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Altseason over.

It’s been a bit of a mixed day. We partied a bit last night, took out some leveraged positions on ETH and BTC on Perp.Fi. Almost got liquidated so that was fun. Seriously though, I was actually under my estimated liquidation price, but I still had a couple basis points on my position, and the price rebounded. It was quite nerve-wracking. That was last night, with a small position in my regular account. I opened another position with about five grand in my IRA funds. That’s underwater right now but holding steady.

What do you call this pattern?

Spent the rest of the night playing video games, and was pretty useless this AM. Took Younger to get a haircut, bought her a bike at the thrift store, then did some grocery shopping. Spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the house and getting ready for Elder’s friend to sleep over. Missus has been sick all day, has barely left the bedroom. Cooked pizza for dinner and spent the afternoon playing video games.

I bought the fourth Start Atlas NFT poster. That one is $512, the next one is $1024 and then I’m done. First I need to figure out where I’m getting the cash from. Now is a really bad time to sell. Alts are bleeding all over the place. I don’t think a single coin in my watchlist was up by the daily close. Anyways I’ll find something to dump, maybe harvest a tax loss and get this last poster to bring me up to tier two. SAIADao has raised about $60,000, so I’m going to move forward with a proposal to buy the tier three posters. That’s only about a quarter of what we have in the bank, so we’ll see how things go from there.

I did really pick a horrible time to retire. May has been brutal. I haven’t done too bad, mainly as I’ve just been buying spot. I probably should have tapered off my ETH2x-FLI position, but it’s still up from where I entered, so we should be good. If this is the bottom and I can keep from getting liquidated, then I’ll be feeling fat and happy. But I am underwater right now, and most of my cash is deployed. Sentiment on Twitter is absolutely horrible, but it’s out of my hands now.

One more thing about yesterday. I had the second handoff meeting with the St. Louis team, and spent about ninety minutes going over the particulars of my client list. Of course the guys asked me why I was stepping down and I told them about my crypto activities. I was probably a bit too open, but oh well. I also called the last one of my clients that I wanted to touch base with and said goodbye to. They were actually very interested in my crypto activities, so I might keep in touch. I need to draft a statement or something for social media, and my various publishing platforms. Time to get serious.

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DeFi level up

Trade notes: Pickle, Perp and CREAM

I was pretty busy yesterday, as I got the latest tranche of funds transferred from my brokerage TradFi IRA over to my AltoIRA and onto Kraken. Tracking my portfolio to my original plan was very difficult, due to the various wallets, chains and apps that I’m using to track it. My original plan was to do a 40/40/20 BED portfolio, (BTC, ETH, DPI,) but it’s changed a bit. The current portfolio looks a bit like this:

BTC16.75%Native BTC
wBTC18.25%also includes BTC2x-FLI-wBTC SLP
ETH31.00%also includes ETH2x-FLI
DPI/BDI7.50%Staked BDI, BASK
ALCX6.50%Staked alUSD, ALCX and ALCX-ETH SLP
Solana8.50%SOL, SOL-RAY and STEP-USDC LP
USD stables5.00%
Other6.50%BAL, RUNE, others, Star Atlas NFTs

I can’t actually seem to get the total value of the other category to calculate correctly, leading to a margin of error around five thousand dollars. It made trading a little bit difficult, since I wasn’t quite sure how to balance what I was doing. So I’m sitting on about seven percent more cash than I want to right now, and was not sure exactly how to proceed, so I made a few trades into ETH and wBTC, sent some USDC to Solana, and decided to look at some other things.

I’m not quite sure what brought me to it, but the V1 Yearn 3crv vault is migrating to the V2 version and is not earning boost, so it needed to be moved. I decided to pull it entirely and move it to the native USDC vault, which is getting a higher yield right now. I came out a bit ahead, thankfully, but only a trivial amount. I’ll have a full report on the reFIREment fund in June.

