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Day jobbing during a bull run

$BTC has broken $19k and it looks like today could be another good day. Hopefully not too good, cause I do have work to do. I’d like to get some work done on the front end for the Ether Auction, but I have a feeling Zombie, LLC is going to be sucking most of my attention this morning. I had several fires yesterday that still need cleaning up, and it’s hard to care in a bull market.

I had a heart to heart with Bossmang last week. I told him I wasn’t currently looking for another job, but also that he wasn’t paying me enough to put my kids back in day care. So I’m forced to rely on my coworkers to get stuff done onsite. An unfortunately for us, the only other person with any technical know-how is completely unreliable, unorganized, and incompetent. It’s harsh, but I’ve tried to work with this person, but they lack the basic skills one needs to succeed in this role, and I’ve given up several times. I’ve told Bossmang to let them go several times over the years, and despite the fact that Bossmang agrees with me, they’ve never done anything about it. It’s been going on for years, and dragging us down.

It may have been GE’s Jack Welsh that came up with the following saying that I’m paraphrasing: There are three ranks of employees, A’s, B’s, and C’s. A’s are the top performers, the ones who get things done, are self sufficient. B’s are the average employees, the ones who show promise and could become top performers with the proper mentoring. C’s are the employees who — how do we say, just aren’t right for the role. While it is possible for B’s to become A’s when put in the proper role and given the proper guidance, C’s will never become B’s. An my man is a C.

We had a morning call and talked about everything going on with the project, and I tried not to point a finger while making it perfectly clear who was responsible for the mess. My boss’s response was that we “needed more project management”. I’m so done.

I had several other problems that I continued to work through today, but they just seem so unimportant. I need to get out. It’s really hard to care bout my job when I’m watching my account balances earn two or three month’s salary in a day. It’s crazy.

I finally started working on the Ether Auction app. The contract is pretty much where I want it for this first run, but I have to figure out how to deploy an app for it. Create-eth-app comes with React out of the box, as well as a subgraph for TheGraph, which I’ve used once for PRIA, but this time I need to set up a local development node and figure out how to make all that work. I’ll get there, slowly but surely.

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Boom time

Today was absolutely insane. There was some good news about another COVID vaccine which set the equities markets up today, and $ETH hit $600, which set the crypto markets roaring. It was amazing. I finished the day up eight percent, for my first five digit day, (and then some.)

The news behind $DPW was that they announced some partnerships with restaurants to provide electric vehicle charging stations. I’ve had a standing trigger since September to set a trailing stop next time it pumped past five dollars, and it triggered at 5.39, which cut me out of a couple hundred dollars to the close.

Overall, I’m glad to be out of this one. I had picked it after I misinterpreted some news about their involvement with bitcoin, and got caught up in that first big pump gap a week after I opened the position. By the time I hit my value averaging targets in the grey box, I was down, so I set the trigger, hoping that it would have another big spike that I could capitalize on. Turns out it worked, so yay me. I feel a lot better about the other, pure-crypto plays in my portfolio, and would rather put my focus there than worry about these guys in the future.

Ethereum was obviously the driver in today’s rally, and again, the fact that the mining companies are up even more shows me where I need to be focusing my cash. $RIOT and $MARA and the rest are doing really good.

Strangely, BTC has been pretty flat despite a big dip over the weekend, I think the fact that it’s basically back where it was Friday has proven really bullish for the market. In fact, $BTC was down from Friday’s levels, but $GBTC was up five percent.

I have actually been anticipating a BTC dip when we get near ATH levels, and I had calculated a GBTC price of 22.40 for a sell order. Today’s close set us at 22.15, so I’m thinking I may want to reconsider that order. If the premium keeps running up like today, we may hit it without any price movement by BTC, and I may get stuck holding the cash. I’m going to sleep on it and see what happens overnight.

In spite of today’s mind-blowing rally, I still managed to get pulled into four different fires at work. And it gave me a bit of solace while dealing with the bullshit, knowing that none of it mattered and that ultimately I didn’t have to put up with any of it if I didn’t want to. I got so much done today, I even managed to take the girls to the playground for an hour this afternoon, cooked lunch and dinner and did grocery shopping.

All in all, today kicked ass in more ways that one.

