happy with the arrangement, Missus because she does most of the work, and me as I think the girls should be doing more for their part to help out. Myself, I do most of the kitchen work and cooking, so I guess I feel like it’s an upstair/downstairs kind of thing.

All this talk of my early retirement has rubbed a sore spot with my wife. If we’re so rich why can’t we afford a maid, she’s remarked to me several times. So I’ve been mulling over the decision to bring back our cleaning lady.

However, I’ve been listening to the Business of Family podcast, and one of the guests was talking about allowances. Now, for the last year or two, I’ve been giving the girls an allowance, one dollar a week times their age. I read a book at the time which recommended splitting the allowance into three pots: spend, save and give. The give pot was originally for charity, but I modified it for birthday and Christmas gifts instead. I found an inexpensive app called RoosterMoney that allows me to automate the process, and I can even offer interest on the save pot. The money gets deposited in their accounts on Friday, and I give them mostly free reign with the spend money. The save pots were supposed to be for big-ticket items that I would let them choose on their birthday, but as we’ve gotten more into downsizing and financial independence, I’ve decided to show the girls the value of compound interest. The money stays in the save pot, but I’ll let them disburse the interest gained once a month if they want. Elder has over three hundred in her account, which is giving her about a dollar and a half each month.

My plan is to stop giving them allowances when they turn thirteen, and allow them to start managing the save money, but I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do yet. I’ve also been saving up $50/month for their “education” fund, which through my investing success has grown to around five figures. I figured by the time they turn thirteen I would start getting them involved in the management of the funds, and I would hand it over to them when they turn eighteen. But if bitcoin continues compounding at two hundred percent a year like it’s been doing for the next decade, then that might be a serious amount of money, and I’ll have to reconsider how I hand it off.

So the guest on this podcast said that instead of giving kids an allowance and falling into the entitlement trap, that one allows them to earn it. He didn’t advocate paying kids to keep their rooms clean, but instead give them the opportunity to earn money doing something that you were going to pay someone else to do anyways, like yard work. Now I had originally experimented with doing DadPoints through the Rooster app, but it was too cumbersome to do daily chores in it. I used it one time to make the girls earn a trampoline for the backyard, but that was the end of the DadPoints system.

So I got it into my head yesterday that I was going to pay Elder to help clean the house. She’d been begging me for some money for whatever, and I told her that she could earn up to $130 to clean the house, top-to-bottom for four hours. She got very excited, and we decided to go for it. So around 11:30 yesterday morning we got started. I made a list of every room in the house, as well as all of the tasks that need to be done. It was about three pages long. Then we got started, and set a four hour timer on the kitchen stove. She went upstairs to start on the bedrooms, and I set to work in the kitchen.

I had sent Younger out of the house to play with her adoptive family. The kids came to ask if Elder could play but I told them she was working. After a while they came back to ask, but I sent them away again. I furiously cleaned the kitchen, doing some much overdue deep cleaning. One of the girls, Younger’s age, asked if they could come in and play. No, I said, we are cleaning in here, and if you come in here you have to clean also. Okay, she said.

I wasn’t ready to have a house-full of little ones running around, so I gave them a test. Clean up the back deck and yard, and then they could come in and start on the living room. It took them a while to get that done, and by the time our timer was down to ninety minutes, I let them in.

That last hour and a half was a blur. I was trying to clean, keep Elder and my three other kids busy cleaning. Missus puttered about but mostly kept herself locked in her office watching Netflix. I threw out so much trash and pulled stuff out from under furniture that hadn’t seen the light of day in months. I even found my car keys, that had been missing for weeks, underneath he upholstered chair next to my desk. (I blame the cats.)

When the timer went off I pulled all the dollar bills out of my money jar and set down with everyone to divvied the spoils. We weren’t able to conqueror the dining room table or our main office, so we knocked the total amount down to a hundred dollars. I wound up giving the younger kids five dollars for the help they did, and gave Elder twenty-five. The rest was mine, since I did most of the work anyways.

