Category: General

Missus and I enjoyed a nice day without the kids. Elder spent the night over at her friend’s house, and Younger decided that she would rather go to church on her birthday than go to a pool party at her auntie’s house. Who am I to argue?

I’ve been drinking the hopium these last few weeks. I’ve managed to avoid liquidations on my Perp.Fi positions, and if things reverse from here then I should be set. I haven’t had to deploy any new capital to my ETH positions for several days, and have been holding on to the latest tranche of funds just in case. Haven’t had to use them yet, thankfully.

I took advantage of low, low gas prices today to clean up my accounts. Did some claiming and restaking, and took advantage of my IRA funds that I had on CREAM to borrow some VSP. There was a lot more that I wanted to do, but I don’t have enough capital right now. Everything is tied up in cash.

1/ #BITCOIN thread, monthly update

Sentiment: Bearish😡
Price Action: Bearish📉
Investors: Angry/Scared/Rekt🤒

Is it all over? Let’s look at certain data, to paint a picture of the current state of the market.

I hope it helps!🔥✌️
1/43 pic.twitter.com/raJm7jv3Mk

— Phoenix (@Phoenix_Ash3s) June 27, 2021

Then after we got back from running around this afternoon we came back and found a modest little pump.

Damn, I can't really remember the last time we had one of these. pic.twitter.com/Q5ZJrttNgk

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) June 27, 2021

While this is a good sign, I’m not going to do anything stupid. My liquidation prices are still too high, so I’m going to chill here and let my margin build up for a few more weeks. If I need cash, (which I do,) I’m going to pull it out of my stablecoin positions. I checked the Yearn USDC vault today and it was something like four percent. Ew.

In all it’s been a pretty good weekend. I need to take it easy tonight and go for a run first thing in the morning.

Younger’s party was today, and it went of pretty well considering we got rained out. We did the last bit of cleaning this morning, then lounged around the house most of the afternoon. My dad came by and took her out shopping while we did the final preparations. I picked up the catering and got back a few minutes before they got back. It was nice.

We had some early afternoon showers, so we had to move everything inside, but there was just too many kids in the house so we sent them outside to do cake and I set up the slip and slide for the last hour of the party. It was fun.

While I was killing time this morning I took advantage of low gas prices to clear up some of my shitcoin positions and made several Uniswap trades. I cleared up a few hundred dollars that I sent over to xDAI in case I need it for my Perp.Fi position. I really hope we are close to a bottom. I’d really hate to have to spend more of my reFIREment fund runway to keep this long from getting liquidated. Also funding has been flat so I’m not even really making much off of the position itself. It’s a long way back to break even.

I passed the rest of the day playing The Outer Wilds. It’s a great game, and I’m challenging myself to finish it without using the internet for help. The world building is quite amazing, and it’s a quite fascinating world-building example. I really want to finish it on my own.

Let you think all I did was party and play games all day, I did go to bed very early last night and woke up and worked out this morning. And cleaning up for the party got me to clean my desk for the first time in months, so it’s really decluttered. I took care of business today.

Tomorrow I go to my sister in law’s to celebrate her birthday. Elder went with her friend for a sleepover, so I’ll have to pick her up in the late afternoon. It seems that it’ll be a long day tomorrow.

Well, I’ve survived another day, despite my best efforts to sabotage myself last night. Perhaps I was feeling a bit relieved that I still haven’t gotten liquidated, and went a bit crazy. There was TV, video games, Netflix, and beer.

I woke up rather late this morning, and was pretty useless. I managed to get some cleaning done today, and did manage to finish another Rust Exercism this morning while the girls watched a movie. I didn’t get too much done after that though. What work I did manage to do was mainly housework: cleaning, laundry, and getting the house ready for Younger’s surprise birthday party tomorrow.

We’re pretty much ready, just a bit more cleaning, and then it’s just a matter of pulling off the last bit of decorations. Missus has a hair appointment, she’s going to get the food get home about a half hour before guests arrive. Then I’ll take Younger out for forty five minutes so they can finish setting up. Then we get back and then SURPRISE! It’s your birthday! I really feel like we should get some kind of award for pulling this off, but I imagine the look of sheer joy on her face will be enough.

So tonight I’ll be taking it easy, turning in early and making sure I’m well rested for what’s sure to be a long day tomorrow.

This is actually my second attempt at a blog post today. The first one turned out a bit longer than my usual ones and is going to need a bit more work than I was able to give it today. The day was productive, but wasn’t really spent how I wanted it to. I did manage to get through a particularly difficult (for me) Rust Exercism that had been giving me trouble for a few days. I also spent a good deal of energy today cooking what turned out to be a delicious rack of ribs on the smoker using the 3-2-1 method. It was a lot of trouble and I feel like I spent most of the day cleaning up after myself.

Preparations for Younger’s surprise birthday continued. We also got the hottub repaired… after six months. I’d be ready to cross that one off the todo list, but we still have to get the cover replaced.