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Long weekend

[This post contains referral links]

We took a road trip yesterday. My father in law bought several acres out in the country, about two and a half hours from where we live, out in the middle of nowhere. It’s got a large lake, and a wooded lot, and we wanted to get out for the day to check it out and get the kids out of the house. It was good for all of us.

There were Trump signs everywhere. I asked my FIL if he was going to build a house on the lot, and he said that no, the area was too “primitive” for him to build there. Most of the money had fled the area for brick houses on large farms, leaving mostly poor whites and minorities around. He had bought the lot mainly so that we would have a place to camp and fish.

We did a bit of the latter. The pond was stocked, but the few fish that we caught were too small to keep, so we threw them back. The girls played in the pond. It was a beautiful day, in the mid sixties, although the pond — spring fed — was quite crisp. We did some boating around the pond, walked around the woods for a bit, and ate and talked before heading back home. It was a lot of time in the car for a short visit, but it was worth it as a bit of a recon trip. I’m not sure we’ll go back to camp before next spring, but at least we know what we’re dealing with now.

Today I got a lot of work done on the deck, putting a couple finishing touches on it and cleaning up some of the mess that I’ve left. I’ve got a couple of railings left on the stairs and maybe a few more side pieces, then I’m pretty much done till this summer when it’ll be ready to stain. The hot tub is still dead though. I’ve got to call someone to come look at the pump; the motor is leaking now, and the repair cost will determine whether we fix it or haul it off. I’d rather get rid of it than spend another $600 repairing it, all told.

We watched Playing With Fire today, a documentary about the FIRE movement. Missus and Elder and I watched it this morning, I was surprised Elder paid so much attention to it. I think she gets it. Missus enjoyed it and I thought it was worth the five buck rental. It was good to help keep us focused on the prize.

I also signed up for Lolli today, after I found out that they work with my local grocery store. I’d actually be planning on using them to buy pet food a few weeks ago, but had been procrastinating. So I went ahead and signed up and used them today, earning about a buck and a half worth of bitcoin. Missus was actually impressed by the fact that I could use it and still earn points from my credit card, especially when I stopped to see if any of my cards were offering extra percentages for the store I was using. Alas, no. Still, it should be a good way to earn some extra BTC if I can stay disciplined and order most of my groceries online. It will do me good.

I’m actually considering switching my bank. The one I use has some issue with Plaid, which is used by BlockFi for ACH transfers. Basically, I have to transfer funds from my bank to Gemini, wait five days for it to clear, then send it to BlockFi. It’s too long. So I’m probably going to set up a new checking account with the same company we use for our joint account, and use that instead. I’ve got cash on hand to pay the mortgage and credit cards through the end of the year, and I don’t want to hassle with putting it in a Yearn vault, but BlockFi would be nice if I could just move in and out between my checking account when it’s time to pay the bill. I’m going to sleep on it.

Despite that, I’ve been slacking quite a bit lately, falling off my habits. Epic Games had Elite Dangerous as one of their freebies the other day, and I got sucked right into it the past few days. It looks like quite the time suck, from the looks of it, and I’ve already put in several hours of the past couple days. I’m almost tempted to pull out my VR headset and flight stick and yoke, but that would probably turn out bad for me. When I get obsessed with a video game — I’m looking at you, iRacing! — my life suffers in other respects.

The more time during the day that I spend on crypto, especially the smart contract programming that I’m doing for the Ether auction, the more I wind up taking a break during the evenings. I’ve been taking it real easy lately, especially the more BTC keeps making three year highs. I know Missus is excited about what’s happening, at least the fact that I’m excited about it, although I probably need to temper my expectations a bit. It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to run my mouth a bit much, and I don’t want to look the fool in a year if things haven’t manifested themselves the way I expect.

Still, we’re moving in the right direction, and from the looks of it we’re moving in the right direction. I just gotta keep stacking sats.

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Changing strategies

Another day, another 2020 ATH. $BTC broke $18K before I went to bed last night, and despite a $1000 drop that was quickly eaten up, we’re back at $18,200, ready to continue our journey.

