Blockchain Man

Yesterday was pretty good. It was sprint retrospective at Star Atlas, and the dev team got to present the mini-game to Mike Wagner, and then he was able to confirm the minigame date to the general public. ATLAS is up over ten points today.

I wrote a small script this morning to make my FTX purchases easier. I was testing in prod and made a couple mistakes, but it’s working now, I just need to run it once a day to stack BTC, ETH and SOL.

Things are going to be a bit more difficult on-chain. I worked on getting Serum to work via a script, but had some issues trying to import my secret keys into the script. Anchor makes it a bit easier to import the json file directly, so I think I’m going to refactor it later. My arbitrage bot is picking up some good deals and I think there’s some money to be made there if I can automate it.

My friend T. came over today to help me cut down the tree in the front yard. He used to work for a tree cutting service, and we got things knocked down and cleaned up rather quickly. I was pleasantly surprised that we got it taken care of so quickly. We had a big lunch and got to hang out a bit.

I took the girls out to get haircuts earlier this evening. Elder is throwing a fit because the stylist — following my instructions — cut off too much of her hair. She’s calmed down now, but I’m pretty sure she stayed up too late in her room watching YT on her school tablet.

I’m pretty tired myself, although I’m not quite sure why. I went to bed at a decent hour and got a pretty decent sleep. Maybe it’s yesterday’s workout coupled with today’s activity. I don’t know.

Going to watch a show with the kids, put them to bed early, then play some video games. I’ve been rather obsessed with X4 lately, but I might put it away tonight and play DSP or Cyperpunk.

Yesterday flowed pretty well. I got my morning routine done and got to work. The Club struck again, unleashing another leak of the wave five ship drops. They were watching the pubkey that the team uses for minting the ships, and must have got some sort of alert when the new wave was created. The NFT metadata contains the ship components as well as the drop date and prices, so they used all that information to put out a video with the information.

Now that the information is out there I’m effectively cleared to speak on it. I’m not trying to test my luck or anything and hype things too much outside of official channels, but at least I can do certain things without feeling like I’m taking advantage over other players.

I don’t have my notes in front of me, but we know there will be around 150 of the Pearce C11’s minted. The first batch will be released on USDC and ATLAS markets simultaneously, and will be about $81,000. The second batch will be released one minute later for just under $100,000.

SAIAdao will have one. I started liquidating cash yesterday, pulling our ATLAS LP and initiating a DCA protocol over the next six days. That should give us enough to purchase the C11 and leave us with more to try and scalp some of the smaller ships. We’ll see how things play out on Tuesday.

I’m getting up to speed quickly at work. I’ve got my local environment setup and am helping hunt bugs in the minigame on devnet.

I’m still buying more crypto for myself. I figured out I can buy about fifty bucks a day of BTC, ETH, and SOL, and how much I can spend on ATLAS, POLIS, and IN as well. I think I summed it up properly so that I’ll be able to get paid, and re-up my exchange account to keep it going. I’ll need to write a script to keep it going.

Also yesterday, Santa visited our neighbor’s house. There’s an older couple that lives there, and for the past forty-three years they’ve have a family friend dress up and visit them. So they invited us and some other neighbors over. We exchanged some gifts, and the kids go to sit on Santa’s lap. It was cute.

I guess my most important thing today is to buy some crypto, then check in with work. I have an important task that I want to see if I have approval for. Time to go.

The week is going well. The cold has settled in, meaning I’ve added scraping the car windshield of frost to my morning schedule. Younger’s school bus has been running late — the school system has been struggling to keep drivers — and it makes no sense to stand outside in thirty degree weather when it’s less than a mile from the school. Missus is work from home today.

We decided, given my new position, that we could hire back the housekeepers that we let go following the start of the pandemic. Today is their first day back, and Missus has spent the last week decluttering the house and cleaning things up. We almost don’t need to them to clean, it’s just the threat of them coming which is enough to trigger Missus’s OCD and get the job done.

I kid, they’ll do the sweeping and mopping and scrubbing in all the corners that we’ve missed.

So far I’ve managed a modicum of self control and haven’t gone crazy with the spending. I did finally buy a Discord Nitro subscription after I was trying to send a PDF to someone and it was too large, but that’s the only thing I’ve done. I’ve got too much business to handle, I can’t afford to be distracted by a bunch of BS purchases.

Christmas gifts are piling up around the house. I have yet to wrap anything, so I’ve been stacking Amazon packages in my closet and under my desk.

