Category: General

It’s funny that the titles of this week’s post have been dark: Exploited, A Foul Mood, The Sickness Spreads. It sounds like I’m having a pretty horrible week, or like the title of some trilogy of dark fantasy novels. But I’ve actually been having a pretty good week, considering. And today’s been pretty good so far.

I must be rested, because I went to bed a bit early last night and had trouble falling asleep. I woke up at four this morning, and tossed and turned before getting up around five-thirty. I went for a run. It’s unseasonably warm, and when I was cooling down I heard the Reveille play from across the water at the AFB. I got Younger up and to the bus without too much fuss, came back and took Elder in to school, and did my daily 45 minute meditation session.

I spent most of yesterday working on the spl-governance program. It’s mostly front-end work, of course, trying to get the UI running on my localnet. I got my first commit and PR in on the Blockworks repo, which is good. I’m gaining clout every day.

I don’t really want to write much today, because I want to get to it. I’m still waiting on CompanyA to give me the job offer. Apparently they’re drafting some special company policy that applies directly to me, so they’re working that out. Apparently I was a bit too aggressive with my ‘what ifs’ during the call with HR. It’s fine, I got a lot to do and have savings to rely on. I’m definitely not in a rush or anxious about it like I was last week.

I do want to start making some more cash soon though. The market is down quite a bit right now, and there’s a lot of things I want to buy. BTC, ETH, and SOL, obviously, but there are a lot of other projects that I want to put some moonbag stakes in. I want to put some real money in Star Atlas, and up my stake in Invictus. But first I need to start earning.

No, I’m not referring to yesterday’s foul mood, but the the non-cold then cold that Younger caught and gave to Missus. When she gets sick she gets sick, and is completely out of commission, which just means that there’s more for me to do with the kids. I took Elder in to school this morning, Younger is watching TV. I just finished my meditation and it’s almost nine.

I did some work on the spl-token-swap JS client yesterday. I found an inconsistency between the github version and the one on NPM that caused me some problems with my testing, so I filed an issue and posted up in their Discord that I wanted to help out with it. One of their developer relations guys invited me to some invite only Solana developer Discord, so I feel like I’m part of some super shadowy secret coder group now. I think this will only accelerate my learning and knowledge.

I pulled the last of my stablecoin funds, six months living expenses, out of Yearn yesterday. It’s sitting in my ETH wallet. I want to send it to BlockFi but it’s a new address, and I’m hesitant to send the whole tranche over without a test first. Gas is $60 to send right now so I decided to wait. The market seems to have stabilized, I think we’re at the bottom of the chop at sixty K. I’d be tempted to buy some here but I still don’t have an official job offer. I don’t know if this is a negotiation tactic or something, but it’s a longer delay than I’d like. On the other hand, I’m still getting messages on LinkedIn from recruiters, so I may as well play the game while I’m still a free agent.

I want to wrap this up so that I can get started working. It’s a beautiful fall day, mostly cloudy and a bit warm for November, but I can see the leaves turning outside my window.

This morning was tough. Younger has a slight cold, and is home from school again today. I don’t think she should be here, but there it is. I was very agitated this morning because of my dreams, and I did not look forward to the prospect of having to keep her home today. I had a really good day with her yesterday, and went out of my way to play card games with her (she beat me at Go Fish and Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman,) and took her on a half hour bike ride to her Momo’s house mid afternoon so she could get some exercise. I also did not get a lot done yesterday.

When GenesysGo “deprecated” the DEX RPC server, I had to scramble Saturday morning to get the site operational. I forgot to update the indexer. So yesterday morning I was trying to figure out why the site wasn’t displaying recent trades. I thought it might have been a database error so I was all stressing about getting access to the Redis instance. Turns out the recent trades only show the last 24 hours of data, and there hadn’t been any data since the RPC went offline Saturday. So I fixed that, but now we’re missing two days of information. Oh well.

That ruined my morning, and while I did manage to get the SAIAdao update written, I didn’t post it. I’m still waiting on CompanyA to get back to me, so I’ll just have to wait till next week to get it out. So that’s my first order of business this morning.

I also have a tech support request from the exchange that I need to deal with. I do not want to be handling these all the time. Not now, when we’re barely seeing any volume. Wait and see.

