July update and goals

July is here! I’m ready to kick some ass this month and get some shit done!

Elder just had her onboarding call with Galileo. She’s going to be doing her first check in in half an hour. She’s going to be doing arts and crafts, Spanish, film making, and two other activities that she picked out. I’ll have to do some hand-holding for the next week or so, but I’m excited for her.

I wound up getting sucked in to an Ethereum auditing group through a friend of mine. I don’t know how much time I’m going to be able to devote to it, but for now I’m just going to check in twice a day until they have something for me to do. I’m not think I’m really qualified to audit solidity contracts for reentrancy and overflow errors, but I’m sure I’ll be able to add value to the group and make a little bit of cash.

I’m continuing to keep an eye on PerpFi. I’m not really automating anything yet; I want to finish the last part of the GraphQL tutorial that I’m working on, and see if I can build the dashboard that I want to monitor funding rates. This week’s payments have been rather low for BTC and ETH, and I think there’s some real opportunity for CREAM funding. It’s over 250%. I want to run some numbers and figure out what type of risk I’d be taking on and if I can engineer any hedging to take advantage of the funding spread.

I’ve missed a day of Rust Exercism work but I want to keep at that; Solana programming is taking a bit of a backseat for the moment. SAIADao is holding for the moment, testing the multisig is almost complete, but I don’t have any real thoughts as to where we go from here. We’re waiting on the GAO for the moment. My guy in Minneapolis messaged me last night and said that the SAFT fell through, so I’ll have a call with him to see if there’s any other projects for us to work on.

I think I have enough cash on hand to make it through the month without any more withdrawals from the reFIREment fund. I’m going to be using the Fold card as much as possible.

My exercise routine is doing well, I’ve been on point this week with running and lifting; I think I’m almost at the point where I might need to up my weights. I need to see if the community center has weights or if I need to join a gym.

I have a project this weekend that I really need to knock off my list — the deck. I need to do a bit of work on it and prep it for staining. The wife will be really happy about that. I’ll have to do all that while fitting in an overnight trip to the mountains and a party on Monday for the holiday. It’ll be tight.

Religion vs. Church

This week the kids have been going to vacation bible school. We’ve never gone to church as a family, so it’s a little weird having the girls come home in the evening singing church songs and trying to memorize bible verses. It’s even weirder that they’re so excited about it.

Missus and I were both raised in the church but drifted away from it after we grew up. We both had our minds blown by a world religion professor in the freshman course we took in college. I took a more Buddhist philosophy to the meaning of life, and started calling myself an atheist after reading a couple Richard Dawkins books. Eventually I corrupted Missus, much to the chagrin of her fundamentalist father.

When I was running for office, I had to tour the churches. I actually had a quite moving moment in one of them, as it was the first time I’d attended a real church service in years. I got caught up in the moment. I had been to a Unitarian church a few times in the previous year, but this was a black church, and it was unlike anything I’d seen in a long time. I remembered the singing from my childhood and the feeling of being a part of something bigger than myself, and it was so powerful that I broke down in tears for several minutes.

I’ve got a copy of Religion for Atheists sitting on my bedside table, unread. I picked it up years ago when I was struggling with this conflict between religion and church. I lost it for a while and have been meaning to pick it back up. I’ve only read the first couple chapters, but it’s remained untouched for some time. The theme of the book is how do non-believers take the things that are good from organized religion, the community, the sense of togetherness, the rituals, and remove them from the baggage of biblical literalism. I think the Unitarians were on the right path here, but the service that I went too seemed a bit hollow, like something was missing. Maybe it was the progressive, political baggage that was subtext to what was going on in the country at the time. I’m not sure.

I started a habit of listening to Dr. Roger Ray’s Progressive Faith sermons on my podcast feed. Ray was trained as a biblical scholar, and is very frank about the historical origins of the bible. He’s not one for magical thinking, and his voice was a very welcome one during the last months of the Trump era. I haven’t listened much since my interest in politics has waned.