I’ve been seeing something interesting play out with the Bitcoin related equities like $RIOT, $MARA, and $BTBT; they’ve been running faster than BTC and $GBTC. I’m not sure why this is, I guess investors think that they’re undervalued. The main question right now is whether I’m over-allocated in GBTC right now.

It’s 43%, so yea. I figured it was the best play on a BTC run, but with the others outperforming, I may need to reallocate. But I’m almost out of cash, so I’ll need to sell some to reallocate. My last GBTC purchase was on July 15, at 13.60. Current price is over $20, so I should probably sell enough to cover a week’s worth of my value averaging protocols for the big gainers. My two percent targets have increased, so I’ll have to update my value averaging script and make sure I have enough capital allocated to allow it to run.

Done. Now to see how it plays out.

Progress continues on the Ether Auction. I figured out some problems with the Hardhat/Waffle/Chai tests that were failing, and added some functionality to allow claiming the proceeds. Writing the tests out really forces one to clarify all the possibilities. I also found a big bug with the time lock parts of the contracts that were making them end seven seconds after they started, not seven days.

I’ve got some additional tests cases that I need to write to finish the auction contract itself, then I need to figure out how to deploy it to a test network and starting working on the UI. I’ve started going through the React course on FreeCodeCamp, and will deploy a create-eth-app once I have the contract deployed.

I want the website up and running before I deploy the first contract. I’m debating whether I need the autodeployer setup, or whether I just want to manage the first one manually as a test.

There’s also some interesting things with the Open Zeppelin upgradable contracts that I may want to add in before all is said and done. I’ve implemented a self destruct function that can be called three days after the auction ends, but using one of the proxy contracts to hold state might allow me to reset the auctions for the subsequent rounds.

We’ll see how things develop.

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FIRE incoming

Woke up to $BTC over $17k.

40 days, 60%.

I’ve completely obsessed lately, keeping TradingView and my IRA up on my laptop while I’m working on my day job, which has been demoted to just a single screen on my dual monitor setup. I check Zapper.Fi daily, and am on Twitter constantly during the day.

I’m still doing my job, taking care of anything urgent or important, delegating as much as I can. Ultimately, nothing is as important as what’s going on in the markets, so I’m constantly reading and trying to figure out what the long term plan is going to be.

This Tweetstorm has a couple good points. One I’ve been thinking about and seen a few times before is that this isn’t going to be like the last couple cycles, with a blow-off top and an eighty percent drawdown. My plan during the past few months was that I would sell a portion of my holdings off and save it for a drawdown. But what if there’s not a drawdown?

My target is dynamic, it’s based off the moving average at the last top, about 3.6x the 200 day moving average. That equates to a price of $39,000. The longer we take to get there, the higher the price will be, so we might now have a huge runup like we saw before. Since we’re seeing institutional players in the market now, they’re more patient, will move slower, and price action might instead be a slow, steady grind up and up.

Of course, once we see $20k I expect it will be all over the news, possibly triggering another wave of retail FOMO. I’m not sure that it will have as much effect on the market since the market cap is actually a higher due to the block rewards emitted over the last few years. I’m probably completely wrong about this.

There’s also a chance that we’re moving into the next phase in bitcoin adoption: HODL FOMO.

If accurate, it would reduce the chances of a big drawdown, furthering the need to hold on. Still, I expect some sort of pullback. Many in CT are warning that this run up is happening too fast, and are hoping for a bit of a pause here now that we’re at $17,600. Better to let the market take it’s time than have a blow off top later. Still, I’d imagine some sort of resistance at $20k, so I’ve put in a limit order on my recent $GBTC entry that I hope will translate to the $19,800 level. If it hits, I’m hoping to to have another entry before we blast off, otherwise I’ll hold the funds to deploy elsewhere.

Where? Well I have noticed today that many of the crypto industry tickers had double the gains that $GBTC did:

I’ve got some value averaging protocols engaged for several firms, and I’m low on cash, so I’ll either need to liquidate some GBTC to free up some capital, or stop the protocol. I’ve set an expiry on the GBTC sale for Thanksgiving. Hopefully we’ll blow right past $20k while the market is closed and I’ll be able to close my position without selling.

Overally, my IRA was up over 6% today, while the major indexes were down one percent. I nearly had a five-digit day. So close. My point is that it looks like things are moving according to plan. BTC is on a run up, and it seems like every day I’m a bit closer to my goal of financial independence.

