Category: General

Well we made it to Miami late last night. We got stuck in Baltimore for a few hours because of weather, then delayed further because our flight had maintenance issues. So we finally deplaned after midnight. We wound up taking a “taxi” to our hotel which somehow wound up costing us thirty dollars for the mile and a half trip. Missus didn’t want to haggle with the guy, it was so late, that’s what I get for not setting up Lyft on my phone before we left.

The conference has already started, but I needed the sleep, so I’m going to take my time and read the itinerary before I head out. I’m thinking about walking, as I don’t think it’s too far to the Maya Wynwood, we’ll see. I still need to get cleaned up and make sure I can bring my bag into the event.

I have some friends down here, including some investors that are interested in the Star Atlas deal that we put together. It should be interesting.

Missus is sleeping behind me, and my typing is disturbing her sleep.

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I had fun today, despite myself. I took a Lyft to the conference, but was pretty bored for most of the day. The first highlight was shaking Michael Saylor’s hand as he walked into one of the events. I also ran into Lyn Alden. For the most part I was just walking around being hot, but at some point I decided to grab some drinks and sat down with a group of guys. We started talking and they told me that they were from my area. Literally less than twenty miles from my house. At first I thought they were fucking with me, but after some interrogation I determined that they were, in fact, my neighbor. It’s totally strange, considering the fact that we flew some thirteen hundred miles to hang out with people who live nearby. Insane, honestly.

So I’m off for Miami today. I have mixed feelings about it, which I think are just related to my general post-retirement malaise. I didn’t get a good night’s sleep and have already been up trying to clean the house and make lists of things I want to do, rules for the kids and fun things for my mom to do with them. I’ve got a lot to do this morning.

BTC and ETH are climbing. Nothing dramatic, but I did add to my ETH longs yesterday. I still got a long way until I get back to my big BTC purchase at $50,500. I scaled back my VSP loan yesterday, since my utilization was in the nineties, and the last thing I need is a liquidation while I’m out of town. I also exited out of most of my BSC positions. They’re just too small for me to have to worry about anymore.

It’s a bit more difficult than I expected to have my entire financial stake tied up in the market. My initial $100,000+ BTC thesis shouldn’t be invalidated by the recent drawdown, but there’s a lot of hemming and hawing on CryptoTwitter over whether a bear has returned, or whether we’re going to see a further BTC drawdown to $20,000. That would be pretty catastrophic, personally. I mean it won’t change my cash balance, of course, but I just don’t have the free funds to buy the dip. The pain would be severe, as I’d lose a few thousand in the liquidated longs. Can I live with that? I guess the nagging feeling I’ve been experiencing lately is telling me now.

I had Elder’s onboarding with Galileo yesterday. I’m going to have to start her earlier than I had anticipated, since most of the groups and nano-degrees start on the first of the month and she’s already missed the first classes. It wouldn’t make sense for her to start after she’s already missed the second, so I’m going to get her going next week after I come back. Her teacher, or facilitator or whatever they call it is a former elementary school teacher who is crypto-retired and is actually down in Miami for the conference as well.

There’s so much Miami in my feed right now I have fomo. Seems like everyone is living large and I’m struggling to make myself go to the thrift store and buy some shorts for the trip. I need to get moving, as I got less than six hours to get to the airport. I should probably figure out a budget so I don’t go crazy, put some BTC in a lightning wallet as I know they’ll be prevalent. I want to bring my Trezor in case I need to do anything, but I’m worried about the risk of carrying my main cold wallet with me. I may just bring it to the hotel — there’s no way I would take that into the main conference!

Time to get a move on!

So I’m a little more centered today. I actually spent most of yesterday trying to clean the house. Seems I did five loads of laundry yesterday and spent half the day trying to get the girls to clean their rooms. Didn’t get much done otherwise. I’m trying to get the house ready for our trip. I don’t want my mom coming down to find our house a cesspool. I bought her a nice bottle of wine, hopefully the kids don’t drive her too crazy.

Looked at the calendar this morning and realize we leave tomorrow. I’m not ready. I’m going to go to Miami looking like a bum. I managed to give myself a haircut a few days ago. It’s not bad, but it’s not that flattering either. Missus cleaned up the back, but it still looks like I put a number five guard on the trimmers and went around my head. I’ll have to work on it some more.