I was actually quite impressed with how things turned out. We got most of the house clean, no small feat, Missus didn’t have to do all the work, I didn’t have to pay for a maid, and the kids got to earn a bit of extra cash. It was such a success that I went and marked the third Saturday of each month on our calendar cleaning day. I figure I’ll let them do it again in April, and see if they get better at it and can get the house even more clean.

Fantastic.

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Aping New Uniswap Pools

I had a bit of a brainstorm earlier today.

Uniswap’s factory contract emits a pairCreated event whenever a new pool is established, so it’s fairly trivial to find the pool and purchase tokens right after the pool is launched, potentially before the project has even announced it. Dark Forest indeed. I’ve been watching a few of these to watch what happens after during these post event launches, and trying to figure out a way to build a bot that can exploit these launches.

Here’s one such transaction.

You can see here that someone is seeding a Uniswap pool with 1 ETH and 441 billion of these KONG tokens.

So a word about KONG. All I can find about it is kongdefi.finance. Just a basic website. No social anywhere, nothing on Twitter other than a single tweet mentioning it, and a reply back to that has failed to garner a response yet.

Anyways, looking at the actual contract log event:

The first Hex value returned is the address of the Uniswap pair, and you can paste it into the Uni search box or into the address bar to find it. Just remove the leading zeroes and add ‘0x’ to it. So you can see the KONG-ETH pair here. You can also watch the chart on DexTools as well.

I did a bit of digging into the contract code and the holders to try and evaluate the likelihood of a rugpull. The contract creator made 1 trillion tokens, burned less than half of them, then deposited about eighty percent of what’s left into the Uni pool with the single ETH. They’re still holding about five percent of the supply. Much of the Uni LP tokens seem to have been put into a token lock contract, but not all of them.

I threw a little bit of ETH at KONG just for kicks, and saw my funds go up about double, so I threw five times that at it, hoping it would do the same, but there was a dump and it’s been chopping around since then. One of the first buyers got in for 0.4ETH and was able to sell less than half the position back for over seven ETH. Not bad for an hours work. They’ve sold another smaller portion off again. What a profit.

I aped into another token again, a few minutes ago, with disastrous results. I basically turned 0.1ETH into 0.003 in about twenty minutes. No website, no Coingecko listing, probably just someone taking advantage of idiots like me, trying to play the DarkForest game.

Some backtesting is going to be needed. There’s probably dozens of LPs created each day, so spraying and praying probably isn’t going to be the best option. These low liquidity pools are probably all scams, so it’s probably best to stay away from them. I’ll have to spend some time looking over the higher value pools and figuring out which projects are quality.

I’ve been brainstorming on how to automate this process. There’s a Uniswap Token Listing bot on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that it’s slow to catch things. There may be a way to do it using Nansen, if I can afford the monthly fee, but I can probably build something myself using Python and Alchemy. Catch the events, figure out what tokens they are, look up Coingecko to find the website, then set an alert if there’s a match. I might even be able to deploy funds if those criteria are met.

More research is needed, but I’ll probably experiment with a few more of these over the next couple days to see if it’s a viable strategy.

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Insomnia

Yesterday Elder woke me up at 4:30AM after an accident. I had only been to bed since midnight but my ADHD-addled brain wouldn’t let me go back to sleep afterward. I spent the next couple hours on the verge of sleep before getting up and meditating. I managed to fall asleep for another hour but by eight I was completely awake and mostly useless. Thankfully I went to bed before ten last night and slept like a baby. So here I am. My

My project work at Zombie, LLC is winding down. I have a couple of things I need to wrap up on Friday, but then I think the way is pretty much clear for my departure. I still need to complete my resignation letter, and there’s a lot of things that I need to do elsewhere to make sure everything happens on track.