I’ve got a small arbitrage bot running that is tracking Star Atlas markets. It’s turning up very small opportunities, a few cents here and there. There was one for seventy cents yesterday. It’s too much trouble for me to have to buy, settle, sell, settle and then make the ATLAS/USDC swap at the end of it all. I may give a crack at writing a Serum script that will do the job, but it’s not like I don’t have other things to do.

The SA dev team gave the go-ahead for the minigame release on the 16th. Early yesterday morning, the team updated the Google bucket with a bunch of ship images, and The Club was watching it and had a video out a few hours later with all of the info. There was a bit of panic internally as some people suspected a leak, but their monitoring was just better than the team’s opsec. All is fair in this game…

I finally started looking at the team’s code, getting the new portal up so I can keep up with the rest of the changes the dev team are doing. There’s a lot to unpack, tons of scripts, and I’m looking through those to compare to what I’ve been doing. It’s nice to be somewhere with people who are smarter than me. It keeps my hubris down and motivates me to learn.

My priorities for today include stacking some sats. BTC was below $50k and I want to load up. I’m trying to maintain a pace that won’t run my reserves dry before my first paycheck, but I’m running a bit hot. I really need to focus on the CPA stuff and get that turned in or else I’m going to be in a world of hurt later on.

There’s a lot to do today.

I airdropped SAIA tokens to dao members on devnet. I have some testing to do to make sure we can use a realm governance as a multisig.

I worked on a project plan for work yesterday, a task list on how we’re going to bridge Ethereum based Rebirth assets over to player’s Solana wallets. I’m just waiting on approval to proceed with the plan. Some of the stuff for the community managers I can start working on now, I want it to be smooth like butter.

I watched a new episode of Mythic Quest yesterday, which I’ll refer to as the Dead Quiet Death episode. It’s one of the most absolute perfect episodes of television that I’ve ever watched. It was so good that I watched it again last night with Missus. Then we worked backward to the Girls Can Code episode.

I’ve been playing OGame again, this time with some co-workers. I think it’s a pretty good inspiration for what the Star Atlas mini-game will be like. I’ve been playing X4 for the same reason. It’s a pretty decent benchmark for where we are headed. It’s a decent universe simulator, although it’s buggy as hell and it’s lacking some gameplay features that a proper MMO will need.

We’re all running behind here at the house. I was a bad influence on Missus last night, so she’s calling out. I already brought Elder in, but Younger slept in as well and she’s already two hours late for school. Looks like I’m going to be stuck bringing her in, I doubt Missus is moving her butt yet.

Yesterday was interesting. I’ve been getting a slew of DMs on Discord lately, I usually keep my DMs open because I want people to be able to reach out to me, but yesterday was just scam after scam after scam. I did get one person who thanked me for my half-assed Solana /Anchor vids that I did two of. I feel obligated to do more of them; I’m way behind on that.

I did some work on the SAIAdao token distribution stuff. Distribution-tools is a Python lib that does the trick, but Metaplex has recently released their Candy Machine, which uses Merkle trees to allow users to claim tokens, instead of putting the onus on the project. Star Atlas is getting ready to drop supply tokens as part of the mini-game launch, and estimates are somewhere around $80,000 worth of Solana will be needed to do that. I’m working on an alternate implementation that might negate that, and I think it would be a big win if I can get that pushed out.

I’m also trying to build a solution for people who have Rebirth assets on OpenSea. They need to be brought over to Solana, but the wormhole only works for ERC20 tokens, not the ERC721s or whatever standard they wound up using. Again, the solution that was floated required users to swap the NFT for a token, then use the wormhole. This would require at least two transactions and might wind up costing more in gas than the actual assets themselves. Additional rewards were mentioned as an incentive, but I have another alternative that might reduce that to a simple signing transaction. I know that it can be done, but not how to do it.

I’ve been doing a bit of online window shopping. I’ve bought pretty much everything for family; I’ve still got to get Missus’s new phone. But now I’m loading up my wish list with a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff for myself. My old work laptop is getting retired. To do that I need a docking station for this Alienware, and I’m probably going to upgrade my monitors, two 22″ Samsungs from 2008. I was looking at curved monitors. The thirty inch models are a downgrade from what I have, but the forty inch ones are bigger than the TV I have. What to do….

I’ve got a lot going on, that is to put it lightly. I’m planning a trip home for the holiday, and we’re talking about at least twenty hours in the car with the kids, so I’m trying to figure out how to break it up.

I’ve got a new CPA that I’m working with, and I need to get stuff to them so they can give me an estimate for tax prep.

So much to do. Time to get to it.