And my clothes are another thing. It’s not going to get below seventy-eight degrees while we’re down there and I have no clue what I’m going to wear. I suppose I’m going with business casual, but I’m not even sure what fits my fat ass anymore. I haven’t spent money on shoes or clothes in a year. I think I bought two pairs of jeans and some socks, that’s it. I sound like a teenage girl.

There’s a lot on my Trello board to get into, and Younger is already awake so I better get to it.

So today is the first day of my reFIREment. I’m a bit terrified. I have a lot of things I have to catch up on today, first off some domain renewals that I’m still holding for a client, a holdover from when I was going to be a web site designer. Ugh. The house is a mess, we came back from my sister in law’s and pretty much plopped out on the couch for five or six hours, so we’ve got a lot of cleaning to do. Then there are the various house projects on my honey-do list that need attention. And not to mention that I have no idea what I am going to do with myself otherwise.

I need to set up the multisig for SAIADao, which shouldn’t take to much time to move the needle, then I’d like to spend some time working on the next step, which is finding or building a trustless program that can make a purchase on the Serum dex. That’s probably the priority right now.

I’ve got to get ready for our trip to Miami. We leave Thursday and come back Sunday, but we’ve got to make sure that the house is ready for my mom, who’s watching the kids. There’s so much to do.

No time for a long update today. My Vesper plan seems to have fizzled out, my expected weekly yield is down to $20, which isn’t even going to cover gas costs for all the depositing that I did. I suppose I could leave it, but it’s too much risk and too little return for the nine grand that I’m using as collateral. Gas prices are at sixteen gwei, which I haven’t seen in months, so it might be time to harvest some tax losses and free up some cash.

There’s no room for error now. I’ve got to execute.

Today is Memorial Day, which means pool party cookout at my sister in law’s house. The entire house is up, which is slightly unusual considering it is a holiday. I plan on going by my stepmother’s house and checking on my dad, letting the girls see him. I want them to make him a get-well gift.

Part of my brain is having trouble accepting that I don’t have a job anymore. Rather, that this is it. There’s a vague tingling in the back of my brain about “getting ready for work”, like an ex-smoker’s muscle memory.

I’m adding exercise into the list of things that I do in the morning. Tea, meditation, writing, workout. I’ve got to get back into shape. I’ve put on quite a bit of weight over the winter and want to lose the beer belly and put on some lean muscle. The main challenge I have is lack of weights. There’s a new community center opening up down the street, but their gym isn’t ready yet, so I’m not sure what I can do. I guess I’ll need to stick to the measly thirty pound dumbbells that I have, otherwise I’ll have to figure out a way to do more with bodyweight, either mine or the girls.

I had an interesting call last night. An ETH OG popped in the IA Discord last night asking lots of questions about SAIADao, so I had a half hour conversation with him about what we were doing. This place is amazing. I get to talk to so many interesting people. Going to meet with them in Miami. These are exciting times.

The BTC/ETH markets seem to have actually gone up overnight. I don’t think I could take any more bearishness from CryptoTwitter. So many people calling a bear market it’s ridiculous. I haven’t made any trades, just keeping an eye on my Perp positions, which are still underwater but seem safe from liquidation at this point.

My experiment with Vesper doesn’t seem as lucrative as it did several days ago. The emissions APY has come down to three hundred percent. The borrow rate is down to on hundred as well, but my net is now only one fifth of what I need to make ends week to week. This is going to be a bit harder than I thought.

Well I did it. Yesterday I signed off for the last time and packed my work phone and branded polos up in a box. I’m done. Then I spent a few hours working on this quitting my job post, which got sent out to some seventeen hundred people. Whew.

This spawned a call with an old roommate who I haven’t talked to in a year. They wanted to do some more investing in Bitcoin, and it was good to talk to them.

I also wound up making a huge mistake in taking the kids on a bike ride to the dollar store for ice cream. It was way to hot, Elder moaned and complained the whole way there and back, and we made a huge mess eating our ice cream outside the store. Plus it was rush hour and traffic was really bad. Maybe next time I’ll wait for the weekend.

And it looks like we might finally be able to close the door on COVID here. The gov’nor lifted restrictions Thursday and so we might finally be done with the masks.

Last night was party time. I let Elder play some of Dragon Age: Origins, it was interesting seeing her set up her character and try to get through the introduction. After the rest of the fam went to bed I stayed up too late watching Castlevania. Spent most of this morning recovering, watching TV until lunch, cleaned the house, and puttered around on the computer for a few hours. After I finish writing I’m going to cook some burgers and watch Cruella for popcorn movie night.