Missus and I just signed our closing documents for our refi. It seems kinda stupid to me to be paying twenty-five hundred in costs when I plan on paying the whole thing off in a few months, but it was for Missus’s peace of mind, not mine. It’ll take a couple months for us to get our escrow back from our current lender, then we’ll be getting new windows here at the house. Our stimulus and tax returns will be paying most of that.

I’ve got a lot of funds in play right now. My 60-day IRA rollover is on the way to the LLC bank, once it clears it’s on to FTX, and eventually to my new hardware wallet, which is coming Thursday night. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with it quite yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s all going straight into ETH and DeFi. I’m starting to liquidate my personal holdings and am doing yield farming with my USDC. There’s a lot going on with BadgerDAO right now, so I’m keeping a close eye on things and trying to decide what to do. DIGG is hemorrhaging capital right now, and Badger itself is holding somewhat steady in USD terms, but falling slowly against BTC. Other than that, I’m trying to bring myself to sell my IDEX funds. It’s still up 10x from where I purchased, but it’s not really doing much of anything. Apparently I’m earning drops on BSC and some other chain, but I don’t have time to keep up with it and would rather just sell it and farm the proceeds. I brought up the transaction on Zapper several times yesterday, but couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Maybe today.

There’s a lot going on with Homebrew.Finance and MUG this weekend. TokenSet/SetProtocol now allow editing the Set page, so I’ll be able to update it with the Homebrew website and Twitter. We’re supposed to be doing our first reissue and rebalance this weekend. So far the plan is to move forward with liquidation, but I’m looking for a way out of doing that, cause it’s going to be expensive. I might just need to put tokens up on Uniswap or try to sell them OTC to raise some funds first. I’ll probably need to think this through a bit more, and should focus on getting the snapshot.page deployed. There’s a lot of work to do.

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Information overload

Today was “busy”, but not in a productive way. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to for work, but the last 24 hours have been pretty effective in a spring-cleaning way. I blame Daylight Savings. Yesterday the entire fam washed the car and cleaned the yard, did a bunch of cleaning around the house. I even did our books. Today I cooked dinner for the fam and the kids’ friends down the street, and they played outside with such joy that Missus and I couldn’t help but smile.

I also made my way down to my bank to start a wire transfer for my 60-day IRA rollover. This process has been so excruciatingly slow. And I just had to go down there the first weekday after everyone got their stimulus checks. I noted today that they were calling it the “Rescue America Act”. I’m amazed that it took so long for this bit of trivia to become known to me. Anyways, it should take two days for the wire to complete, another four days to transfer to the LLC bank, then another ACH to FTX and I’ll be able to load up. Just in time for my new Lattice1 wallet to arrive.

I sat down last night with my spreadsheet and tried to make sense of all the things I’ve been doing with Badger. I was trying to prep myself to take some profits. Since most of my capital is locked up in LP, I’m very concerned about impermanent loss. And the rewards are starting to get to the point where it’s not worth it for me to hold. This last weekly “harvest” was rather underwhelming, considering gas prices. I was working my way to a plan to exit my liquidity pools so that I’d have just wBTC and Badger, but then I saw a Tweet that the $CLAWS product will be released soon.

I can’t find the YouTube video which describes it, but basically we’ll be able to mint some sort of derivative using out BadgerDAO LPs. These will be 60-day tokens that will expire in 60-days, so we may be able to sell them for stablecoins, then farm these tokens. I’m not really sure I understand it quite yet, but if they launch by April 1st then I may decide to hang onto my LP tokens and try to take advantage of some stablecoin yields.

I’ve been liquidating positions to USDC and wBTC. USDC is going toward my one-year “retirement” runway, and the wBTC is going toward the “pay off the mortgage” funds. I’m looking at ways to stake them for yield, which I consider safer than altcoin plays right now. I may risk some of my IRA funds on some potential altcoin plays if it looks like altseason is still in play, but for the most part I’m just going to be farming tokens. Staking wBTC or USDC for liquidity mining is relatively safe, but I’m going to need a lot to make it worthwhile.