On top of this, President-elect Biden signaled that he will absolve up to $70,000 in student debt for everyone, regardless of income. This will wipe by debt completely. There are questions about how fast this will happen. Apparently he can do it via executive order, so we’ll see. One thing is now clear, that I will be making the minimum payment on my loans, of which the first payment is due in January.

What an exciting time!

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More ethereum work

I haven’t been keeping up with habits lately, and haven’t written in three days. I also haven’t been working out much, instead drinking and staying up too late. I could make excuses about how work, home and the kids have been stressing me out, but that’s not it. I’ve just got to find other things to do.

I have been getting a lot done on the Ether Auction smart contracts. I’ve been using Hardhat, which is probably a bit too new and buggy for me, given my experience level with Solidity development, but I’m slowly moving forward with TDD. There are a couple bugs that are preventing me from putting the tests together like I would want. Chai methods for ensuring wallet balances change between bid and withdrawal calls seems to be broken, and I can’t seem to retrieve the getters from a public mapping in the contract.

I’ve been reading up on Solidity best practices, fussing over the withdraw function on the app to make sure I don’t have any hacks on the withdrawals. I want a really solid testing suite before I worry about deploying this thing. I’ve got a lot to figure out in the meantime. Just getting the testing suite has been difficult enough, but I’ve still got to finish building the auction instance contracts, the deployer contract, then figure out how to deploy, and get the web3 UI up and running. I have no idea what I’m doing, and will have to learn it all on the fly.

Thankfully the Hardhat community Discord has several helpful people, although the team seems like they have quite the backlog on the Github issues page.

I’m trying to just take it slow break when I get frustrated. I’ve been working through the Javascript ES tutorials on FreeCodeCamp to try and fill the gaps in knowledge, since I’m going to need it more and more.

I’m not happy with the pace of progress that I’m making, but as long as I make some progress every day I should be happy.

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Continued optimism

Nose to the grindstone.

So I actually got a quite a bit done yesterday since I wasn’t obsessing over $BTC price action yesterday. I spent most of my time working in Hardhat, trying to figure out how to make tests work using the Waffle/Chai suite. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around all the different dependencies so that I can do things. It’s a lot to take in, even for me, so I just had to turn in early last night and give my brain a rest.

I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano for the past week. I finished Slaughterhouse Five earlier last month — it’s a short read — Player Piano is much more like a regular novel. I only gotten through the first fifth of it, but it’s quite amazing from a futurist standpoint. The novel deals with the economic and class consequences of automation and computerization, and even touches on things like standardized test scores determining one’s algorithmic destiny. It’s really making me think about the kids’ education.

Elder is really spending a lot of her day working on schoolwork. I know it’s really not a lot compared to how much time she would be spending in class if they were in person, but it just seems like a lot of work for a third-grader. I find she’s often not paying attention to what the teacher is doing, and is doodling or reading something else she’s not supposed to, and I feel like a hardass constantly telling her to pay attention. She gets frustrated by the homework, having to type everything up; I’ve been trying to reinforce her touch typing, but she often falls back to two-fingers when she’s working.

And I’m pushing Younger with her reading. We’ve been doing IXL every day for the most part, and I’m working with her on language arts as much as I can. It’s stressful, cause she gets frustrated easy, so we have to take it in short increments, a few questions, a TV show, a few questions, another show.

And trying to fit all this in while “working”…

Zombie, LLC’s home franchise was having their virtual convention yesterday, and I spent half of my workday yesterday trying unsuccessfully to get sound working in the Windows 10 VM that I use for work. I don’t know if it’s a problem with QEMU, or the Pulse Audio subsystem, but I tried to convert my QEMU image over to a VirtualBox image and ran out of space. I tried watching the Zoom meeting on my host, but I’m stuck on wifi (another problem with the ethernet card), and the meeting was pretty much unwatchable. I also tried using the Azure VM that I use for the meeting, but the throughput on that was pretty horrible.

I really don’t know what to do about the networking issue other than just put my head to the grindstone and figure out what the hell is going on. I’m not sure if it’s a driver issue with the card itself or some sort of Network Manager / NetPlan issue that I messed up. I’m just not getting an IP address unless I run dhclient directly, and that only works for a few minutes. I really wasn’t looking forward to debugging the entire Ubuntu network stack.