I did start poking around the other Yearn vaults while I was there, and contemplated the yvBOOST vaults. It basically holds yveCRV tokens, which go into a one-way vault, and earn 3crv tokens in return. The BOOST vault compounds these of course, but there’s another one that interested me was the one that deposited it as yvBOOST-ETH SLP on Pickle.Finance. The first time I looked at it a few weeks ago I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but this time it clicked. I’ll explain, with a slightly different example. I’m holding ALCX-ETH SLP, which I have staked on Alchemix for more ALCX rewards. I unstaked my SLP from there and deposited it on Pickle, where the jar, or vault, follows a basic auto-compounding strategy. This turns my 250% APY into a 500% position. On top of that, I can stake this resulting pSLP, as it’s called, for an additional 10% APY in PICKLE tokens.

I also spent a lot of time on Perp.fi yesterday. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around perpetual contracts for some time, but have been somewhat limited as a US-citizen. I’ve done some basic leverage trading on Kraken, but found the experience to be a bit lacking. FTX.us has some leveraged products available, but using margin with my IRA triggers a taxable event, and I haven’t done KYC with my regular account yet. Perpetual Finance, while still geo-locked for those of us in the US, is available 100% on-chain. Better yet, it’s trade engine is on xDAI, which means it’s very cheap to use.

Even better, funding rates are negative, meaning that shorts pay long. So I can basically get paid to take a long position. Everything’s done through USDC, and I already had some wETH and wBTC on xDAI, so I liquidated some of my position and opened longs using the proceeds as collateral. So I’m sitting on a couple of 5x positions, that won’t get liquidated unless we have a further market correction that takes us lower than this week’s lows. In the meantime, I’ll get a little bit of funding from the spread.

I’m really impressed with the Perpetual team. Their docs are put together nicely, and their code repos have some nice treats, including a CLI client (!) and an FTX/Perp arbitrage bot, which is nice. They have their own token, which receives some of the trading fees, but I haven’t decided whether to take a position on that. The main use case seems to be for taking short positions, as this video shows. Taking a market-neutral position to facilitate high interest yield farming really opens some doors.

Perp is limited to a few trading pairs, mostly BTC, ETH and a few DeFi blue chips. One really important note in the video is how you can use CREAM’s bigger selection of tokens to short the other side. I clicked with me, and opened up the door to another piece of the yield farming puzzle. I’ve got plenty of tokens and LP I can use as collateral in CREAM and borrow some of the low interest rate tokens, such as DPI, and, which I can lend to Impermax; or VSP, which is 25% to borrow, but yields 125% in the Vesper vault. There’s obviously some liquidation risk, but it is something I’m going to be taking a further look at in the coming days.

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Play to earn

NFT gaming for work

A recent tweet led me to YieldGuildGames, or YGG, described as “a decentralized gaming guild of players and investors who generate yield from NFT-based games.” The Discord server was filled with requests from Filipino players asking for “scholarships” to play Axie Infinity. It cost several hundred dollars to get three Axies, Pokemon-like creatures, to play the game, but players can earn several dollars a week playing the game, and many people in the Philippines have come to rely on it for income. It’s really quite something.

I watched this documentary with the girls earlier today. Elder had a couple reactions to it. The first was to the economic conditions, “is that where they live?” and the other was whether I would buy her some Axies so that she could earn some money also. No.

I did however, look into sponsoring a team. My wife’s brother and father are both married to Filipino women, so I reached out to them so see if either of them had any insight into this. No answer yet, but I also reached out on the YGG Discord and wound up having a long talk with their head of partnerships, who goes by the alias Sarutobi Sasuke. Right now, you can basically donate Axie’s SLP token to them and it will be used to see teams, but there’s no actual investment opportunity available with YGG as of yet. There are other groups that are funding teams for a revenue stake, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

Sarutobi had a long-ranging conversation that touched on a lot of stuff in the blockchain gaming space. He’s keeping tabs on a lot of different projects, and we both agreed that this whole play-to-earn phenomenon is just getting started, and is going to open up a lot of interesting possibilities for people in developing countries, as well as work in general. This is kind of my whole thesis behind Star Atlas, but it did make me question what’s going to happen if the game gets flooded with farmers from around the world trying to eke out a living in the game.