There’s so much I want to do. I literally can’t think of much else beyond crypto these days. In addition to keeping up with what’s going on with bitcoin and macro, there’s Ethereum and DeFi. I really want to take a look at what’s going on with Polkadot, and what’s going on with Rune and Avalanche seems really interesting as well.

TokenSets is taking a lot of my time as well. I just had two people reach out to me who jumped into creating a set without understanding how it works. My contact on the team has promised me that some goodies are coming, so we’ll see how that plays out. It’s just so sad to see people jumping into wasting the gas to make this protocol without understanding how it works.

For now, all I can do is keep my head down and keep grinding. There’s lots of work to do.

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Sixty one thousand

About a year ago, when I first started writing about reFIREment, I added up my debt on a whiteboard, mortgage and student loan debt. I divided that debt by the number of bitcoin in my hardware wallet and wrote the price BTC would need to hit in order for the value of that bitcoin to zero out that debt. It didn’t really hit me yesterday, but we hit that number.

But I’m not selling. In fact, I went in the kitchen and erased that old number and wrote a new one. One-hundred twenty thousand.

In addition to my bitcoin, I’ve got BlockFi accounts for all four of us in the house, plus I’m holding some funds for my dad through our spec mining partnership. In addition to that, I’ve got ethereum wallets that contain even more funds. All said, it’s a stupid amount of money, considering where we were a year ago.

I’ll be reassessing some things later this morning, but I’ll probably be pulling my BadgerDAO LP stake out of at least one or more pools this morning, starting with the Badger-wBTC Sushiswap pool, since it’s the only one that I can positively claim is mine, and doesn’t have any co-mingled funds in it. The rewards I’m getting aren’t enough to justify the impermanent loss that I expect on this next leg up for BTC. It will trigger a, shall we say, taxable event, so I’m still not sure how I want to deal with it. wBTC will probably stay as it is, but I may need to liquidate my Badger to USDC. I’m still bullish on the DAO, but the goal right now is at least a year’s salary in stablecoins by June 1st, my official “retirement” date.

I’ve got a new hardware wallet on the way, I’ll be restructuring how I handle funds to keep things easier to manage. Separate ETH addresses for everyone will have to be the way moving forward, cause calculating NAV manually in a mixed wallet is just to challenging for me. Crypkit looks like it might have the features that I want, but at $300/month, it’s a bit too pricey for me right now. Once I hit my goal I can put a business plan into action, and can justify the cost of fancy accounting software and other subscriptions.

Elder drew a really nice leprechaun for St. Patrick’s day, and I started looking into what I need to do to mint it as an NFT. I was playing around with MurAll ($PAINT) last night, trying to figure it out. I estimated for about $300 PAINT tokens based on the size of the picture, but the gas to mint it is several hundred dollars more. I also spent some time messing around with Rarible as well, but didn’t get around to finishing it before it was Elder’s bedtime. I’m going to investigate some more this morning, and see if there are better options available.

I also showed her Printful, and gave her some ideas about making some customised items. She’s got ideas. Just-in-time shops are much cheaper to set up than minting NFTs, that’s for sure.

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Sixty thousand

In three weeks, the price of bitcoin has gone from fifty-eight thousand dollars on February 21st, down to forty-three a week later, and has now breached sixty on some exchanges.

I hope you bought the dip, friend.

Yesterday was hectic for me. Bossmang decided that he wanted to do a router and UPS installation the day before, which would have been a simple task, but quickly turned into a panic job. I had forgotten that we had scheduled a visit to the passport office to get passports updated or issued for everyone. So while I’m on the phone trying to coordinate new IPs and remote router configuration with him, the kids are screaming at each other while I try to get them to make lunch. On top of that, Friday was supposed to be my “public announcement” of my retirement, but by the time I got back and finished up the day, it was too late to get it out by my original 4PM Friday deadline. I did manage a thousand words or so, a nice start.