My mood has been much better today. I woke up with a bit of anxiety, fearing an overnight liquidation, but the price of ETH actually went up enough overnight that I didn’t have to worry about my position much. If I make it to a new ATH without liquidation I feel like I deserve a t-shirt or something.

I actually went ahead and borrowed VSP on Cream again. The VSP compound rate on Vesper was triple digits and the borrow rate was low enough that I went ahead and and took out a 50% utilization loan. It might not work out to be a terrible amount of money, but as long as it’s paying for itself I should be good. I didn’t take terribly good notes last time I did it, but maybe this time will pay off a bit better. My main risk is VSP going up more than 50%, so I set an alert on TradingView and will keep an eye on it.

Welcome to the bipolar blog, where yesterday I was on the verge of despair, and today everything is A-OK. I wound up throwing more cash at my long position before getting liquidated today, survived the bounce, and now everything looks like it’s going to be fine. We’ll see.

It was actually a pretty good day. I woke up on time, got in a workout, and managed several hours of deep work today on some Rust Exercisms as well as working on a React project for the Perp.Fi hackathon. Mainly it’s for myself, but if I can finish it in time I might be able to make a bounty off of it. I’m trying to track my potential funding gains. It requires a bit of Javascript and GraphQL work, so it’s keeping me on my ties. The Rust exercises are proving very hard, even though they’re considered easy. I’m working through them without any peeking in order to level up my deep work skills. Being able to push through when I can’t Google the answer will prove useful as I get to more difficult positions.

Speaking of which, I think that’s the idea behind why I push Elder so hard on the piano even though she says she doesn’t enjoy it. She’s given up on so many hobbies that I want to push her to show her that she can do something difficult. Still, it’s very stressful dealing with her limited mindset. I hope I can teach her to persevere even when something isn’t fun. I want to teach her that she can get through the dip so that she doesn’t give up and move on to something new and easy.

Despite almost getting liquidated today, and throwing more money at my margin, it was a pretty good day. After I survived the dip, at least. I don’t know if this is the bottom, but I will sleep good tonight. If this is the bottom then I’m well set to survive the next few months. Hopefully the Perp.fi funding will pay the bills for months to come.

Pretty decent day today, some market woes withstanding. Missus picked up all of the slack today and the kids weren’t too bad.

I got up early, well rested and had most of the morning to myself. The market had a bit of a dump and I realized how precarious my ETH leveraged longs were. I wound up taking a bit of margin out of BTC position and was preparing to throw it at my ETH position as a last resort, but the price rebounded and had a nice weekly close. I’m obviously a bit overextended there and spent a good deal of my time meditating trying to figure out what to do. I considered throwing cash at it but actually did the right thing and moved some money to fiat. Note to self: Gemini doesn’t do USDC and Voyager takes 5-10 days for transfers, so give yourself more wiggle room next time.

So while I was getting caught up on in the FUD and watching the five minute chart I listened to some music and farted around. It was a bit of a waste really, but I was still suffering from a bad diet the past few days. Younger went to church with the neighbors and Missus took Elder out to shop for Younger’s surprise birthday party, so I had the house to myself for a bit. Played piano but wasn’t productive in the slightest.

Missus got me a small keg for my homebrew, so I took the day to quit procrastinating and brew up a recipe I picked up at a local supply shop like six months ago. I’d been procrastinating because it required me to cook my own hops and I was fearing it’d be a huge pain in the ass. It was, but I figure I might as well get it over with. I’m still using my two gallon starter kit; I’m not sure I want to go further with the supplies I’ll need to do the full five gallon experience. We shall see.

I plan on getting to bed on time tonight, picking up with the habit wagon tomorrow: go for a run, do some deep work on coding, and get stuff done.

What a day. We drove a couple hours out today and just got back in an hour ago. Over six hours on the road. First we went out to a gem mine, then headed over to the family lake or a bit of swimming and fishing. I am exhausted, and everyone is sunburnt to various extents.

The “gem mine” was a bit of a letdown. You basically buy a bucket of dirt. The place scatters in feldspar, quartz and various other stones in the bucket, and the kids can then take scoops out of it and sift it through a sluice that they have setup. The girls loved it, but I’m glad we didn’t go too far out of our way for the thirty minutes or so that we spent there.

From the mine it was a forty minute drive to the family lake. My father and law has been busy up there, building up the dock. I did a bit of swimming with the girls and almost drowned myself. One side of Younger’s life jacket slipped out of the belt/chest straps and I thought she was going to slip right out the bottom of it and I started to panic. We were in the deep end and I had both girls with me, so when I ordered them to start swimming back they though I was playing a game and I was really scared that something was going to happen to one of them.

I tried staying out of the sun as much as possible; I forgot my hat, and there was no shade on the water, of course. The kids “caught” some fish, FIL hooked them and let the girls reel them in. The small lake is overstocked with fish, mostly small bass. We pigged out on snacks, drank a few beers and just hung out while the girls enjoyed themselves. It was a good time.