It’s remarkable how far the game industry has come in the last couple decades. I remember Chinese gold farmers getting run out of World of Warcraft back in the day, and now we’re at the point where farming for real world money is actively encouraged. It’s a very interesting development. It’s indeed a very strange world where a seventy-five year old man plays a video game twelve hours a day to be able to buy his medicines. Fucking weird.

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Blood in the streets

The crypto bloodbath continues today, with ETH breaching $3000 and BTC $40k. Suddenly my 2x FLI positions aren’t looking to shabby. The market is a complete mess, everything is a sea of red. Still, I have a transfer from my brokerage IRA that is almost complete and should be on exchanges either today or tomorrow, so I will be ready to do somme discount shopping. Still, I could not have picked a worse time to retire. My goodness.

I’ve started working on Solana in earnest, working my way through the tutorials for Anchor, their deployment framework. I have got to get multisig working, as SAIADao has raised over $58,000, and I’ve got close to nine grand in a soft wallet that only I control. Setting it up seems a pretty straightforward procedure, it’s just a program, but it’s using it that I’ve yet to figure out. I have no idea how to interact with Serum via command line, so that’s going to be something new for me to figure out.

Since SAIADao has done so well, I’m moving the timetable up to start purchasing posters in about two weeks. We’ve got more than enough to cover the Star Atlas: Rebirth Tier 3 posters six through eight and have plenty left over. Still, I’ve been making mistakes with some of the proposals, sponsoring some before I verify the wallet transactions, and I even let one through today for five grand that had the parameters mixed up. Thankfully someone caught it, but now we’ve got to vote it down so that it can be redone. It’s a bit of a mess, but I should be able to step back a bit and let others do it.

I’m having trouble bringing myself to work on … work. I had a meeting yesterday with the St. Louis crew that I forgot between my morning call and 1PM. By that time I was doing school work with Younger and didn’t check my work computer until almost three. There’s a lot of other things that I seemed to be missing as well. I just got seven more days to go, but I have absolutely no motivation to do anything at all. There’s too much else going on in my life that has a higher priority. For example, I haven’t been able to get in touch with my dad for several days, last I talked to him was the day after his second surgery. Just put that on the to-do list, I guess.

Someone turned me on to this new game called Core. It’s a very cool concept, it’s like Roblox in that you can build your own games with it, but it’s built on the Epic Games platform, so I assume it uses Unreal engine. It’s got an editor that’s very similar to Unity and Roblox, but the main difference is the number of game assets that are made available by default. There are even frameworks for dungeon crawlers and capture-the-flag games, I was very impressed with it. There’s also a central hub that players can hang out in, and jump into portals which take them to the games. They load very fast, and the entire process of jumping from game to game is very seamless.

Of course I wanted Elder to check it out with me. She’s of course more interested in playing the games than building them. Core is geared at an older teen or adult audience, so I don’t know if I’m pushing her too hard, but I’m hoping we can find something to work on together, but I’m not sure if it’s going to take. I’m going to start her with Galileo in a couple weeks, so we’ll see what she takes after then.

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to spend a lot of time with the kids over the summer. Working from home while trying to be Mr. Mom has been really stressful for all of us, mainly as they have no boundaries when it comes to interrupting me when I’m on the phone. I’m sure there’s something to be said about my lack of balance in the past, but that’s all about to change dramatically in a few more days.

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Game maker family

Today is Missus’s first full day back at the office, so it’s going to be interesting to see how things go with the kids. Everyone is up bright and shiny today, but Younger has been a bit defiant and got a spanking for throwing the cream cheese across the kitchen at breakfast. I think she was testing me, so better to set the tone early. I don’t have anything to do for Zombie, LLC. today except for a hand-off meeting, so I plan on getting things done today.