Yesterday was beautiful, the weather reached seventy and sunny. It got hot in the house, but rather than put on the AC I just opened all the windows before bed. Friday evening was tame, we let the girls have their friends over for TV and pajama party. I actually wound up going to bed at a decent hour, read a chapter of Shantaram and When Money Dies before passing out. I woke up this morning with cool air coming in the window along with the sounds of birds chirping, so I got out of bed very early and checked the price. Retirement is back on.

I’m still no closer to figuring out how to pay off the mortgage. I’m hoping it will be an easier decision in the next few weeks. For now, I’ve got about twenty pounds of pork sitting on the counter, waiting for me to fire up the smoker. Today will be chill, nothing to do but cook and write, and plan for the future.

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Exit plan, revised

I spoke to a wealth management expert yesterday. It was an interesting conversation, to say the least. They had reached out to me via LinkedIn because we share the same alma mater, and I figured it was good timing, given my current interest in wealth management, and generational businesses.

They were actually fairly familiar with crypto, they had a background in information systems. He had heard of DeFi, but I think I lost him explaining that and when the subject turned to the work we were doing with MUG token. He wasn’t judgy at all, either.

We spoke for about an hour, I asked him to describe his professional career, and then I launched into my story of running a business (into the ground) in my mid-twenties, and getting started in investing shortly there after. I got into spec mining in 2014, bought ETH when it was pennies, then cashed out my brokerage account for crypto during the 2017 run, and watched my modest four-figure stack turn into six figures over that winter. The sudden success caught me by surprise, and, lacking an exit strategy, I held all the way down through the 2018 correction till my holdings were only 80% of what they had peaked by the start of 2019.

I spent the next two years continuing to invest in bitcoin, and doing spec mining and basically learning everything I could about the industry, and positioning my investments within my IRA among crypto-related equities like $GBTC, $MARA and $RIOT. Q420 was a blast.

As the bitcoin bull-market resumed in the latter half of 2020, crypto-related equities actually outperformed BTC by an order of magnitude. So while my crypto portfolio gained 10x, my IRA actually outperformed BTC, despite GBTC and the others only representing a modest portion of my original cost basis.

I talked about the FIRE movement, and how we came up with out magic number using the four percent rule. That, my new friend understand. I told him basically how we had set our FIRE by 2024 plan last year, (halving to halving), and how we were already hit our goal in one year. Well, almost.

We’re close, but not close enough for me to just call it quits and cash out. The difference between this cycle and the last is that we have plenty of lending platform that can provide a significant yield income on crypto and stablecoin deposits. Obviously there’s no telling how long it will last, but if things keep up we may have to rewrite the four percent rule to the twenty percent rule.

My wife has put some qualifications on my upcoming so-called retirement: no debt. So I’ve got to pay off our mortgage if I want to avoid separation. The question is, how to go about that? I’ve already decided that I’ll need a significant cash cushion, equal to a years salary, and I’ve started taking claimed profits from my highest generating project and selling that to stable coins. That’s not gonna get me all the way there, so I’m looking to liquidate some of my smaller, more speculative assets that have done well to cash as well. That may get me closer, but my plan is really dependent on a run to six-figure BTC — and beyond. Somewhere between $100-120k should do the trick.

I told my new acquantaince that if I can double my IRA, I’d have enough money to pay the income tax, early withdrawal penalty, pay off the mortgage, and still have enough left over to provide interest income to satisfy our new, lower magic number. More than half of our monthly expenses are our mortgage, so paying this off would lower our capital requirements significantly.

They pointed out a couple points that I had misunderstood. First off, I was under the impression that any pre-retirement distribution from an IRA would cause the entire IRA to be considered as income. He corrected me, that only the distribution itself would be, the rest of the IRA would be still be protected. He also pointed out that selling my long-term BTC holdings would only be taxed at fifteen percent, instead of the forty percent that an early IRA withdrawal would cost.

