Fifty-two thousand

Today was a exciting, I felt full of energy. We got the Homebrew.Finance NFT TokenSet launched yesterday, and spent a good deal of time trying to get the word out about that. So far it doesn’t appear that there’s been any interest in it from anyone other than myself, but we’ve got another day before we start deploying funds to it.

The markets were up again today, especially my cryptoequities. The mining plays were up about 20-40%, so just over nine percent overall. I’m going to be more aggressive about scaling out of Grayscale, since they mirror the BTC price, and the rest of my holdings are outperforming. It’s crazy. My options plays aren’t really working out for me, cause the stocks keep outperforming my calls and I have to keep rolling them up. I’m going to have to figure out a different way to play this game.

I didn’t get a lot done at work today, all said. Did some grocery shopping and the neighbors came over early in the afternoon. It was so cold outside we tried to start a fire. I wound up chopping down a dead tree in no-mans land and tried to cut it up with an axe to burn, but didn’t quite get through the thickest part of the trunk. Good exercise though.

I feel like I should have more to talk about, but the day was a bit of a blur. Markets were bullish as hell and I spent most of the day watching price action. Not the best use of my time, I’ll admit. My crypto portfolio has been pretty flat. So much of it is locked up in Badger pools, I need to start pulling funds out of the pools. Hopefully BTC will run enough that my IL will come back down and I can come out even. I’d even be glad for Badger to come down a bit more if it meant that I’d wind up holding more. I’m sure it’s got more to go.

Things are looking really good right now. Bitcoin is at all time highs. $100k feels inevitable. I just need not trade myself out of position. This year is going to be incredible.

One more round of emails with Kraken today and we should have our business account set up. Finally. Hopefully this CSR doesn’t give me more crap about the paperwork.

In all, a great day. Life is good.

Fifty thousand

If only for a moment

Things are moving so well right now.

BTC tapped $50k for a bit last night before dipping and spending most of the day ranging. We just had the highest daily close ever, and news everywhere is so good, even nocoiners are acknowledging that we could 2x from here. This exchange was pretty amazing:

My brokerage IRA hit another round six-figure number before pulling back today. Apparently there’s a short report on $EH that dumped it 50%. I’ll have to look into it but first glance seems bullshit. I considered selling some $RIOT calls today but too nervous to even put out a three day contract at this point. Seems insane that I can make fifteen hundred dollars for a Friday expiry on forty thousand worth of stock, I’m just sad that I’ve been missing out on it all this time.

A tweet from Brian Roemmele drew my attention to an OTC stock called Bitcoin Services $BTSC. There’s absolutely no information on it other than a sketchy website that doesn’t mention anything other than mining and programming services. So of course I threw two grand at it after I sold some GBTC.

I wrote up a proposal for the Homebrew.Finance NFT Index TokenSet, which we’re calling $MUG. Collectible mugs get it? I actually got half an ETH from one of the SetProtocol founders to deploy it, and sent the transaction out last night. Didn’t put enough gas on it, so it hasn’t gone through, so I’m going to up it tonight after writing and hope to squeeze it through overnight. I can’t wait to get started with it. I think it might have huge opportunity. I learned a lot about the issuance challenges, so we’ll have to follow this liquidation schedule to allow investors in and out. I do have an idea on how to fix this problem that involves API3, and I’m trying to bring the two teams together to make it happen. So fun.

I sent the last of my paperwork into Kraken today to get my approval on the LLC account. Still no word from Gemini. And my brokerage is being super slow to get my funds wired out. It’s ridiculous. My original plan to submit a wire a day isn’t going to work, it’s too much hassle. But I don’t want to be exposed to cash for two weeks or whatever while I move funds around, so I’ll just have to do like five percent of my portfolio at a time. That’s still a lot of money. It’s kinda hard to believe that I’m doing all this. It seems nuts that I’m planning on putting almost all of my life savings on a seventy dollar piece of electronics, but here we are.