I finished the Rustlings tutorials yesterday and started on the Rust track at Exercism, I figure I’ll do one a day to keep the blood flowing and build up a reputation, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it since I need to get working on Solana. The hackathon started three or four days ago, so I don’t have much time. It looks like whatever I’ll be doing will be solo for now, as I can’t really prioritize it until I get a few more things done.

The SAIA Dao has between thirty and forty thousand dollars in it right now. The dao itself has the majority of it right now, plus I have some in a Gnosis multisig, and a Solana wallet. I’m the only owner on the Gnosis vault right now, and the Solana wallet is a soft-wallet, so the first order of business is testing and figuring out how to use Solana multi-sig. Identifying who would be the co-owners is another challenge entirely.

I’ve been floating a couple of ideas around in my head for the Star Atlas Arcade, which is offering some $25k in prizes for the hackathon. I hadn’t really settled on anything solid, but then a friend sent me a message about a yield farm pool called HyperJump. It has a spaceship theme to it, and one thing I noticed is that they have a clone of Asteroids in their arcade. The game is built using Unity’s web player, and that gave me an idea.

I spent an hour or so last night downloading Unity and going through a tutorial to create my own Asteroid clone, which I’m calling Star Atlasteroids. I got most of it done, but there are a couple bugs that are preventing it from running properly. I need to do some research to see what options are available to make it work with the outside world, then I may be able to get it to work with Solana. Storing the high scores on Solana might be the first step, but from there there are a lot of things that need to be done, like wallet integration, printing NFTs and so on. HyperJump is giving me some ideas.

Unity has come a long way, and I was showing some of the demos to Elder. She loves games, and I’ve tried to encourage her to learn how to make them. The most I’ve gotten her to do so far is build one of these obbys in Roblox using off-the shelf assets. Last night I told her I was building a game and she immediately started writing down story ideas for ‘planets” in the game. (This morning she came down talking about a “mummy mountain”.) I’m hoping we’ll have more time to work on these ideas together so I can help foster her creativity. Plus digital modeling and game development could be a very lucrative skill.

Still, Unity is a bit more complicated than Roblox. Besides editing assets in the workspace, she’s never really gotten into the whole scripting side of things. Roblox uses Lua, Unity uses C#, and Unreal Engine, which I’ve yet to delve into, uses C++. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get her to delve into the nuts and bolts on this.

Now that Missus is transitioning back to office work, and my days at Zombie are down the single digits, I hope we’ll have more time to work with her on some of these things. It’ll be fun. Of course Younger will need attention as well, but she’ll be starting Kindergarten this fall. I’ll be starting Elder at Galileo XP when public school wraps up a week after my work does, so this summer will be a test for what could a very interesting family business.

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Sleep deprived morning pages

The Solana hackathon commenced two days ago, and I can’t even figure out what I want to do with it. I’m not even really sure what my expectations are given that it’s only going on for three weeks and haven’t even really wrapped my head around how it works. I’ve got a couple ideas banging around in my head, but I’m not really confident about my ability to deliver anything in the three weeks. We’ll see.

I have two weeks left at work, so hopefully I won’t have any problems with that. I wanted to finish the Rustlings tutorials, I have two or three left, and then I was looking at doing the track at Exercism or just going into some Solana development.

I’ve been thinking about video games a lot lately; I got woken up early this morning and had a lot of ideas banging around in my head, but given that it’s not something I’ve been able to work out yet I don’t know what I would do. I really wanted to get in on the Star Atlas prize money, but doing a MolochDao implementation might be more within my skill set. I’ve got some research to do.

In other news, I’ve got what will probably be the last wire transfer out of my brokerage IRA. It seems this one has come through pretty quickly, hopefully I can get it onto the exchange quickly enough to buy this pullback. I’ll have to examine my spreadsheets to see whether I want to dump it all into BTC 2x FLI-wBTC or if I need to spread it out a bit more. Gas is low, not as low as I want it, but I may just go ahead and swap into a FLI SLP position this morning if I can move fast enough.