During the COVID lockdown we fell in with a very religious family down the street. Trump voting, gun-toting, church-going, military family from Louisiana. Not exactly who we would have picked out of a lineup to be friends with. But the kids became friends, and our families became very tight. I even got D. to start buying bitcoin. A few weeks ago, Younger decided that she wanted to go to church with her best friend, and I really wasn’t going to stop her. So she’s been going for a few weeks, and when vacation bible school came around, I was surprised that Elder wanted to go as well.

So each afternoon this week, I’ve been watching D.’s kids while he brings over the church bus, and then the kids load up and head out for a few hours. The girls are super excited when they get back, talking up how they sing songs on the bus, how there are games and the food is really good. They have some sort of points contest going on, and Elder has been trying to game it, even trying to memorize bible verses.

Now I’m not the type of secular progressive to get all tittered over my kids going to church. Missus said we both went and we turned out alright. Recently I’ve been trying to come up with some family values as part of our family business meetings. All of the constitution templates that I dug up all reference “faith in God” as one of the tenets, and such language is a non-starter to me. Trying to figure out our own values outside of religious dogma is something that I’m struggling to enumerate, if you will.

I stumbled across a meme on Twitter yesterday, it’s a quote from H.L. Mencken. “Morality is doing what is right, now matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.” That’s mainly what’s always bothered me about “religion”. My grandfather used his religion to justify his racism, and it was the bigotry of evangelicals during the 90’s that ultimately turned me off from it forever.

And in a somewhat amusing case of synchronicity, I was reading section in The Sovereign Individual last night describing the role of the church in guiding Europe out of the dark ages. It’s a quote from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown: “the social function of a religion is as independent of its truth or falsity.” The last paragraphs of the chapter go on to interpret the Genesis story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden as describing the change from hunter gatherer societies to agrarian ones. There’s contrast between peaceful gathering societies who enjoy an “life of ease”, and the “paradise lost” of toiling the land, and the violence that ensued as mankind shifted to stationary farms. It’s a very convincing argument.

Now my children have put me in a bit of a moral quandary. I’m more than happy to barter with D. for childcare — it does take a village — I’m a bit more at a loss to figure out what to do here. Missus seems to have no trouble letting the girls go to church with them, but I’m not sure how I feel letting them get on the bus to go off with a bunch of strangers. One time when Elder was little, she’d been going to another church with woman from her daycare, who also babysit from time to time. I remember one day I brought her there at her request, and basically dropped her off. I remember the look on their faces when I left, explaining that I wasn’t going to stay for service. I did feel a bit guilty about it, using them for free babysitting basically.

I feel a similar guilt here, but I’m not sure that it’s warranted. D. seems to genuinely relishing taking the kids, and the kids are enjoying it, and now I feel some sort of obligation. I think a donation is warranted to help cover the cost of the food and activities that the girls have been doing. And I’ll probably get dragged in to a service tomorrow night for kids’ recital or whatever they’ve got planned for their finale. Still, I don’t plan on attending any services.

I’ve been writing this most of the morning. The kids have interrupted me several times, and I’ve been short with them because today I actually had something to write about. They’ve been fighting, and I’ve actually gotten so mad at Elder for being defiant that I’ve wanted to hit her. We’ve been having problems for the last couple days. Yesterday, while enjoying our peaceful afternoon while the kids were away, Missus remarked that we really haven’t been doing a good job as parents recently. Keeping the kids at home all week, making them do chores and letting them watch TV all the time. It’s no wonder that they are super excited about VBS and want to go. I’m not really offering them much since school was out.

Tomorrow is July 1. Elder is starting her GalileoXP summer camp, and I’ll restart daddy pre-K with Younger. Missus wants to have an adventure this weekend, but I promised to stain the deck this weekend, so I’m not sure what will happen. Missus is looking at summer camps, trying to find something for the kids to do to get them out of the house and clear the air a bit. The mood in this house is bipolar, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Just breathe, I suppose, and try to find things for the kids to do.

It’s just so hard trying to balance my desire to do deep work and spend more time with my kids. Maybe I just need to accept that what my kids need is less time with their dad.

Is the bottom in?