So I’m considering dropping three-fifty on this Lattice1 hardware wallet. It’s a step up from my current hardware wallet, which I can barely read. I’m not sure yet, but it looks neat as hell. I’ll either expense for business or buy it for the IRA. Not sure yet, I’ll worry about it after I have funds in Kraken. I’m definitely going to need something more secure if Homebrew does anything.

And I also got a call lined up with a potential product manager position related to crypto/fintech. It’s exciting, but it’s got me wondering if I can really afford to stay on with my current job like I had promised. I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with someone today because they had the wrong charger for their company laptop, and it was the perfect example of the stuff I’m not trying to deal with anymore. We’ll see how it goes, it seems like the opportunities are coming from all around.

A day off

The last couple days have been pretty hectic, I don’t even know where to start. Yesterday we let the girls throw a Valentine’s Day party for their friends, and I worked on Ethereum contract stuff. I’ve actually got a separate post for that stuff that I’ll publish when I’m done. The girls pretty much ate themselves sick. Missus laid out some presents for them, including face masks with their names on them, as well as a box of chocolate that they ate for breakfast. I’m pretty sure they’re diabetic now.

I’ve been getting some video game time in. I finished OxenFree a few days ago. It was nice, and except for a bit of dialogue about “magic brownies”, I think it’s something that Elder can play and enjoy. I also picked up The Outer Wilds and For the King on Saturday night, and stayed up late playing those. Wilds is fascinating, a puzzle game based on a time loop. You’re basically exploring a small solar system, trying to progress in the roughly twenty minutes or so from the beginning of the game until the system’s star goes supernova. It’s got a great story and the environments are very well crafted. I can’t wait to go back it. For the King is a rouge-like turn based game, sort of like the exploration and battle portions of Civilization crossed with the battle mechanics of Final Fantasy. Not quite what I was expecting, but it seems that the game might take a long time to play, and I can’t imagine playing it coop online.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time on Saturday doing taxes. I gave up trying to track my cryptocurrency holdings on CoinTracking. It’s not smart enough to know when I’m withdrawing from one exchange to one of my wallets and back again. It’s a mess. So after a bit of research I found CoinTracker.io. It’s backed by Coinbase and it’s pretty slick. It does the matching, and is much better with cost basis. CoinTracking was showing me a seven thousand dollar capital gain for 2020, whereas CoinTracker has it more accurately, only a couple hundred bucks. Tracker can monitor my exchanges via API, my on chain Ethereum balances, and I even uploaded my BTC wallet xpubs so I could track transfers between my wallets and BlockFi accounts. It’s real slick. They’ve still got some work to do with tracking DeFi deposits and staking rewards, but it’s clear what I’ll be using to do my taxes this year and next.

Progress on the SDIRA continues. It’s taking a lot longer to move my funds from TDAmeritrade, and it actually took about an hour on the phone to get through to them and clear up a transfer. I’ve got my bank account opened, with the first funds there now, and I have a couple of corporate account applications out for Kraken and Gemini. Kraken responded yesterday for some additional KYC docs, so they may win my business. It sucks though, since they don’t do ACH transfers, which means that I’ll have to do wires for everything. We’ll see. I’ll have a full write up on that after I have the first coins in my wallet.

Yesterday I had the idea to create a broad-based TokenSet based on NFT platform tokens. I actually had some interest on Twitter, and I spent most of the day working testing the Set creation process on Kovan. I’ve been documenting the steps and will have a full post soon. I did actually logon to Decentraland for a bit yesterday and take a look around. There weren’t a lot of people there, but the environment was pretty interesting. I’m going to create an account for Elder and let her check it out, and see if she has any interest in building out some scenes. I figure there’s a way for her to start making her own money building stuff, and maybe the Decentraland builder will be easier for her to figure out than Roblox or Blender.