I’m a bit sleep deprived again this morning. Younger got sick and kept Missus up last night, she switched beds and then I got the brunt of of it. I managed to get a solid hour on the couch earlier, so I’m not going to be completely wasted, but might still want to call out. Missus already did, even though it was supposed to be her week to provide coverage at her office. At least I get another day before I’m on single-parent duty, a small blessing.

Not much else to talk about, I just want to get some caffeine in me and get some work done. Gas is rising already.

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Grinding

Gas was at forty gwei this morning, so I scrambled to get a lot of stuff done that I’d been planning all week: moving tokens to centralized exchanges and staking, claiming, unstaking various positions. Of course the rest of the market was in turmoil today as BTC continued it’s drawdown. As predicted, my last BTC buy is under my two percent limit, but I’m holding, come hell or high water. This seems to be another thirty percent pullback, I hope that we’re at a bottom or I am going to be begging for my job back before the end of the month is out. I kid.

I’ve been playing games with Elder. We puttered around in Project Entropia for a few hours last night. I’m not sure I want to get into an MMO with her, but it was mentioned as an influence by the CEO of Star Atlas, so I figured that it was another look. And it’s certainly better that those games that she plays on Roblox. Most of them are mindless, grindy click games. The obbies, short for obstacle course are somewhat okay, the worst are the tycoon games. They’re basically grinding games where you’re dependent on a timer to build up money that you need to build the next piece of whatever you’re building, and requires a lot of running back and forth from point A to B, to A, to C, and so on and on. The whole point of these games are to use every addictive game mechanism known to man to hook players, and then offer them bonuses like 2x walking speed or whatever to get them to shell out Robux to the developer. They’re extremely exploitative.

I don’t think I’d hate them so much if they weren’t being so completely transparent about it. While one could argue that they’re not that much different than other MMOs at the core, at least there’s an element of story to most games, and some level of interaction and space to form friendships. Most of that has been stripped away there.

The two of us spent a couple hours running around in a game today. It had RPG elements, we were mainly running around swinging swords at goblins and other monsters, for skulls, but we were limited by how many skulls we could carry, and had to respawn back at the start to sell them for coins, which we then used to purchase larger skull capacity. That should tell you all you need to know about that game. There were pets that gave you skull bonuses, but it all built up so fast that you eventually spent more time respawning and running back and forth than you did attacking monsters. And it was garish, like the RPG version of a casino. There was so much visual noise on the screen that I about had a fit, but thankfully I had the option to turn off all the money effects and pets.

After a couple hours of that I needed a detox, so I took the girls out. We stopped by the dollar store for some treats, then I took them to the nature park for some canoeing. Younger almost had a fit when we took off, but it was fun. The playground there was open for the first time since COVID started, and was a bit crowded. So we left there and I took them to the beach and let them run around in the surf for a bit. They had a great day.

So now they’re in bed, and I’m going to hopefully spend some time with Missus. She’s going to be working at the office this next week as part of a coverage rotation, so I’m going to be on my own all day with the kids tomorrow, a full time househusband. Her job hasn’t announced any “return to work” plans for her yet, but it’s coming. We’ll just have to see how much deep work I can get done with the kids around. It’s going to be a challenge.

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Evening pages

Not a lot to talk about today, market-wise. ADA had been pumping lately, and it looks like someone’s let the air out of BTC. My big position that I opened a couple days ago is about to get stopped out, but I don’t know if I’m actually going to sell it. I continue playing the market with the Start Atlas posters, the latest one dropped today. Oh, and I got a few thousand USDC locked up on FTX because my 2FA codes stopped working for some reason. Fun times.

Last night we tied one on. The neighbors came over — the whole neighborhood would be a more accurate assessment — we let the kids blast some music off the porch and we fed them pizza and ice cream. D. and I drank almost an entire bottle of Glenfiddich, so this morning was a bit rough. We did our cleaning day activities and drove across the water to a rally in support of the the local newspaper, which is at risk of being shut down by their parent company halfway across the country. We stopped at a Mexican joint on the way home and ate out with the girls for the first time in several years. Good times.