I did have some small wins over the past few days. Lambo1, my six-GPU mining rig, had been acting up, so I wound up disconnecting the rig and pulling out every card one-by-one and spraying then off with air. It looks like one of the power cables stopped working, but it took an hour of swapping and restarting to figure it out. The riser support was slipping down as well, which may have contributed. I also managed to finally figure out how ssh-agent and ssh-add work together with ssh to allow automatic login. It had always been one of those things that I managed to clobber together once in a blue moon, but I had to redo my Gitlab and Github keys on both my development workstations, and now I’ve got it figured out. It’s so nice to be able to clone my repos and push without having to lookup passwords.

I think my BTC bullishness may have caught on with the Missus. She’s sitting on a lot of cash right now and just opened a Vangard account, per her FIRE peeps. I bought a small amount for her during the 2017 run up, and it’s now worth three times what she paid for it. We were comparing notes on portfolio performance she said, “OK, I’ll buy some more”. I’ve been trying to get her to setup a BlockFi account, but she’s had other things on her mind. I’ll probably just have her set the account up with some cash, and we’ll feed the interest into BTC. Maybe I’ll add some dollar cost averaging into the mix if she want to fund it further.

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Ether auction development

So I actually started programming the (Evil) Ether Auction that I’ve been thinking about for several weeks. I put the repo up on GitLab while I work through it, so that I can get some feedback on it before deploy it.

I’m still working on the actual auction portion of it. There are several auction Solidity auctions tutorials out there, so used those as a start point while I refine the requirements for the app. The auction contract is deployed with a bid time parameter, and the the pot is seeded via a separate transaction. The first bid will set the endtime of the auction.

We keep track of the winner and first loser, once the auction is complete all other bidders will be able to withdrawal their funds from the contract. When the winner claims the pot, both the winner and first loser’s balance become property of the owner.

That’s the gist, anyways. I’m working out the details on a deployer contract that will keep the game running indefinitely, or until a set limit. I actually want the next round to be triggered by the winner claiming funds, some sort of callback to the deployer that takes the winnings from the previous auction and uses it to create a new one. I’ll probably add some sort of dev fee, and checks to make sure that the proceeds from the previous auction are more than the starting pot. I don’t think there’s any reason that this can’t be done, I’ll have to do some gas tests to make sure claiming the pot doesn’t cost too much for a first round.

I’m planning on seeding the first round with one Eth, and letting the contract run until the last round is greater than 32ETH. It’s actually pretty small change for some Ethereum whales, and there’s no reason that I couldn’t make this work for specific ERC20 tokens.

I’m using the Hardhat library to code this up right now, instead of Truffle and Ganache, and I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with Solidity for this contract or change over to Vyper. I’ve got the framework up and running and have started writing tests, but I’m unfamiliar with Chai and having problems wrapping my head around how to structure the tests.

The last piece I want in place is some sort of web interface setup, something simple that will list the auction details and allow users to place bids or reclaim bids from previous auctions.

That’s what I’m envisioning, so we’ll see how things go as development continues.

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DeFi notes

This weekend was a bit rough.

The kids were on my nerves the whole time and my temper kept flaring up. The girls seem to think they can just do whatever they want and ignore what I ask them to do. It’s infuriating. Missus is stressed out from work, and has been sleeping a lot. I’m stressed out cause she’s sleeping a lot and it feels like I’m doing most of the work around here.

We did manage to have some fun around here. I had promised Younger an ice cream party if she learned her letters. She did that several weeks ago and has been waiting patiently through Halloween and her friend’s birthdays, and Saturday I took her to Cold Stone and let her pick out three different flavors. She was really distraught when I told her that her friends wouldn’t be able to come over till Sunday, and on Sunday she must have asked five or six times if it was time.

So they came over yesterday afternoon and had their ice cream in the backyard. And these kids are exhausting, man, I tell you.