Today I took the day off, and promised the kids lots of special time. It’s been raining for days, so we won’t be spending any time outside today cause the ground is heavily saturated. We’ve been stuck inside for days, and all of us have been off in our own little worlds, staring at our own screens. Elder and Younger have been feeling neglected as I’ve been spending almost all my time on the computer or doing house chores. I’ve got to remember to carve out these little periods of time for them, even if all they want to do during our special time is wrestle and beat me up.

Costa Rica dreaming

I finally got a bank account setup for the LLC today, and put out the first application for an institutional crypto account with Gemini. More paperwork to fill out. I also rolled my covered calls on $MARA, up from $40 to $55, and out from June to September. This was the only way I could do it without paying the premium back at a loss. We’ll see how long I can kick this can down the road. More on that another day.

Having a checkbook control IRA means I can buy real estate, and the tweet above got me thinking about Costa Rica again. I’ve been telling myself that if everything goes well this year, with bitcoin and with vaccines, I want to get our passports updated and take a trip to Costa Rica. So I spent some time looking into it today.

They have several ways to gain residency. The most relevant to me is what they call inversionista, which requires a $50,000 investment in tourism, or $100,000 investment in reforestation. After two years of this I can apply for permanent residency, assuming I spend half the year in CR. There’s also a way to do if if one deposits $60,000 cash in a qualifying CR bank. Seems easy enough.

I even started looking at land for sale, since I can technically purchase it through my IRA, so long as it isn’t used for personal use. And who wouldn’t want to live here?

I showed this vid to the whole fam earlier and they go really excited. I’m really looking forward to getting my COVID vaccine and taking a trip this year. With the last three years of bear market, plus the last year of pandemic, I think we’re about overdue!

Tough times make strong kids

There seems to be a direct correlation between market performance and my productivity. Days like yesterday, with big news and big gains, distract me from doing what I’m supposed to do, and I wind up wasting most of the day staring at charts. Days like today, when my portfolio is down, I can actually tuck my head down and get some work done.

I managed to get a bank account today for the SDIRA today. I’ll should have confirmation tomorrow when I get the account numbers, then I’ll be able to start moving forward with my plans. First the exchange account, and then it’s time for the real fun to begin.

I actually managed to spend some time trying to prepare for the SetProtocol deployment. I’m still a long ways away from being able to call myself a Solidity developer, by any stretch of the imagination, so it’s pretty challenging for me to figure out how to do this. I want to interact with the contracts and try to deploy things on Ropsten testnet, but I really have no idea what I’m doing. I took a good look at the SetProtocol contracts so that I could deploy them in a dev environment, but they way they’re setup is a little beyond what I’m able to understand. I got a lot of work to do.

Of course, I could just deploy the set on mainnet using the GUI, but I still have lots of questions about how the operation will work. The Set team seems to have neglected the documentation at the expense of development — no suprise there — so I’ll have to let the code speak for itself. It just takes longer, but I’m sure it will ultimately prove useful.

Things around the house have been up and down. Elder is dealing with a chronic illness, and she’s been extremely sensitive about it. Wait, let me be clear, she’s been extremely sensitive about everything. Especially the amount of attention her sister gets from me. We try to have a bit of “special time” every day, fifteen minutes when the girls get to decide what we do. Usually they just want to wrestle me, or jump on the trampoline. It’s fine, but gets old when that’s all they want to do. I’ve started giving Younger her time when her big sister is in class, and I’ve been playing card or board games with Elder when her younger sister is in bed asleep. It’s worked pretty good the past week or so.

Still, it is so hard to keep up with them. I keep telling myself that I’m doing the things I’m doing to make sure that they have a secure future. They’ll understand money in a way that I didn’t figure out until my late twenties, and they’ll start out with enough bitcoin when they’re of age that they’ll never have to work a traditional job a day in their lives. Yet, all I hear is that I only let them watch two TV shows after dinner, or that Missus got to eat Lucky Charms every day of her entire childhood and turned out fine, or that I didn’t have to do my laundry when I was eight. Whatever.