I feel a bit optimistic about the markets this week, at least in Ethereum land. Two days ago we broke out of a two week downward range, and this morning we broke one going back to mid-may, starting with the peak at $4300. And we’re above the 200-day moving average. We’ve got several resistance levels up from here, I’m looking for a close above $2900 before I feel really confident. Right now my Perp.Fi position is sitting around 4x with a liquidation price at $1580. I’ll probably maintain it here, using the negative funding to compound my position weekly, perhaps lower my leverage factor a bit. I think it’s safe to keep it here until new ATHs; I’ve still got enough cash in my bags to defend this position if we have another drawdown. I had enough stress dealing with liquidation risk last week. I’ll sit here.

ETHUSD chart

I still think we could range from here for the next month or so. We’ll see if EIP-1556 gets deployed on time, and what happens with the BTC price. Bitcoin has been somewhat anemic here, but on-chain data is really strong and there’s a lot of accumulation going on here. I’ve got two positions open here, 2x longs with liquidation prices at $22k and 18k. I’ll manage these for cash flow while compounding and looking for opportunities on LedgerX’s options or futures markets.

I’m not doing anything else in the market right now. I’ve been thinking about taking a position in PERP, but my main focus is income generation rather than speculation. I just moved $6,000 in USDC to my checking account, which will take care of my expenses through July at least. The historical funding rates on Perp.Fi are only at 75% my previous salary at my current nominal position value, so I’m either going to need the market to pick up 25%, or I’ll need to increase my size. I’ve got a couple ways I can do that. I can liquidate spot positions, harvesting tax losses while I’m at it, and convert that to Perp margin, increasing our decreasing the amount of leverage that I have in my position. A safer, but slower way to build this position is to remove the funding payments, which decrease my leverage and liquidation price, out of my margin, and use them to add additional leverage into my position, maintaining it over time.

I estimate that I have until the end of September to make this work. That’s when student loan payments come due, and I’ll need to make a decision on whether to take a regular job. In the meantime, I’ve got several projects I’m working on, hopefully one of them will work out and allow me to maintain my reFIREment indefinitely.

Daily page

I’ve had a pretty good Monday. I managed to force myself out for a jog this morning, and ran two and a half miles despite some warm temperatures and high humidity. I knocked out a Exercism, took care of the groceries, went to the hardware store and patched some holes the kids knocked in the wall with the doorknob, and started working on tutorials for GraphQL. Then I managed to cook a big pot of spaghetti for dinner. Not bad.

Not one but both the girls decided to hop on the church bus and go to vacation bible school with the neighbors. D. managed to recruit practically the entire neighborhood. Younger has been going with them for several weeks, but I was surprised Elder wanted to go. It’s kind of out of character for her. I suppose her sister told her how much food they get. Hopefully she doesn’t go in there and start refuting scripture and telling everyone that god is something early humans invented to help them understand the world. That’s what I get for buying her a copy of the Sapiens graphic novel, I suppose.

I finally signed Elder up for Galileo. I went ahead and did the two month summer camp. It’s still my intention to pull her out of public school if she takes to it, but I know Missus remains skeptical. Plus the seven grand tuition might be hard to come by if this market doesn’t take off in the next three months. I’ll have student loans coming due in September as well, so things might be pretty tight.

Marketwise, the price is getting near the point where I don’t feel constantly under duress. My BTC position on Perp.Fi is under 2x now, my ETH one below 4x now. I think I’ll wait for a proper breakout above 42k before I start pulling funding or compounding my margin. I did pull my USDC out of ForceDAO and sent it to my bank. That should give me another six weeks of cash. I’m paying off the credit cards and moving everything else over to the Fold card. We’ll see how that goes.

Evening pages

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.

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

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.

Surprise birthday

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.

Preparation day

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.

So you want to buy some crypto?

I had a couple calls earlier this week from a couple friends who want to increase their bitcoin holdings. One is an individual investor, and the second wanted to know how to best purchase as a group. I know this is only anecdote, but I think it goes to show that this latest pullback is being seen as a buying opportunity by many. This discussion will focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum-related assets. I’ll cover the individual case first and build out from there.