Also, the market is tanking. BTC is near sixty thou. I’m down 25k on my Perp positions, but funding is already over three hundred. That means a lot of people are shorting. It may be one of the strongest rates I’ve seen in a while. It’s trending toward $1200, which would be one of my best weeks in two or three months. I suppose that means that a turnaround is right around the corner. I’d like to buy the dip, but I have no cash. Which reminds me that I need to get my funds out of Yearn today. Gas is around 100 gwei, so hopefully it won’t cost me more than a grand to get out my funds.

I did meditate and do everything else I was supposed to do last night to make sure that I have a good day today. So let’s see if the rest of the day goes any better.

So yesterday I found out that I lost thirty thousand dollars in the last CREAM Finance hack. Funds lost include ten grand in funds from my regular wallet, and twenty grand that I had staked via my IRA. I had posted the collateral there in order to arbitrage an interest play on VSP. I had already returned half of the lended tokens though, so I am only holding a small amount of VSP tokens compared to the total lost. Additionally, I had a leveraged Perp.Fi position open in CREAM for another grand. It was completely liquidated.

This is my biggest loss in crypto, and the first time I’ve been rekt because of a hack.

BREAKING: Ethereum DeFi protocol @CreamdotFinance hacked for more than $130 million. According to SlowMist AML statistics, the hacker has profited a total of 2760.22 ETH and 60 tokens including HBTC, USDT, BUSD, etc. SlowMist will continue to monitor the transfer of stolen funds. pic.twitter.com/eLPMz3YEII

— SlowMist (@SlowMist_Team) October 27, 2021

This hack actually occurred prior to Halloween. I apparently misread the initial details, as I did not realize that all pools were affected and that my funds had been lost at the time. The UI was still showing that I had collateral, so I naively assumed that I was safu. Alas, no.

Emotionally, I’m ok. I understand the risks of this space, and it’s precisely why I split funds up in my reFIREment account. Using it as collateral was something I didn’t quite think through though.

The lost funds aren’t really a big deal. The ten thou will be a tax write off, and the twenty in my IRA is less than four percent of the funds. I think if anything it’s made me slightly more anxious about my other funds. I have one tranche of funds left, about nineteen grand in a deprecated Yearn Vault. It will cost me $1200 in ETH to remove these funds, at which point I’ll send them to BlockFi to pay off mortgage and living expenses.

I’ll probably do a post-mortem on the reFIREment fund. It served its purpose, but financially was a wash. I took five months off from work, recharged from burnout, spent more time with my family, and was able to focus on building, ultimately landing me a dream job. I’m still not going to say who CompanyA is until I have a signed job offer in my hands though.

I think I’m most nervous about something going wrong with the job and I don’t want to jinx it. And I did just lose one third of my remaining living expenses, which is why I want to make sure I get the funds moved out of Yearn as soon as gas dies down. It could be three or five weeks before I start seeing a paycheck again, and I can’t risk those last funds on chain.

So today I’ve got to write an update for SAIAdao. Younger is home again today. She was sniffling and coughing this morning when she woke up, and Missus and I decided to keep her home again today. D’s grandfather passed away, so they’re leaving today and will be away for two weeks. So I’ll have to be Younger’s playmate today. I’m not sure how that’s going to work out, maybe I’ll get a couple of hours done today. I really want to dig in to some more development work, we’ll see how my day goes.

Yesterday we went to our local amusement park. Today was the first day of their Christmas opening, and Missus bought tickets for the family. We were only there for a couple hours, it was very crowded and we left to pick up dinner at Wawa. High rollers. I can’t say I really enjoyed it, I know the kids had fun running around but I felt more like a sherpa, and by the time it was time to go the girls were acting up. Still, it wasn’t a disaster like last time where Younger tried to hide and we needed to call security to find her.

So I stayed up till 2AM playing DSP and watching playthrough videos. This game is insane. So of course I woke up this morning with a sore neck. Got the girls off to church, I have a few more hours before they get back. I did my meditation, I’m doing my writing.