The Solana multisignature bug has been worked out. I just needed a missing switch. So we’re ready to form the vault control team with four other people. Once that’s worked out I need to figure out how to build a program that can make trades off of Serum. That’ll be interesting.

Other than that, BTC and ETH continue to range down. CryptoTwitter is a mess. Half of my feed is people calling for a bounce, the rest think we’re in a bear market. I don’t know what to think. Holding my coins to zero, I suppose. Just looking over my reFIREment fund and trying to figure out what moves to make. Some of my C-tranche is only getting 15-20%, so I got to move it. I just don’t really know to where. I’ve got a couple plans, but nothing is really doing anything spectacular. I’m going to have to work harder than I thought to get the yields I was looking for.

I’m also trying to figure out a strategy to take some market neutral positions that I can farm. For one of these positions, I’ll need to take half of my cash, buy and stake an asset with degen-worthy yield, then use my other cash to borrow the same amount of tokens, and sell them. Then I can sell the yield for cash. When that’s no longer sufficient to cover my maintenance fee, I use my staked position to pay back the loan and I’m out. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to work. There are lots of risks, depending on where I stake and where I borrow from, but it might be a good way to earn that income I need to extend my retirement and keep from having to dip into my stablecoins. We’ll see how that works out. I really need to think about that some more.

Well, today is the day, my last day at Zombie, LLC. I don’t even know what to say right now, other than it feels like really bad timing. I don’t really have doubts, per se, but I’m worried about the short term. Bitcoin’s fifty percent drop last night really messed with my plans, so this might not be so much of a retirement so much as a hiatus from work. We’ll see. I went over the reFIREment fund last night to see what my returns were looking like, and it’s not that great. We’ll have a full evaluation after I return from Miami. I should have no problem making it to September, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to justify things much past that unless the market does really well and I’m able to make some real income.

Made my "So long, and thanks for all the fish" goodbye post on the corporate Teams channel today and told them they need to buy bitcoin or they're NGMI. pic.twitter.com/DBYx4Ed1Z8

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

So I wrote a small post as a send off for the home office, and there is a small list of things that need to be done and I am out. My main priority today is writing a broader post for my LinkedIn and Substack. This is really it. I am taking my life into my own hands.

I’m going to keep this short today as I have a lot to do. I think I’ll start with a jog.

I’ve spent the last two days trying to get multisig on Solana working. I scripted everything out to make sure I wasn’t making a stupid mistake, using bash variables, command substitution and even regex to make sure the damn thing worked right. I got really close at one point when I got a new error, but I couldn’t get it. Turns out there might be a bug.

I had also reached out to the Perpetual Finance team, about some issues with their liquidation price calculation. I had spent several hours trying to take the CLI JS code and translate it to something I could stuff in an Excel spreadsheet, but I couldn’t quite figure out if I was doing it right. Just got word from the team there was a bug for that as well.

I’m apparently really good at finding bugs in programs. I think that’s the easy part, but being able to isolate the issue and communicate it to the teams in a way that is helpful is the hard part. Maybe I should pay more attention to bug bounties.

The the Solana bug puts the SAIADao process on hold for the time being, I need to turn my attention to the next, biggest, hardest thing: my resignation announcement and Substack article. I should probably post it earlier in the afternoon, instead of waiting until late afternoon like I usually do. We’ll see.

I’ve started organizing my work board, a Trello board I named personal, but I should probably rename it after my LLC, as that’s what it is. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that I’ve been procrastinating on like domain and certificates renewals, and I also want to migrate this site over to the blockchainman.com domain that I bought long ago.

But first thing on my list after I’m done here today is to workout. I have got to get back in a routine with that. My legs still hurt from two days ago, but my work has been sporadic. I’m pondering joining a fitness center or re-subscribing to Daily Burn so I can start doing some HIIT again, but I think resistance training is going to be the most important thing I can do, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do that without access to a weight room. I told Missus and she said there are a bunch of logs in the backyard, why don’t you go and lift those a bunch of times? Not a bad point, actually.