Dollar cost averaging

My first friend, R, is a successful professional who has less than one percent of their net worth in bitcoin, which they currently have in a Coinbase account. They want to increase their exposure with a five-figure purchase. Timing is important for R, they know we’re still early from a long-term, but worries that short term price fluctuations might give them a bit of stress. What I am recommending to R is that they open a BlockFi account and implement a dollar cost averaging setup to scale into a position over the next six months.

The benefit to using BlockFi is two-fold. First, USD funds on the platform are currently earning 8% APR, and the interest can be paid in BTC or other cryptocurrencies. Secondly, BlockFi allows recurring trades, which means R can set it and forget it while their fiat is converted to crypto. Six months from now, they can either re-up their cash allocation, or move funds to take advantage of more decentralized, on-chain solutions.

Exchanges

BlockFi, for all its benefits, has a couple drawbacks which make it ill-suited as a primary exchange for power users. It’s not really built for traders, and is only really good for the occasional swap. Also they discourage withdrawals from the platform with only one free withdrawal per month. Additional ones can run as much as thirty dollars. Plus they can take at least one business day to process, so woe to you if you need to move funds on a weekend. So you’ll need to open an account with a full-fledged exchange.

My wife recently asked me which exchanges I use to convert cash to crypto and my response was all of them. Literally. It’s hard to make a recommendation here as a lot depends on individual circumstances, like which tokens you want to trade, how you’re moving funds (wire vs. ACH), and your familiarity with trading interfaces. On the simpler end I’d put Coinbase, Voyager, and Gemini, with Coinbase Pro, Gemini Pro, FTX and Kraken on the other. Realistically, you’ll probably want to open accounts on at least two exchanges, one as a backup.

As a security precaution, you’ll want to make sure you set up two factor authentication on your account. Do not use SMS messaging as your phone’s SIM can be spoofed, use an app like Authy or Google Authenticator instead. And as an extra layer of security, you may also want to set up new email addresses for each exchange account as well. Using different email accounts other than your primary one will protect you should it get compromised.

Self-custody and hardware wallets

While centralized exchanges are the primary fiat on-ramps to the crypto ecosystem, there are custodial risks associated with them, hacks and outages being the primary ones. Most crypto-diehards will no doubt be screaming not your keys, not your coins at me or anyone else who suggests keeping large portions of your funds on BlockFi or any centralized exchange. Self custody is the way, and while there are a number of softwallets available for phones and computers, a hardware wallet is the way to go for significant sums of coin. I recommend a Trezor for most people, but anyone who plans on participating in DeFi, daos, NFTs or whatever else on the Ethereum ecosystem might want to take a look at the Lattice1, which has a large touchscreen for inspecting smart contract calls, as well as a host of other useful features. I don’t recommend Ledger products unless you plan on dealing with Solana, as it’s the only choice currently.

Lattice1 Hardware Wallet

An important note about purchasing hardware wallets: they should only be purchased from the vendor, and never from secondary markets. It’s recommended that you use an alias and a drop box for shipping to prevent your personal details from being exposed. Make sure the anti-tampering seals are intact on all the packaging. And make sure you generate your own private keys, never use any that have been given to you by someone else, and never record them in an electronic form. The Trezor will come with several slips for you to record your seed phrase, and the Lattice1 allows you to store your keys on a password protected smart cards. Either way, make several copies and store them securely in different locations to protect from loss.

Remember, if your device is destroyed or lost and you don’t have your private keys, or if anyone else gains access to them, your funds are lost forever. There’s no password reset button or customer service team you can contact if you forget this very important point.

Institutional accounts

If you’re buying crypto for a business, you’ll want to open an institutional account with an exchange. This could be for your LLC or partnership; I have a couple tied to my checkbook IRA account. You’ll need articles of incorporation as well as certificates of good standing from whatever jurisdiction that you’re registered in. You’ll also need to complete KYC for any authorized members of the entity that will have access to the account.

Now you’ve really got two ways you can go here if you are a corporation or business that wants to get into crypto. A lot of the big hedge funds rely on custodial accounts for their holdings, as dealing with self-custody is too much of a hassle for them. One of the most popular custodial firms is Coinbase, but I don’t have experience here to tell you much more. I can tell you that many of the crypto IRA products out there are basically built on top of Coinbase Custody, which charges an annual custodial fee as well as what I consider relatively high trading fees. You’ll also be limited to the assets that Coinbase has available. There are other custodial firms available, but again, I have no experience to speak of here.