It’s Sunday, which means Perps. My CREAM position has been completely liquidated. It was only a grand, thankfully I got that out of my system. I should probably get my LP off of CREAM though, before they have another exploit. My ETH and BTC funding had a really good week, as they do when the market is down or consolidating like it is. It’s almost eight hundred for ETH, another two for BTC. Minus the three hundred gone from CREAM this week and six the last. I took my snapshot and updated my charts already, so I just need to head upstairs and compound the position. I’m up another five hundred between my IRA positions as well. My liquidation prices are all well below fifty percent. I’ve got a lot of leeway between my current price and my projected one, but I’m not sure how aggressive I want to be right now.

I spent several hours programming yesterday morning. I was hoping to update the spl-token JS library to allow one to pass a custom pubkey for a new mint, but I wound up spending too much time figuring out how to include my library in my testing repo. And then the TS mappings weren’t updating.

Then I got a message that Fintwit’s web host is going to shut them down because their server was used in some kind of SSH attack. I’m not even sure how that’s possible, really. I don’t want to take responsibility for this project, but I did tell Sherem I would do the ETH contracts. Like I need more shit on my plate right now. The house is a wreck, I start a new job in a week, and I have no idea how long it’s going to take me to launch SAIA.

But, I got to keep grinding on.

My meditation practice continues. I’m tending to find a rhythm near the end of the sessions that is completely focused on the breath. I find myself humming om in my head through the breath, and it seems to help me focus. I’ve been trying various counting strategies, always starting with the inhale, sometimes to five, sometimes to ten, but eventually I have to stop the counting altogether. This is a bit different than the time I did the sixty-minute sessions two years ago, there was no effort made there, just to sit, whereas for these I’m actively engaging to focus my attention and my awareness.

This first week has been pretty good, today was a pretty good session. I did have some distractions and mind-wandering during the middle of the session, but I didn’t have any of the severe pain in my legs and back that I did yesterday. According to The Mind Illuminated I’m still in stages one and two, one, for establishing a practice, and two for being able to focus for the entire session. It will be interesting to see if I can make it to the phase where mind-wandering is eliminated altogether. I wonder how long that will take…

I’m making progress with SAIAdao’s migration. Trying to come up with what one would call a workspace is a bit challenging. I’m trying to do all my work on localnet — although why I’m not just using testnet instead is a question that has been raised — and figuring out how to hold everything together is a bit of a challenge. The Anchor test command does a decent job, but it’s a bit different when running their localnet command. By default, it wipes the database each time it’s run, and while I can deploy programs at launch, I can’t preserve token mints. I basically have to start the localnet, then deploy the mints using a couple of CLI commands.

I also am having a minor squibble with the SAIA DEX. GenesysGo deprecated our endpoint. They had asked me to change it a week or two ago, but I wasn’t expecting the cutoff. Thankfully I was able to push a change to master without too much trouble.

So it seems I will be starting my new job in a week. I spoke to my new bossmang yesterday and confirmed. I’m still waiting on paperwork as several team members were in Lisbon for the Solana conference. Hopefully we can make some progress on that today.

Younger is home today. School sent her home “sick” when she told them she had a sore throat and they took her temperature. It was ninety-nine. Ugh. She’s not sick, but the school has a 24 hour policy on fevers so she’s stuck home with Missus and I today.

Hopefully I can get some work done. I spent some time trying to deploy the Solana Oyster Swap (AMM) front end, but it’s horribly out of date. It only has Sollet wallet support, and when I tried to add everything from the DEX repo I started getting Typescript errors. Thankfully my developer network is growing by the day, so I have more people to ping questions off of.

I’m going to keep grinding at it. We’ve got to get SAIA fully launched as quickly as possible. The clock is ticking. I’m not even spending any time writing Solana programs, it’s all front end stuff. Very frustrating. All I can do is try to make daily progress and keep building toward the end goal.

Our phishing incident with the DEX seems to be resolved.

I aped into another Olympus fork, Invictus. It’s the first one I’ve seen on Solana so I didn’t even think about it, just threw twelve hundred dollars into it. I also was going to by in on $GM, but couldn’t get Uniswap to work. It’s one of these fee on transfer tokens, and requires high slippage. I was about to put $10k of my IRA money into it last night but just kept having issues. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t. I’ll probably look at the price chart later this morning and thank my good fortune or curse my luck.