I’m not sure what all I’m going to get done today. Gas has been pretty low today, so I’ve done some farming. No trades, just some claiming and staking. Might as well go and manage the BSC farms while I’m at it today. Not sure I’m going to get much else done tonight besides play video games with Elder. I need to turn in early today and get a good start tomorrow.

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Morning pages

Most of the blood from the last two days has settled. BTC is back up over $50k, and ETH has reclaimed four. I have not made a transaction on mainnet in over four days, and have had a forty gwei transaction pending since then. Instead, I’ve been planning out my activities and estimating gas costs, waiting for another costs to come down a bit more. Gas is at eighty now, but I’m hoping for a couple more days below fifty before I start making any moves.

I’ve got several farms and stakes that need harvesting, but mainly I’ve been eyeing the BTC 2x-FLI/wBTC pool on Sushiswap. Pairing the 2x and native token effectively creates a 1.5x leveraged position, and the fees on the Sushiswap pool basically pays you to hold it. I really wanted to do something a few nights ago, but couldn’t justify the cost with gas at three or four hundred. ETH is going to become even more expensive, so I’m holding on to every single bit. Especially since I’m not going to be earning fiat after three weeks from now.

That’s right, I have two weeks to go after today. I actually had a handoff meeting with a team out of St. Louis to go over our clients, I spent ninety minutes debriefing them and have another meeting next week to go over a few more operational details. It’s really happening.

One small wrinkle in my reFIREment plan, if you will. I had BTFD FOMO so hard after the Tesla FUD that I dumped my entire A tranche that was on Voyager into a BTC market order. I’ll admit it was a very stupid move, considering the fact that I had just held it up as assurance to my wife, who was concerned that I wouldn’t have cash available when “something comes up.” I told her I had funds available on the exchange that I could move directly to my bank within a day or two, not to worry. And now I’ve gone ahead and bought the dip with it.

I did at least manage to draw up a trade plan after the fact, and even calculated a two percent loss level on the cash position. I came very close to that yesterday, but right now I’m back at my entry. I chose $70k as my exit just to give myself a 5x R/R on the trade. However, Voyager doesn’t allow limit orders that are “too far” outside of the current market price, so I might be forced to move the funds to Kraken just so I can place a proper OCO order on the position. And part of me wants to send it over to Coinbase, swap it for wBTC and put it into the BTC2x pool I mentioned earlier. I think I’ve put myself in enough of a pickle. I should probably just cash out now so I don’t have to worry about tax ramifications, but I know I’m going to hold this for the next leg up.

I’m still working my way through the Rust tutorials, I got hung up on the multithread lesson, so that’s going to take some time today to get that right. I’m at the point now where there aren’t any video tutorials on Egghead, so I had to figure things out for myself. I felt pretty good when I managed to clear one of the later iterators lessons that required me to write some functional one-liners that used closures. I might get this programming thing yet!

Even though I haven’t been active on Ethereum, I’m still tending my STEP farm on Solana. I’m pretty far down underwater right now, but it’s printing cash every day, so I’m going to hold this one for now and see how things go. I want to automate the harvesting, so that will be one of my projects once I finally start moving into the Solana side of things. I’ve also been trying to corner the Serum market on Star Atlas posters, but more on that another time.

Last thing I’ll leave is this podcast that I listened to a few days ago. It resonated with me because it talks about the idea of a time-multiplier. Doing activities today that will give you more time tomorrow. This is my whole philosophy with automation, and this guy basically has system to it, and gives himself a 30x time investment quota to work on things. Meaning, that if you spend five minutes a day on something, then you should spend one hundred and fifty minutes, or two and a half hours, training someone to do it, or figuring out another way to delegate it or automate it. He also says that getting someone to do something at 80% efficiency is better than doing it with 100% efficiency yourself, as it frees up time, and that’s how successful leaders operate. It ties in very nicely with the Essentialism book that I’m reading.

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Battle of the memes

CPI inflation beat all estimates; Vitalik rugs SHIB and other meme coins; Elon dumps Bitcoin over “dirty power”, bitcoiners fight back.