Multisigs

This section is geared toward groups of people, whether they’re part of a formal corporate entity, or even an informal one. I’ll describe a couple ways that assets can be managed in a trustless way, that is, how a group can share management of assets, without allowing any one individual to have complete control of them.

The first, and most common is called a multi-signature wallet, or multisig for short. It’s a wallet in which a certain number of owners are required to sign off on a transaction before it can be approved, commonly referred to as m of n schemes, where n is the number of private keys associated with the address, and m is the number required for a valid transaction. These are most commonly configured as 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 setups, although you can have 2 of 2 or even 8 of 8 if you wanted to. There are a number of firms that provide bitcoin-specific multisig services, and it can also be configured via a Trezor hardware wallet and the Electrum desktop application.

There are no hardware based multisig solutions for Ethereum, although on-chain smart contract solutions do exist. The most popular is Gnosis Safe. With Gnosis, an on chain vault is created, and the m of n scheme and owners are specified. ERC20 tokens and NFTs can be sent to the vault address, and Gnosis has several plugins that allows the vault to interact with a variety of apps, such as Uniswap or OpenSea. Any owner can propose a transaction, and once the requisite number of owners have approved it it can be transacted on the Ethereum network. Many of the top defi projects on Ethereum use Gnosis vaults to manage their treasuries, and it’s a relatively trivial operation for less technical owners to approve transactions.

Other on-chain solutions

Gnosis is probably the most robust solution for a formal or informal group that is comfortable with a centralized, custodial solution. There are two others I’ll mention that might be more suited for other applications or groups, one that is non-custodial, and another that is decentralized.

The first is called Set Protocol. A Set is akin to a mutual fund, and can be created with anywhere between one and twenty assets within it. Users can issue Set tokens by providing assets to the Set, meaning that the value of each token is backed by the assets within the Set itself. They can’t be created out of thin air. The Set manager can perform a number of operations with these set assets, such as trading them for other tokens or providing them to a number of DeFi protocols. These actions are somewhat limited compared to what you can do with a Gnosis vault. While the manager does not have direct access to the funds in the Set, there are a couple ways that a manager can potentially exploit funds in the set, whether through changing the management fee or trading into a illiquid shitcoin, the manager address can be assigned to a Gnosis multisig for additional security. We used Set Protocol for the Homebrew.Finance $MUG NTF Fund.

The last one I’ll mention is DaoHaus, which is used to manage decentralized autonomous organizations, or daos. Daos are basically on-chain shareholder corporations, and are useful if you want to create a trustless organization. Users can deposit into the dao in exchange for voting shares or loot, both of which grant proportional ownership of funds in the dao’s bank. Many of the popular daos on DaoHaus are venture funds or non-profit/open source grant foundations. Users can create funding proposals, the membership votes, and funds are distributed accordingly. Managing a DaoHaus can get a bit complicated, but it can also be combined with a Gnosis safe to provide more accountability. Additional development on DaoHaus minions, or associated smart contracts, continues to add more functionality to the system. We are using DaoHaus to manage membership in SAIADao.

Wrapping up

One quick note about on-chain Ethereum solutions such as Gnosis and so forth: gas fees. Congestion on the Ethereum network lead to some pretty high transaction fees over the last few months. It cost me over $500 to create the $MUG Set, back in March, with trades costing over $150 each. Creating a Gnosis safe cost me over a hundred dollars earlier this year after gas had come down, but the vault overhead does add some overhead to transactions. I wouldn’t recommend them unless you’re dealing with several thousand dollars worth of funds. Thankfully, the release of other Ethereum-compatible sidechains such as Polygon and xDAI are making relieving some of this pressure, although a full discussion of this will need to wait for another day.

Hopefully this article is helpful for others who are looking to increase their exposure to Bitcoin or Ethereum-related assets.

Evening pages

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.

Redemption day

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.