Today is Veterans’ Day, so Missus has the day off. I’m going to crank out a couple hours work on an Ethereum project and then we are going to do something together. We’re just not sure what.

I stayed up a bit late last night playing Dyson Sphere Project and watching Big Mouth. I’m paying the price this morning. I still managed to do my forty five minutes of meditation though, and I am sticking to my practice by writing. I have decided that no matter what, these two activities are going to be how I start my day.

My brain was a bit distracted during meditation. It was very anxious for the time to be up so that I could get on with my day. There’s a lot that I want to do. Namely play DSP, but I’m going to hold off on that for now and get some actual work done. I promised Sherem that I would do some work on Fintwit’s Trailer Park for him. I either need to deliver or find someone else who can.

I supposed my Solana work will have to take the backseat for the moment. I managed to record another short video for my Anchor series yesterday. I’m not too happy with the results, I may want to redo it in the future. I wasn’t really prepared for it and probably wound up sounding like an idiot at a couple places. I might need to spend more time prepping for the next. I’m not going to advertise the channel until I’ve got a couple more vids under my belt. I’m really not putting any effort into them right now, but I guess they’ll get better as my competencies grow.

That’s it, it’s nine AM. Time for office hours.

Y'all I can't say much till it's official, but I made it, fam.

I made it for real.

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) November 9, 2021

Well, I heard back from CompanyA yesterday, and it looks like I’ll be going back to work as a blockchain developer here in the next couple weeks. They took my counter-offer, but I’m mum on the details until the paperwork is signed. I am not blowing this one.

Still, I told everyone I know. It’s life-changing and a dream job on top of that. Life is going to change, for sure. I’m going to fight the lifestyle inflation as hard as I can, but I can already feel my brain working against me, thinking about new cars, hiring help around the house, taking trips and vacations; stacking sats. I just have to have patience for now and wait.

Someone reported the DEX as a phishing site. I got reports yesterday that people were having the site blocked by their AV. I was busy yesterday morning blowing up our Redis database so I didn’t get around to it till after lunch, when I was taking Missus’s mom to the doctor’s office. I opened a couple tickets to try and get it un-flagged, but I’m just waiting. And I also had an email from AWS as well, so there’s that.

I’ve got a lot to do this morning. I really need to focus on deploying liquidity for SAIAdao, I’ve got maybe a week or two to get things together before the new job starts and starts requiring my attention.

Life is good.

I am in a world of hurt. I must have pulled several muscles in my lower back this weekend. I did do a lot: ran three miles, cut the grass, worked out, dug up a bush. I didn’t really do much yesterday but I just started getting a very serious ache late in the day. This morning I was woken up at 1AM by Younger, and I was in so much pain I could barely turn on my side to get comfortable. I took two ibuprofen and still wound up tossing and turning until five, when I decided to go downstairs. I brewed my tea and took a frozen gel pack and stuck it under my back. I set a meditation timer for forty-five minutes and must have dozed off numerous times, but my back was better. I fell asleep for another bit before Missus woke me up to take Younger to the bus. And here I am.

I’ve got to take my MIL to the doctor’s again this morning. I didn’t realize when she asked me that it was during the same time as the Star Atlas ship drops. It’s fine, I’ve got the dao’s C9 order in. But someone in the dao pointed out that Atlas Co. added additional ATLAS markets to the existing ships, so I know what I’ll be doing today. I didn’t quite get the automated token updates working, but given how big the NFT feed is that might now be a bad thing. Especially with all of the changes they’ve been making. I’ve got to do the update manually this time.

So I know what my priority will be this morning.

The markets are looking good and I am extremely bullish. Bitcoin confirmed a monthly ATH, a weekly one, and a daily one last night before shooting up to sixty-six last night and sixty-seven early this morning. We are in price discovery mode. As is ETH. I think it’s remarkable that it’s not being attended to with the same level of fanfare as it normally does.

This is the most subdued I've seen CT for an ATH.

I think it's because everyone's waiting for it to break much higher.

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) November 9, 2021

My Perps are well over $100k in profit right now, the ones under my IRA are up another $50, and my crypto-equities are up as well. MARA is a 3700% gain for me, right below Voyager at 3400%. Amazing.

Now let me see if I can move my butt off this couch and make it over to my desk. I feel like an old man.