I don’t have much insight on these inflation figures but am just throwing them here for informational purposes. We’ve known asset inflation was already here, as I discussed yesterday, but I did not see this change in the CPI coming so fast, nor did I expect it to hit four percent already. Most of the macro people I follow have been anticipating this for some time, the question is where do we go from here. Bullish BTC.

So Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, gets lots of airdrops. Apparently token creators do it as some sort of social proof, as they can later say that “Vitalik is an investor in our project”. This happens to Mark Cuban as well as any high profile whale address like the 0x_01b address or whatever it is. So that’s how Vitalik wound up owning about $8 billion dollars in SHIB. These dumbasses decided to drop him Uniswap LP tokens instead of just locking them up in a timelock like most people. Vitalik’s been in a very tough conundrum, a trolley problem, as one person described it. Holding the token was bullish for SHIB, and could lead to more nonsense. Selling it would hurt a lot of people. Damned no matter what he did.

The final straw was several days of network congestion on Ethereum, as gas prices remained in the 300-400 for several days. Most of the traffic was SHIIB, as well as several other clones that sprung up. Even Binance chain was affected and required people to increase gas. So VB did what he had to do, and dumped it. All of them.

You should really look at the thread above . He removed the LP, then started dumping and donating coins to charity. SHIB, AKITA, and ELON were all either dumped or given to charities including Gitcoin and a COVID relief fund for India. One person pointed out that he sent the meme coins to the charities, while keeping the ETH for himself. What this means is that he was able to deduct the full value of the meme tokens as a charitable contribution, even though the charities would in no way be able to redeem the tokens for that value. There’s just not enough liquidity or depth to the market.

This seemed to trigger a minor pullback in the price of ETH, but that was nothing compared to what was about to happen. Queue memelord Elon Musk:

This caused a huge dump in the BTC price from $54-46k in a matter of hours as billions of leveraged traders were liquidated. Much of it was quickly bought up, and it’s recovered to the 49.6k level as I write this. Many were quick to point out that anyone with enough BTC to actually buy a Tesla were unlikely to spend it on one, so Elon wasn’t shooting himself in the foot here. There was also speculation that Elon may have been pressured by bitcoin critics on the environmental front, and that he doesn’t really believe the Tesla statement personally. This article provides some additional context.

The Bitcoin community is taking this accusation as a call to arms. For months, there has been misinformation about bitcoin’s environmental impact being circulated, and this Tesla tweet is the last straw for many. Many believe that bitcoin production actually creates more demand for renewable production as well as the capture of waste energy. Many bitcoin farms rely on hydroelectric, and there are companies that are capturing waste methane from gas mining rigs, which would normally be vented out into the atmosphere, to power bitcoin mining equipment. Bitcoin mining can also smooth out troughs in power demand, coming online when demand is low and shutting down when it goes back up.

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Via Crypto_Rand, Twittter

Of course that’s not to say that some bitcoin production relies on fossil fuel. The Tesla statement is apparently referencing a Chinese coal plant shutdown last month that was accompanied by a significant drop in the bitcoin hashrate, which was apparently due to the fact that hydroelectric power supplies had caused many Chinese miners to shutdown and relocate following the rainy season.

Bitcoin is an easy target for many due to the fact that the hashrate is available directly on chain. While critics like to bemoan the fact that the bitcoin network uses more power than most small countries, it’s not a fair comparison. No one talks about the current environmental impact of gold mining production, or the combined cost of paper currency production by every nation on earth. Those figures aren’t as easy to come by. Thankfully, Ark Invest has done the math for us.

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Source: Ark Invest

Of course for many bitcoiners, the cost of the fiat monetary system is way worse than the environmental impact of bitcoin. If we are returning to four percent inflation, or higher, then people are going to witness firsthand the damaging effects of wealth destruction, as peoples’ savings are destroyed by rising prices. The next few days will likely see bitcoin’s energy usage at the front of debate, and hopefully this time it can be put to rest.