I’ve been running the numbers back and forth all day, trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do. I am more emotionally attached to the bitcoin I own, I’ve got a hodler’s mentality and have been telling myself that I’ll never sell them — although that’s not quite true. Right now my moving target, (3.6*200-day moving average) is around $87k and rising, so it may be a while before we get there.

Thankfully, I don’t have to make any decisions right now. I’ll just keep taking profits on the smaller positions and yield generating protocols every week or so, and revisit where we’re at in a month.

And here we are now, with BTC edging $80k and toying with new ATH. Things are looking very nice indeed.

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The next decade

I’ve reached the breaking point with work, and have told my boss, in no uncertain terms, that I will be stepping away by June. I’m not going to discuss the circumstances that finally broke me or the way in which I did it, but it’s obvious to me that between my family, job, crypto and personal health, my job has been the lowest priority on that list for some time, and I cannot continue to live such an unbalanced life. I am grateful to my boss for the last eight years of employment, however I cannot continue to hold myself back from fully embracing the opportunities in the crypto industry and starting the next phase of my life.

There is a saying, that the thing that you want is behind your fear, and I have been afraid of taking that step for several years. I’ve been telling myself the criteria that I would need to meet to step away, and have kept finding excuses not to take that step. No more.

I’m extremely lucky to be in the place where I am now, although I understand that my position is extremely tenuous. Having seventy percent of your net worth locked up in crypto puts one in a very volatile position, financially, and I have got to take immediate steps to derisk my positions and build up a cash reserve that will provide my family stability over the next year, no matter what happens to bitcoin or crypto. To that end, I’ll be accelerating profit taking of my existing assets and rotating funds into cash and tax-deferred crypto accounts.

To prevent myself from waffling and reneging on my promise to myself, I am going to write a blog post announcing the departure and post it to my normie Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack accounts, no later than this Friday.

My immediate concern is capital preservation, and preventing myself from taking unnecessary financial risks that will put this departure plan in jeopardy. Barring a black swan event, I believe that we’ll see BTC prices near six figures by the time I’m ready to depart, but in the event that we do not, I will still need to have a year’s cash on hand to handle expenses. And if I’m correct, my wife and I will have achieved financial independence before the end of the year.

My wife, bless her soul, will always be the main critic of this plan. She’s watched me fall further and further down the crypto rabbit hole these last five years, and has been my rock for the last sixteen years of my life. She knows me and my baser tendencies, and will take much more convincing to go along with this plan. Terms will be set.

I’ve been giving a lot of though to the values and principles that I want to establish and pass down to my children. I’ve always believed in a world of morals without religion, but I’ll admit that the absence of church or religion has left us a bit unmoored. I’ve realized that puts extra work on our shoulders to actually be explicit about our values around work ethic and service to others, that we have to work harder to fight our baser instincts and battle our addictions. We have to set the habits that will make us thrive, we have to build a network of friends and colleagues and take steps to reach out to people that make us better. It’s work.

And to that end, we’re going to hold our first monthly family meeting with the kids, where I’ll be proposing a draft of a family constitution. It’s an idea that I got from the Business of Family podcast. It sets roles and responsibilities, both for parents and children, and provides a plan so that everyone knows what’s expected of them, and sets a framework for long-term, multi-generational planning. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

If this is going to work out, if I’m going to achieve the plans that I set out to achieve, then I’m going to need the help and support of a team outside my family as well. I’m not going to become a man of leisure anytime soon, I’ll have to have a job, else Missus will never go along with it. She still remains convinced that she’s going to be working for the next fourteen years to finish her government pension, and will not abide the thought of me as Mr. Mom, staying up late and engaging in shenanigans, while she continues to hold a steady job in order to provide health care coverage to our family. I’ll need something to do to keep me busy.

The choice is obvious. I’ll make it my mission to help as many people get started on the same journey as I am. Financial independence through bitcoin, if you will. Whether that is by helping them open tax-advantaged retirement accounts for their crypto, offering passive or active investment vehicles, educating them about crypto, or helping them learn about financial indepI’m making it my mission to help as many people get started on the road to financial independence through bitcoin.endence so that they can live the type of life they want, I can think of no better way for me to spend the next ten years building the life I want.