We also watched Biden’s victory speech Saturday night, although I had a hard time getting Elder to pay attention to it. I told her it was important to watch cause she’s so young that she probably doesn’t remember anything about the Obama presidency, and I want her to remember this moment. Younger probably won’t remember it. Missus was more interested in Harris’s speech and making Elder watch it. She didn’t see any point in making her pay attention to another old, white dude. Still I think moving on from the Trump presidency as soon as possible is very important.

Most of my time this weekend was spent reconciling my DeFi transactions, trying to figure out how to reconcile the ycrvBUSD that I have. I owed the girls some, so I got those numbers recorded in my Notion database and moved a bunch more fiat into them. I was tempted to buy more BTC, but decided to stick with my stablecoin strategy for the time being.

I also spend some time on the Yearn Discord and reading over the smart contracts to try and figure out just what the heck is going on. I pulled my ETH out of the vault since it was inactive, and considered doing so with LINK save for the fact that I don’t know what else to do with it. I talked to someone about using it as collateral on Aave for something else, but I don’t want to risk it.

Also, it seems that there is a new test USDC vault, which there seems to be some excitement around. I was tempted to move some funds there but I’m playing with savings here. I’m already nervous enough after hearing of some US-based crypto lending firm filed for bankruptcy this week. I don’t know enough about their business model to know whether BlockFi is at risk as well, but much of CT seemed to think so.

After I deal with day job stuff I need to take a look at my altcoin lending portfolio. Several positions should have stopped out during the pre-election run up, but I’m not entirely sure I had my stops set properly. Cosmos, PolkaDot, and Serum are all well below my stops, only ChainLink has managed to hold its position. I need to calculate my losses and figured out if I’m allowed to make any November trades. I found a new degen yield farming site and am tempted to try and take a position on one or two. If I was smart I would just wrap my BTC and put it in a vault. Alternatively, I don’t have any CRV or YFI tokens, and as much as I’m relying on the vaults I should probably allocate some funds there.

But the best strategy might just be to hold my BTC for now. It seems on the verge of a breakout this morning, and I have no idea what equities will do this morning now that Biden has won. We’ll see.

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Evening update

BTC was mainly quiet today, resting while alts seem to be pumping. Bitcoin has held steady mostly today while the election results come it. Several outlets are calling it for Biden, but several states are going to recounts. It seems that Dems may be able to squeeze out a Senate majority as well, pending results in Alaska (!) and two runoff elections in Georgia early next year.

I spent some time this morning thinking about how to design the Evil Ether Auction app, and exactly how I want to make it work. Nothing solid yet, but I’m trying to figure out how I want the mechanics to work. I’m thinking that it’ll will have a series of rounds, starting at one ETH, and that the proceeds from the first auction will be used as a starting amount for round two, and so forth. I’m thinking the last round would be for 32 Eth, enough to fund a masternode. I’ll either keep the proceeds of the last round, or possibly put a bid tax at some nominal amount as a developer fee. We’ll see how that goes.

My most recent fiat funds cleared ACH on my onramp, so spent more time today thinking about strategy. The GUSD Curve pool is basically garbage, so I’m probably going to stake the bUSD pool. There are a couple degen opportunities out there, Harvest seems to be going strong, recent hack withstanding, and someone pointed me to SnowSwap, but I’m not playing around with these funds. I trust BlockFi and Yearn, but I’m not willing to take chances on any other platforms with significant sums.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about tax ramifications of lending platforms and all this DeFi activity. It’s going to be absolute nightmare. I don’t think CoinTracking has done much work in this area, so I’m probably going to have to take a look at TokenTax when the time comes. Considering that it integrates with Turbotax, I probably should.

The rest of the afternoon was spent going over CSV exports of my Ethereum transactions, trying to line up all my activities over the past few weeks, trying to match fiat to various pools. I haven’t been doing a good job with my earmarked funds, and I’ve got some cleanup to do before I make any more conversions. Trying to keep track of funds earmarked for my family members in one wallet is proving tedious, but keeping them in a separate wallet is out of the question, given gas fees for vault deposits and withdrawals.

I have to be very disciplined if I’m going to keep things straight, and I’m still not sure the best way to keep track of it. Hopefully I can keep things straight in a spreadsheet or Notion table and not have to go as far as putting together a custom database or ledger. I’m going to go back to it here shortly and shore up my calculations and see what I come up with.