I do not want to be writing this right now, as I’m currently residing in Hangover City, but I’m forcing myself to do it before I allow myself to do anything else. The markets were up when I checked earlier, so I want to add to my leveraged longs, and I’m behind on stuff for SAIADao, but I’m going to crank this out before I do anything. I guess I’m on vacation from Zombie, LLC this last week. I got the Dell tech swapping the hard drive on a server later today then I’m just about done. Just a couple so long, and thanks for all the fish posts and I AM OUT.

Our quaranteam family came back from Tennessee yesterday afternoon, and the kids couldn’t wait to play. I cooked a pizza for the kids while the adults ate chicken tacos and drank scotch. I may have overdone it a bit.

I did a lot of work on the Solana multisig for the dao, but I’m having problems with the offline signing portion of it. Once I figure that out we should be good to go, but I still need to put the proposal together for the poster purchases. xDAI’s network was all jacked up yesterday. Graph Protocol was having an issue or something, hopefully it’s resolved so I can carry on.

I went through and read some more of last May’s posts. They’re like time capsules, and I think it emphasizes the importance of this blog/journal as a daily exercise. Earlier this week Missus was talking about some things that happened earlier in our marriage, was all do you remember when you did this fucked up thing and we almost got a divorce? and I was like no, thanks for reminding me. So it’s like that but for stuff that I want to remember here. This Hustle and Flow post is interesting, as it reminded me that a year ago I was worried about Zombie going under, and I was trying to figure out a way to double my salary, and here I am a year later quitting my job. Life is weird.

So, future me, if you’re reading this a year or five in the future, you can recall the beautiful day in May of 2021 when you, Missus, Elder, Younger and the cats were happy and content, the last week before you quit your job and embarked off to see what awaited you on the other side of your fear.

Yesterday I basically signed off with Zombie, LLC for the last time. I had one project I wanted to wrap up, a predictive hard drive failure ticket on a RAID array that I had missed months ago. I escalated it to Dell for next day support and signed off. I told my boss that I was done. I would stick around to handle any escalations that our helpdesk threw back at us, but I wasn’t doing any more break/fix work, and I was starting any new projects. Now all I have to do is clean out my file folders and hand over my VM and LastPass export to the team in St. Louis. I’ve got a few things that I need to bring back to bossman and I’m done, and I just want to announce it to the world.

One thing that I can’t wait to turn in is my desk phone, a VOIP unit that sits in my front office. I told Younger that I was getting rid of it and her face lit up. I think, in a way, that phone represents a lot of conflict in this house. If I’m on a call with a client, I can’t physically isolate myself by closing a door since the front living room is effectively my office. And if I’m on the phone and the kids come in, I’m muting the phone to tell them to scram, or yell at them to pipe down. And in the event that they’re being so disruptive that I have to hang up the phone, well, then there’s hell to pay. I’ll be glad to pack the damn thing up and send it back.

I’m not saying that everything’s going to be roses just because I get rid of the phone, but I know it’s going to be a huge improvement in my quality of life, at least for the next few weeks. We’ll see how long my runway lasts. Once I was able to sign off with the Dell dispatcher yesterday I closed my windows and had special time with Younger before lunch, and actually made some good progress with the Solana multisig that I’ll need to write up for SAIADao.

BTC and ETH recovered quite a bit yesterday, and I tentatively added to my longs on Perp.fi, but I’m not really sticking to a plan, and will probably get rekt. The market had a little pullback overnight, some alts are still getting killed, but I haven’t looked at my positions yet this morning. At least I know what I need to do this AM.

I went back and looked at posts from last May. I don’t seem to have anything further back for May, even going back to 2004. Last year this time I was graduating from college and trying to pick up a six-figure job. To think I just turned one down a few weeks ago… hopefully that won’t come back to bite me in the ass. Reading Deep Work last night got me thinking that what I’ve really been looking for is some isolation from interruption, the ability to sit down for a few hours and work on a project with really intense focus. Even after resigning from Zombie, that won’t be automatic. I’ve still got distractions in the form of TradingView, Twitter, and numerous Discord servers that I allow to distract me. And there’s the kids of course.

But still, I was able to make some good progress yesterday with Solana; it was a problem that I’d been trying to figure out for a week or two, and the solution seems to be much simpler than I had been anticipating. I should probably take note of my horoscope or the phase of the moon, y’know, just in case. I think this weekend with my dad really affected me, I caught myself tearing up at one point while writing yesterday, but it set my mind and my motivation, which may have had something to do with it. We’ll see how long it lasts.