Elder is especially good at rattling off a litany of grievances against me like the ones above, and then gets into the injustice of inequality between her and her sister, who apparently doesn’t pull her weight around here. I tell Elder that her sister is half her age, and that Elder doesn’t even remember what her life was like then, so she has no basis to stand on. It doesn’t matter. She’s bored, she never has any fun, I never want to spend time with her like I do with her sister.

I lost my temper tonight, after hearing this argument for the nth time again. I told her that I’m sorry that her life is so difficult. That I’m not trying to raise an exact copy of myself or my wife. I’m not raising her the same way we were raised because we don’t want her to turn out the same way we did. That we don’t live in the same world that I was raised in, so she’s not going to have the same life. That I’m sorry that her grandparents and those came before wrecked the world and were selfish and that’s why she’s gonna have to clean up after all of us. I was speaking of her generation, of course, but it shut her up from talking back for a breath or two so I kept going, and things escalated a bit until Missus came in to take over and calm her down.

It’s frustrating, realizing in real-time all the ways that you’re failing your kids and fucking them up for life. It’s the human condition, I suppose. I remember reading research in various parenting books over the year that said that parents actually have little control over how their kids turn out, that most of their personality and habits comes from their peer groups and so forth. I wonder how much of that holds up in this current COVID world. It’s the whole argument behind homeschooling, I suppose. We’ve all taken on a larger responsibility for the neuroses that we pass on, I suppose.

I’ve been reading through The Fourth Turning, slowly. It seems very repetitive, but I can’t stop thinking about it, a lot of people in my Twitter feed seem to take for granted that we’re living in a crisis phase. To use it’s nomenclature, I’m a very late Gen-X nomad, but I’m not quite sure what it all means if it’s accurate. It seems like a bit of a generational horoscope, to be honest, but I’m looking for the flaw in it beyond selective generalizations. I’m not sure I can dismiss it. The Trump presidency does seem like the symptom of a crisis, and I know that climate change is only going to make things worse in the coming years. Bitcoin, COVID and the economic situation does strengthen the case, but doesn’t every generation think it’s got it the same? To some religions, the world has always been ending. We are in the midst off a hundred-year pandemic, and the Spanish Flu was followed by WWI and the great depression. So we probably are due for another one.

Hopefully, this too shall pass.

Forty-eight thousand

Bitcoin hit another high early this morning, before dipping and ranging all day. It’s been much more chill than lately. The market was basically flat today. Crypto equities had a modest pump today, except for Voyager, which had a bit of an unexplained pullback. I’m not quite sure what the issue was, so I suppose it’s one of those opportunities when I should have bought more. I didn’t though, since I need to start liquidating positions to cash so I can start rolling over to my new IRA.

Things are taking a long time to transition. I tried to call my brokerage bank today to verify that they got the withdrawal request, but they said the wait time was ninety minutes. No sir, I had work to do today.

My $MARA June $40 covered calls are very close to the strike price, and it caused me a bit of a panic before speaking to my step-father, who does a bit of options trading. I was worried that my underlying was going to be liquidated out from under me, but he told me that won’t happen until the calls expire. I could be able to carry them, buying them back and buying subsequent calls at a higher strike price or later expiry. It’s a bit confusing, but I’m starting to get it. We talked for a good half-hour. He’s got a paid program that he’s got a spot for and offered it to me, and hedged it in lot of talk about taking profits without taking risk. Of course I had told him about everything that was going on lately, and I must have sounded crazy, as usual. He’s obviously not buying the whole hyper-bitcoinization theory, but he did open up the possibility of running my money like a business, like a family office. Once he follows through on his offer I’ve got a lot of work to do.

My dad came by today as well. I spent all day yesterday smoking a pork shoulder, and he wanted to get some. The smoker, a hand-me-down from some neighbors, had been left out in the rain and the element finally broke while I was in the middle of cooking. It basically came back down to the outside temperature before I noticed and stuck it in the oven. It added It several hours to my cooking time, so it was nearly midnight before I was able to pull it. It was sooo good.