It’s going to be a busy day: SAIAdao update is due, and I’m really behind on getting devnet tokens out to people. There’s a lot going on with the Atlas team that I want to help with, but SAIA really needs to take priority until I figure something out.

I’ve also got to get started on my taxes. I’m working with a new CPA, and I’ve got a few days to get some information together so that he can give me an estimate.

I’m getting a late start to the day, stayed up a bit late last night. Yesterday we went to get the girls COVID shots, got Mexican on the way back and a bottle of Monkey Shoulder. It’s almost empty. Was hanging out with couple dudes from the dev team, checking out OGame and X4 as inspiration. I dicked off enough last night so it’s time to get to it.

There’s so much going on, and the possibilities are endless.

I did a bunch of Xmas shopping yesterday. Bought mittens for the kids down the street. Elder got stuff for all her friends and spent almost all of the give money that she had set aside. I’m proud of her. I just need to help Younger do the same and then buy the last of the presents for Missus. An iPhone is going to be expensive, and let’s be real, I’m probably going to get a new one for myself as well. I didn’t even want one, but after seeing what the new ones can do with face rigging software, I want.

I really need to focus. Let’s see what I can get done.

Yesterday was a really good day.

Missus was out of town, but I managed to have a nice family day with the girls, and my dad, who came by mid-morning. My friend, C., purchased a couple of bitcoin miners on Alibaba a few weeks ago, and needed some electrical help getting them set up. My dad is an electrical engineer, and C. wanted to take out a couple of floorboard heaters in his mother in law’s room and replace them with one of the Antminers. So we loaded up the kids and headed over around lunchtime.

My dad and C. worked on the electrical stuff while I let the girls get on their screens. Then I discovered that C. had every Oculus rift made. Now I’ve got the original CV1, but have never used the Touch, and my CV1 has been locked up in the closet ever since I stopped doing sim-racing a few years ago. The kids have never used it. Hell, Missus has never used it either, but anyways. I broke out C.’s Quest with the Touch controllers and was really amazed and the quality. It seemed a lot better than what I remembered, and the Touch integration brought it to a whole new level. Then I let the girls use it.

Elder was blown away. I let her play around with it, and put a skydiving video on for Younger. I don’t really know how much she was into it. The headset didn’t fit her quite right so I’m not sure she enjoyed it.

One of the reasons that I haven’t let the kids use my Oculus already is that I understand that the effects of VR on their brains is even more pronounced than on an adult. I’ve heard that they have a difficult time distinguishing VR from actual reality. So I’ve been hesitant to let them use it. It’s certainly something that I would have to monitor, and one of the problems with the standalone Quest units is that I can’t see what they’re seeing.

After we got the miner running, we started heading back home, and stopped at a park. My dad sat in the car while the kids climbed hills and played on the playground. Younger is getting really good at monkey bars.

On the way home, Younger had an accident. We had to stop at three places before we found a bathroom that she could use, and by that time it was a bit too late, so I cleaned her up as best I could, bought them hotdogs and chips for dinner, and an ice cream dessert, and headed the rest of the way home.

Yesterday we figured out that Elder is two years past the requirement for wearing a booster seat, so we let her throw that in the trunk. I used the opportunity to give her more responsibility and told her that she’s now a babysitter in training, and that I was going to supervise her while she ‘sat’ for her sister. And that’s how I managed to get her to put her sister to bed without any help from me. It’s quite remarkable, and I feel like I’ve levelled up my parenting skills considerably.

Missus got home last night, late, and we spent the day out at a kids event at the local nature museum. They were doing a vaccination drive, so I got my booster and the kids got their first dose. We stopped for Mexican food on the way home and now the girls are all watching TV.

I also spent some time last night playing video games, all in the name of work research of course. More on that another time though.

It is going to be a very busy weekend, oh my. Action packed.

I successfully made it through Friday night, didn’t drink, and went to bed before midnight, so this morning I’m feeling well. My brain was a bit too active for meditation this morning. It went fast, but I was not focused at all, couldn’t help thinking about work and all the things I want to get done.

The main takeaway here is that there’s too much for me to do. I don’t see how I’m going to get even half of what I want to do done.

I’ve got the girls today while Missus is out of town till late tonight. My dad is coming by later and we’re going to visit my friend who is trying to setup some BTC miners and needs my dad’s help with the electrical work. I’ll take the kids out to lunch and let them have lollipops and tablets while we’re there, hanging out.

Bitcoin has crashed below 50k this morning, I want to hop off here and pick up a couple hundred dollars on FTX. Will buy BTC, ETH, SOL, and will be picking up ATLAS and POLIS as well, perhaps some more IN.