I’ve already been experimenting with this via Homebrew.Finance, but the work has been going slow, too slow. I’ve got a lot of ideas to implement and need people with skills that can help me make it happen. So I’m putting out the call, and will be making it formally (non-anon) this Friday. I need to build a professional, crypto-savvy, team of partners who are on on the same road as me, and want to help others get there as well. If this is you, then please let me know in the comments, via my Twittter, or at my gmail (@dahifi).

Here’s looking forward.

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Swimming in Liquidity Pools

So the big news this weekend in crypto was the launch of the Big Data Protocol’s liquidity mining program. The project quickly locked up six billion dollars in it’s BDPMaster contract, causing concern for some. Sam Bankman-Fried’s Almeada Research apparently threw in one billion on their own. I gave myself a minor panic attack as I pulled liquidity from several pools and projects to ape in, burning about five hundred dollars in gas as I exited positions that were earning a measly sixty percent interest.

The project itself is a bit underwhelming to me, it’s founded by an existing data provider company, basically they’re using the tokens to provide access to their feeds. They’re actually using two tokens, $BDP, which is the utility token, and $bALPHA, which is a subscription token that one can burn for access to the data sets. BDP is earned by staking one of twelve assets (wBTC, wETH, USDC, Tether, et al,) for up to a week, at which point no more BDP tokens will be minted for at least two months. The bALPHA tokens are released by staking BDP and bALPHA LP tokens, and those two pools were still pumping quadruple digit APYs three days after launch.

Despite my excitement yesterday, I feel like I was probably late to the party, and that ultimately it will wind up a bit like treading water, a lot of physical activity that gets you nowhere. The worst part is that I am pretty sure I read about the BDP launch some time ago, but wasn’t really interested in it. I just FOMOed in because of all the excitement. I’ll be lucky to earn my gas fees back, and I honestly deserve to get rugged or lose my capital over this.

I’ve forced myself to write before I access any of my wallets. Younger woke me up before dawn this morning and I laid in the dark in that in between sleep state thinking about this, and knew that I needed to write about it. I’m forcing myself to write five hundred words before I allow myself to check my charts and wallets. My CoinTracking is probably going to have at least thirty transactions from yesterday. Sometimes I am a fool. The GasNow plugin in my web browser is mocking me: gas is only eighty, don’t you want to check? Oops, now its ninety, everyone is waking up. You better check your IL and get out why you still can.

I dreamed about changing my LinkedIn profile to cryptoanalyst. Nansen.AI posted a tweet that their hot contracts feature alerted their pro subscribers to activity on the BDPMaster contract Friday night. I imagine having that information could have paid for the $1500/month subscription fee. I signed up for a trial. The basic service has some interesting features, such as address alerts, which an address for tokens or transfers or, most importantly new contract deployments. I imagine this would be very useful for watching star developers like Cronje or Banteg, or Uniswap factories to see when a new LP gets created. I can only begin to imagine. I had been looking at a GlassNode subscription a few days ago to get access to their current data sets, and the number of metrics that they have there are just staggering. Their cost is much cheaper than Nansen, that’s for sure.

I’ve already got a Messari subscription, and it’s not doing that much for me, to be honest, but it’s a business expense, so I justify it along with the 2021 CoinTracking subscription. I still have a day job, and projects to do that not interest me in the slightest anymore. I figure if I can just survive this market for a few more months without doing anything stupid (a big if!) then I just might make it.

My BadgerDAO holdings are giving me some pause, since most of my positions are tied up in LP or staking there. DIGG, which I had started to hoard, is hemorrhaging, but Badger, which I’d been selling, is holding. Go figure. I’m hoping DIGG will start moving once BTC makes a new ATH, but it looks like my previous prediction about it catching the peg with BTC’s price was either naive or will take a lot longer than I predicted.