I filled my dad in on everything and gave him some numbers. Our mining rig seems to have paid off a bit, even considering the power costs. And the bitcoin that he bought in 2017 has compounded several times over thanks to Badger gains, and I explained to him some of the tax liabilities that I’m worried about, and some of the strategies that we can take to deal with it. Plans are evolving.

Right now I’m still trying to find a damn bank for the self-directed IRA. I applied at several banks this afternoon, with rejection after rejection, before I called one and finally figured out that I’m getting rejected because they don’t do LLCs online or something. Anyways, I’ve got one more application I’m waiting on, and then I’ll just have to bite the bullet and actually go to a branch. God knows how long before I can actually move these funds and get them into crypto.

Forty-seven thousand

Everything is a mess right now and I can’t keep up.

Obviously the market gains that I’ve made the past month have come to quickly, and I’m over my head. I spent at least nine hours last night on the computer, downloading wallet transactions and going over them in a spreadsheet, trying to figure out what funds came from dad and the girls, and where they went from there and how much of the yields belong to them. The funny thing is that I don’t actually owe them any of it, but I want to keep track of it to be fair. There has got to be a better way to manage a “family office” like this. There’s got to be software out there that I can use, I sure don’t think I want to roll my own from here, but we’ll see. Using a token set in the future might help.

I wrote the above paragraph early this morning. I think I got distracted somehow, cause at some point I had to step away, and that’s when I found out the news that Tesla added $1.5 billion dollars of bitcoin to it’s balance sheet, sending the price mooning from thirty-eight to forty three in a matter of minutes. I think I lost my shit at one point. I remember rushing upstairs to tell Missus, who was utterly unimpressed with something work-related.

I was a complete wreck by the time I tried to get onto my morning conference call with work. Literally shaking, and almost brought to tears while scrolling Twitter. I signed onto the conference call, did my check-in with as much poise as I could and told Bossmang that I needed to talk to him privately afterward. I told him that I was meeting with a lawyer to draft up papers to transition me from full-time employee to contractor status, and before I signed the paperwork I wanted to make sure he was still cool with it. Not really, he said, but what was he going to do about it.

I started off telling him all that’s been going on, how things have been going better than expected, and how I couldn’t afford to keep moving forward with things the way they are. He understood my position, although his reaction was to ask me if I’d heard of the tulip bubble. Boss, I said, I’ve been in this space for years, of course I’ve heard of the tulip bubble. The conversation moved from there to discussion about what I was going to do in “retirement” and about his plans for the company. I’ve jokingly called it Zombie, LLC in posts here over the years, cause I do think the market here where we’re at is fairly oversaturated. He’s in a franchise agreement for almost two more years, and recently took out a PPP loan. Otherwise he would have gone bankrupt last year. I still think that would have been the better choice, honestly. But I told him that he’s been good to me for the last eight years, and that I wasn’t going to abandon him. I’d finish the projects that I started, and stick around long enough to transition to what’s next. What that’s going to look like, I have no idea.

And then, later today, I met with the lawyers. I wasn’t terribly impressed. I’m going to let them handle my independent contractor contract, but I don’t really feel right about using a lawyer for my crypto that doesn’t hold crypto. I knew the associate lawyer as a client in their previous firm, but this was my first call with one of the actual partners. I asked about their background with crypto, and they said that they had helped with some ICOs and with some individuals that were in my position, and needed to reduce their tax liabilities. I’m not sure they’d really kept up since the 2017 cycle.

We talked through some options, like buying depreciable assets, like a car, for example, gifting to charity, setting up a revocable trust for the kids, and so forth. They mentioned a client that has moved to another jurisdiction (Germany) to reduce their taxable income, and I joked about moving there before the end of next month to qualify for the nine-month exemption. There were a couple other options that we ran through, but nothing really stood out to me as something that I really wanted to pursue. I think moving as much money into a 401k is my best option at this point.