The Star Atlas mini-game will officially be launching on December 16th, barring any word from the auditors. So my head is aflame with that right now. Matter of fact, I need to get off right now and check prices on things, because it is time to shop!

I’m still waking up. Just dropped Younger off at the bus stop and waiting on Elder to get ready so I can take her to Momo’s. Skipping meditation till after I get back otherwise I’ll just be killing time, and I don’t have time to waste today. Missus heads out of town for a flight in a few hours and won’t get back till late tomorrow, so it’s just me and the girls for the next thirty-six hours or so.

Day two at Star Atlas was fantastic. The team is great, I spent most of the day pouring over materials. I feel like — nay, I have been — given clearance to a top secret project that I’ve been speculating over for several months. It’s fantastic. It’s just ridiculous that I’m getting paid to do something this fun.

I went on a crypto shopping spree yesterday. I ran up on some FTX limits, so I didn’t do quite what I wanted to, but I did do the first of what should be a couple purchases.

Bought some $BTC, $ETH, $SOL, $ATLAS, $POLIS, and bonded some $IN/USDC.

Anything I'm forgetting?

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) December 2, 2021

I did some calculations on how much Invictus I’d need to match my current and former salary. Nine-grand of $IN should provide the same daily income as my last job. That’s $100/day for the next 90 days if I DCA. I’ll probably do that.

The more I learn about the minigame the more I’m strategizing. Smaller ships will require more replenishment, but it should be simple enough to make a script or contract that can automate it. Should be pretty simple for this early v0.1 of it.

I’m just figuring out who everyone is right now and what’s going on. There’s no pressure on me to deliver, but I’ve already picked up a couple task that I feel are important and can’t wait.

It’s going to be real hard not to talk about this stuff all the time…

Elder is almost ready, from the sounds of it. I need to pick up her math lesson before we go. She’s been having issues with multiplication, and still hasn’t internalized the table, nor does it seem that she understands the rules and patterns that are inherent to math. We got in a yelling match last night, so I wanted to spend a few minutes this morning finishing it up with her. Trying to teach a nine-year old the commutative property of multiplication. 12 x 9 = (10 x 9) + (2 x 9)

Well, I pulled some strings and yesterday was my first day at Star Atlas. I was told that I would be starting on the 16th because of payroll, but since yesterday was the first of the month I got bossmang to rush it and I am in like Flynn.

Oh, the things I’ve seen already. Ship renders, craft tables, Figma mockups, I haven’t even looked at the code yet. Oh my god. I’m still feeling my way around, getting access to different things, and trying to put my personal affairs in order. Younger is going to after-school care, and I moved the last tranche of reFIREment funds into FTX yesterday. A quarter is going to the house account, another quarter to BlockFi, and the other half is going to Solana. I’m thinking I’ll start DCA’ing SOL, maybe some Invictus, not sure what else. I am probably going to buy a large ship as well, start accumulating ATLAS/POLIS.

If you’d seen what I’ve seen…

The mood between Missus and I has been pretty playful lately. We’ve been joking about being a “kept woman” now, like when is she going to be able to quit her job and spend her time making me coffee and doing other wifely duties. It’s been a good couple of days, except for the kids.

Elder has been a bundle of raw nerves lately. I got a note from her teacher about her behavior. We confronted her about it yesterday after dinner and she started crying. Then she cried again when trying to do her math homework. She obviously stayed up past her bedtime watching YouTube on her tablet after she told me she was going to bed. Sneaky kid. Missus managed to put her down and she seemed in a much better mood this morning. Knock on wood.

I feel a shopping spree coming on. I’ve already bought Elder’s presents but I’m about to buy gifts for the rest of the fam. I think I’m getting Missus a new phone, she’s way overdue. I’m in the mood to clear out everyone’s wish lists this year. I’m being silly, but I am probably going to be upgrading a lot of stuff for myself come New Years. My current dev laptop situation needs to change, it keeps locking up on me, but I’m hesitant to reformat it. And my Alienware laptop doesn’t connect to the docking station or my dual monitors, and I can’t downgrade that. So there’s that, plus the gaming machine upstairs that could use a GPU and RAM upgrade. And I want to get some fitness stuff.

I want to get a Whoop fitness tracker, and I need heavier weights, so I was thinking about those fancy adjustable barbells. If I do that I’ll probably convert the garage to a gym. No more of this working out in the living room.

And the house repairs: the garage doors, the crawlspace, the windows, all the little stuff that needs patching and repairing. There’s a lot to do.

I can’t wait.