So for now, I’m going to take a deep breath, slow my thrashing, and try to tread water for a little while longer while I assess my surroundings.

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The next chapter

I started reading Shantaram yesterday, and the way the author describes his writing habit makes me realize that I am still not a writer. Sure, I’ve been blogging almost daily for over a year now, but most days I still have to force myself to write. Days like yesterday I can just skip it and feel no remorse about it. I’ve been listening to Seth Godin on Knowledge Project about the creative process, and the words he speaks are just so damn clear. The man’s blogged daily and has a streak currently measured in the thousands, and I just don’t have the same level of commitment to writing that he does, or Penn Jillette, who told Tim Ferriss that he’s journaled every day for the last thirty years.

I’m growing more comfortable being honest here. Now that bitcoin has (currently) given me the feeling of financial independence, I’m not so concerned about saying what I think about work, or have any qualms about what anyone future employer might think is professional or not. I’m going to say what I want, and I do feel like I’m starting to find my voice here. I’m not quite ready to erase the veil of pseudonymity that I currently have, and announce on my LinkedIn that I’m Blockchain Man. I still respect my family’s privacy too much for that, and opsec is still a concern. Being your own bank has it’s risks.

I am, however being a bit lax about sharing details with some of my IRL friends and acquaintances. I only know one person who’s actually admitted to reading this blog on a regular basis (hi Britt!) but other than that I think the only people coming through here are those hitting the focused topic articles that I’ve written. This one here is for me, Dear Reader, for present me, so that I can focus my thoughts, and for the many future mes, so I can see this one or more years from now and remember where, and who I was. I went back and looked at last March’s entries, writing about going into lockdown as the pandemic started. It’s like going back in a time machine. Further than that though is a bit of a mixed bag, as they’re all caught up with technical things, or politics. I wasn’t writing in quite the same way I am now.

Things are coming together a bit lately. I made a connection through the SetProtocol Discord, and it turns out this person actually lives less than thirty miles from me. We may have actually been in the same room at some point during a blockchain meetup. They’ve got some ideas around doing their own version of a TokenSet, using paid signals from a popular paid recommendation service for HNW individuals. I ran the numbers to get an idea of how things would run, and I’m tempted to go ahead and pull the trigger on a new Homebrew $RUM fund. This one would be more of a speculative, high risk fund, but I’m still trying to figure out exactly how it would be managed. What would the minimum viable capital needed to start it? What would the capital allocation process look like?

Someone Twitter has been follow pointed me to another NFT Index TokenSet, $NFTI. I stumbled across them after I had already launched $MUG, but had missed the website that was linked at the bottom of the page. They actually started their fund in early February, with about $80k of liquidity on Uniswap, and have done about $300% since then. Not bad at all. The token inclusion policy seems like it may have been ripped straight from the IndexCoop page for DPI, but it’s well done and professional. Very nice.

Linked at the bottom of that page is a link to CryptoArt, an Estonian cryptoasset management fund. This is very attractive to me, and is giving me much inspiration for Harvest. Implementing this type of business as a DAO is likely going to be the focus of the next several months of my life. They have a $5k/6 month minimum investment lockup, plus a two and thirty percent management/commission structure. It seems a bit high to me, but if TokenSets implemented a commission module it could go toward funding a DAO treasury. Governance tokens could be streamed via those willing to lock up their tokens in a smart contract. It’s given me a lot to think about.

As far as capital goes, I liquidated a good number of equity positions yesterday, pretty much everything that wasn’t crypto-related or was at a loss or the lower end of the performance curve. It’s going to get distributed to my SDIRA as quickly as I can. It’s taking me a lot longer to do than I’d like, but it’s the best I can do. I’ve got to be careful about how I manage those funds and keeping it separate from my traditional IRA, lest I trigger some sort of taxable income event. But I will be making some big moves, very shortly.

But for now, family. I am taking the girls on a bike ride to the park, to enjoy this beautiful, warm winter day.