I did do some further research afterward, but I’m still trying to process it. There are too many moving factors right now, and today has been exhausting. I know a lot of people are interested in strategies to save on taxes, and I think the steps I’m taking right now are the best I can do for now. If my wife and I can reduce our income to less than $80k then we can take advantage of the zero percent rate on long-term gains, but that might be the best I can do. Right now my Badger yield farming is making more in a week than I take home in month, although as long as I leave that unclaimed I suppose I could let that accumulate for a year.

The bottom line is that I’m going to need to take a look at several tax services to see how well they can track defi farming. I can probably get away with reducing the income on some of the recent activities that I’ve done since it’s mostly been a wash, but I need to think real hard about what I want to do with my Badger gains. It’s tough.

Evening pages

Today was a bit of a mess. I tied one on last night and was useless for most of the day. I got to stop killing myself like this.

Yesterday I figured out that divergence loss on my Badger LP has been absolutely killing my returns. I’m up 5x right now overall, so I shouldn’t be complaining, but it looks like it should have been more like an 8x. It’s really hard to calculate everything with all the farming rewards that I’m getting; I’ll have to do a spreadsheet to figure it out. Earlier today I posted on the BadgerDAO forums to see if anyone has advice, but no one’s responded yet. I about got laughed out of the Discord by a few people when I was on there yesterday. It’s not a good feeling.

I’m also kind of pissed that I missed a huge 100% ZRX pump today. I had posted about it two days ago and was going to buy back the 2017 bags I sold last month, but I never got around to it because of gas fees. And so it goes. Again, it’s hard to be pissed at myself when almost everything I have is up. BTC is back at $39k as I write this, ETH is over $1700. I’m up more than a year’s salary in less than a month on Badger alone, and things are just getting started.

I spoke to a lawyer today, and former client that’s moved to a new firm. I rambled on about what’s been going on to him for twenty minutes earlier today, and probably sounded completely insane. I’m hiring him to do my new work contractor arrangement, and to help me reduce my tax liability going into next year. I’m also going to need someone on my side as I launch Homebrew.Finance. I have another meeting with him and his partner Monday to discuss things in depth.

I’ve been slowly working on the Homebrew docs and am on the final third of a litepaper. I still haven’t found a bank for the LLC, my Novo application got rejected cause they don’t service my type, so that’s probably the top of my priority list short term. Tomorrow I’m taking the girls to visit a friend on a farm and let them play with the animals. Should be fun. I’ve also got a lot of stuff to do on my honey-do list. The house is falling apart, literally, and I’ve got monthly finances to do.

But tonight, sleep.

Banking on bitcoin

The 2021 crypto bull run continues today. ETH broke $1500 then $1600, while BTC continued climbing to $38k. My IRA hit another nice round number with five zeros behind it, and by BadgerDAO positions just continues making new highs every day. Gas is has been hovering around 150 gwei or higher today, I’m waiting on a low gas transaction to withdraw my yaLINK. It’s looking like $200-300 fee at this point, so I’ve got to be more careful about what I ape into from here on out.

I managed to help my brother recover his funds from the timelock contract. Had some help from the team over Telegram and got his funds en route to BlockFi as we speak. I pulled all of my ETH from there last night after liquidating a few LTC that I had held over from 2017. I should have them in my wallet tonight, then let the games begin. Not sure what I’m going to do yet. Might buy some more DPI and stake it for INDEX, but I’ll probably want to sit on it while ETH runs to $2k and beyond. Transactions are going to get very expensive.

So the IRA LLC got approved. I spent most of last evening trying to find a decent, crypto-friendly bank. Most of them are in the UK, and the ones I could find that service US customers don’t have commercial divisions. I found one that deals with startups, but I don’t need anything fancy. Going to look at Capital One or Chase later today. Wells Fargo wanted additional paperwork beyond what I have already. So it goes.