How did I let the day get away from me. I forgot to schedule blog time and here I am, ready to go to bed, but throwing myself at the computer just to keep the streak alive.

i can barely see what I’m typing because i don’t know where my glasses are. I just don’t want to look for them more than I want to get this done and go to bed.

I finished a particularly difficult Rust Exercism that turned out easier that I made it. I signed up for a Gitcoin grant for Perp.Fi. I spent most of the day taking care of my kids and then volunteered for taking care of D’s three kids so that he could take his wife to see The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Thankfully my other neighbor L. invited us over and the kids got to run around with water guns. We watched Luca, had pizza and popcorn.

Tomorrow we’re going out on a road trip. Just for one day, not overnight, but Sunday I’m supposed to go deal with the hoard at my dad’s house. Happy fathers’ day.

i used my Fold card today to buy groceries. Twice. One percent in sats doesn’t seem like a lot, but we’ll see.

Today was a much more productive day. I finished reading Deep Work last night and decided to follow one of the recommendations to schedule out my whole day. Mostly. I got up at six, did my meditation and tea, then went for a two and a half mile run – the longest I’v done in years. I got back before any of the girls got up and decided to spend a few minutes on one of the projects on my Trello board.

I managed to get a pretty solid two hours in this morning working on one of the Rust Exercisms. I didn’t finish it, but learned a lot, and kept driving forward until my time was up. Then lunch, took the kids to the library, and did some slight rescheduling while Elder finished up her last day of school. I managed to get another forty five minutes in reading through this wonderful primer on Programming on Solana.

I spent a good deal of time working out some metrics on the Perpetual Finance funding. Yesterday’s rates were pretty bad, but things picked up earlier today. I actually started the day but converting some wBTC to USDC, moving it to xDAI and putting it in a 4x ETH long position. The liquidation price is just under two thousand dollars, and I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see that price anytime soon. Regardless, I’ve found myself updating my master wallet sheet every time I take a break, or checking the funding rate whenever I find myself on Discord, so I figured a more formal dashboard was in order.

I started out by taking a CSV file from the historical funding rates on Redash and importing it into a Google Sheet. I filtered out results by BTC and ETH and popped them into separate tabs, then did some averaging and calculations to figure out what the trends were. So now I have a snapshot of what the past daily, weekly, and monthly rates would equate to at the current asset price. (I’m not trying to compute historical price data at this time.) I also looked at past periods as well, so I can see how yesterday, last week, and last month compare to the current trending rates. Hopefully it gives me some good indication as to they type of returns I can expect.

Yesterday’s funding was pretty bad, and it looks like last month was horrid as well. But hopefully having this snapshot will give me less anxiety. I’m also not very anxious about price action. Since I have what I consider very conservative liquidation prices, I should be able to hold these positions open perpetually and generate a decent income off of the funding. And again, since funding is determined by the position value, my income should increase as bitcoin starts making new all time highs. Seems like it’s just a matter of time.

Still, my spreadsheet has its limitations, and could use some marked improvement. I’d like to make it easier to update. Instead of filtering the sheet for ETH and BTC and copying the results to another tab, I should figure out how to pull and filter the data from the primary tab, so I can just import the new CSV and have the results update with a minimal number of steps. Of course I would want to automate the data import as well, but my options are limited there. Graph Protocol is an option, but at that point I’m better off programming something myself. My initial thought is to go with something in a Python notebook, but I might not even need to do that, I should just be able to pull what I need in a simple react app. I’ll have to explore.

Unlike yesterday, today was not a particularly productive day. I got off to a bad start by staying up till 1:30AM last night, so I was not in top shape this morning when I woke up. To make matters worse, bitcoin took a bit of a dive overnight, and funding on Perpetuals turned slightly positive, meaning that my brilliant passive-income generating strategy was not generating any income. Rates eventually turned negative again, but just barely. Back to the drawing board.

I did a Rust Exercism, but my result was not very idiomatic. I’m getting better, but it’s slow going. We completed a second test transaction on the SAIADao multisig and are ready to move forward with production tests, but while I was reviewing some Solana code I figured out that I might be better off using the generic multisig program in the Anchor framework docs since it can more easily be used to invoke the Serum trades than writing a custom program. We’ll see.

I did manage to do a fair bit of cooking. For dinner I smoked some chicken wings that came out great, but the meal turned out a bit more work. By the time I finished with cleanup I needed a second shower. Tons of leftovers though.

I am definitely back on the atomic habit wagon tonight though. I’m finishing up Deep Work right now and am going to bed early. I want to get up early (on-time) and get a jog in first thing.

I also did a health assessment for my insurance company, earned $100 in credits for doing that and uploading a picture of my vaccine card.

So overall, I did get a lot done today, I just felt like shit.