Everything I read today was bullish. More and more firms buying bitcoin. Michael Saylor running his corporate treasuries training for some 1500 companies; Cathie Wood of ARK invest calling BTC a good investment; Bloomberg publishing a report that said the same. Startups everywhere. Just absolutely insane. DeFi is just getting started.

I actually caught up with some old friends today, back from the old crypto meetups that I used to host back in the day. Haven’t talked to one of them in almost two years I think, and it was good to catch up. Another is working for 0x (ZRX), and said that they’re very excited kabout this thread that went around yesterday.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how I want to organize this IRA/LLC and whether I can use it as a vehicle for Homebrew Finance. It’s pretty clear that I can’t use the funds for personal gain, so I might have to find a different outlet for the funds. Either the funds will have to stay out of the set altogether, or the LLC will have to manage the Set completely. That rules out a DAO. For now, I’ll just focus on writing the documents and will do some more research over the next week as I get funds ready to move.

DeFi is breaking my brain

Monday

I was up till 4:30AM last night and I am completely exhausted.

I spent seven hours driving the fam up and back from the mountains for a day of snow fun. Younger got lost in the woods for about twenty minutes, I had to track her down like I was following a Family Circus cartoon. Other than that, it was a nice getaway, and we had fun sledding.

I managed to catch up on my podcasts on the drive, mainly a number of Uncommon Core episodes about options and perpetual swaps. The pieces are starting to fall into place and I’m really trying to wrap my head around some of these strategies for hedging and generating income. Buying puts seems like a no-brainer on long term accumulation targets, especially if the premiums are good.

I spent a good portion of last night on Discord, trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my BadgerDAO positions. I’m up more than 2x right now, and I’ve got to figure out how to rerisk that position somehow. My Klondike experiment was no win, so I’ve got a transaction pending to withdraw my wBTC stake. I also aped into a $RUNE/$ALPHA Sushi pool.

Tuesday

Some guy DMed me last night. Apparently found me cause I mentioned the Gemini API in one of my tweets and he needed my help. He was trying to implement some sort of trade strategy in Python but kept getting the call rejected cause of some issue with a nonce. He was really aggressive and under some time pressure or something. I told him to regen the API keys and he said he could wait and was like “name your price” and I was all like dude, I just want to go to sleep. So I tried to point him in the right direction and apparently he got it worked out.

That’s been happening a lot to me lately, which is a good sign that I’m doing good work in the right field. Looks like the blog posts and tweetstorms are helping people, which is all I can ask. Things are coming together with the Homebrew.Finance chat group that I got going with my friends is growing. Getting all my friends in there. Even got my brother in today. I was telling everyone how bullish I was on ETH — before today’s breakout — and someone said they were going long 5x on Kraken. I asked what their liquidation price was and they were all wut? so I guess there’s more work to be done.

Missus got her second dose of the COVID vaccine yesterday, and had an extremely adverse reaction to it. She’s been in bed all day except for maybe fifteen minutes today, so of course the kids did everything they could to test me. They’ve been disobedient and disrespectful all day, so I put my foot down until they got in line. It was a war of attrition, but I finally got them to pull together by the end of the evening. As a result I didn’t get anything done for work, which is bad because I actually have a project to do.

At one point today my boss messaged me about some billing problem that was costing the company a whopping thirty dollars a month and it took all I had just to keep from telling him have fun staying poor. I’m trying to figure out what to do with six-figures of funds in an animal-themed DAO/yield farm and this guy’s bothering me because of thirty dollars? It reminds me of the old saw from late-Soviet Russia: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Work is basically my side hustle at this point.

Of course, it’s usually when things are going this well that hubris comes and kicks me in the ass. Things are going a little too well, and I’m afraid that I’m going to do something stupid, take a risk or make a bad decision, or the market is going to turn against me. I’m not sure how long this run can keep going, but I’m having fun as hell.

And more good news, my AltoIRA Checkbook+ IRA just came through! We are full speed ahead!