Blockchain Man

Joining the two comma club

Today marked a milestone for Missus and I, as today’s rally put our net worth over one million dollars. On paper, anyways. Most of our assets are in our retirement funds, and the house, but even counting our mortgage debt and my student loans we’re over the line. It’s nice to be able to realize this goal, even though it seems a bit late considering my younger ambitions. Still, it’s a good milestone, and we’ve got a ways to go. I won’t be quitting my job yet, of course, but I can already see the end of the tunnel.

Market wise, BTC pierced forty by a couple hundred dollars and dumped down to the low thirty sixes in a matter of minutes. I managed to buy the dip on Voyager, while Coinbase, Kraken and others were down, apparently.

Binance finally did a “sweep” and nabbed my American IP, so now I have to get funds off of it. That’s what I get for not using an VPN. Got most of my funds off there but need to setup some wallets for a couple of them that I can’t trade. That’s life.

Of course everyone was up in arms about the insurrection yesterday. The house down the street, the one with the TRUMP 2020 sign in front of it for like three years now, had it’s flag at half-mast. And then once Trump was let out of Twitter jail an hour ago, he put up a concession speech. I guess someone threatened him with the 25th Amendment, or jail. He’s still got two weeks, I wonder if there’s time for him to be the only president impeached twice. Here’s hoping. Hopefully this will be the last time I ever need to give a shit what he says. Done, next.

Lastly, I just want to leave this Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholders’ Letter. I’m forwarding it to some people cause I think it does a great job explaining bitcoin and our current macroeconomic situation. The last third is about Stone Ridge, but everything else is pure gold.

Insurrection in the Capital

Well, I’m not even sure what to say, other than this day will live in infamy for some time. Trump supporters storming the Capitol building today, trying to stop the Electoral College vote for Biden. Shameless. I went to bed last night feeling slightly neutral about the Senate elections in Georgia, and woke up to see a big ATH spike in the bitcoin price around the time that the results came in for Warnock. Ossoff was favored as well. It was another busy day at work, markets were up, everything was pretty good around the house, and then MAGAts started swarming the Capitol. The afternoon and this evening were taken up. Even now, Missus is on the couch watching Senate remarks on PBS.

My Twitter feed has been a complete clusterfuck. Kinda hard to shitpost about crypto when the President is inciting violence in the street. We are in full-on Fourth Turning crisis mode now. There’s a part of me that thinks that this is too far, that Trump isn’t going to get away with it. Most of the establishment Republicans are condemning the violence, with the notable exception of Ted Cruz, so maybe all this talk about the 25th Amendment and impeachment might have some teeth. Early indications is that Pence has broken from the President, finally, so it doesn’t seem like Trump will be getting any pardons. We’ll see.

I’ve stayed off my normie feed today. I don’t feel the slightest urge to engage anyone right now. I’ve been holding back to urge to message my quaranteam dad down the street and ask him if he’s still a “Trump fan”, or to berate my dad and brother that “this is what we get cause you couldn’t have a woman president.” It’s too much. Missus said it feels like 911, so she’s going to be up all night watching the news and staying on social media.

Every day we ask why we’re working. Like seriously, what the fuck is going on? I haven’t spoken to my boss about bitcoin since before my vacation. I’m sure he’s seen the news. He must be thinking about my comments about retiring this year. I wonder if he’s realized that I’m not joking. We’ll see how tonight goes. I may not even bother working tomorrow. Maybe I’ll put in a half day and take Friday off. I just feel like striking. I feel pretty angry right now.

Last night, after I finished writing, I went back and looked at my posts from a year ago. One of them was about my 2020 goals. Looks like I’m three for eleven right now:

1. Finished my degree. +1
2. Did not get a raise. I suppose that staying home with the kids out of daycare was sort of like a raise. I cut expenses quite a bit with that, saying home and getting rid of the car, so it was almost like a raise. More money in my pocket anyways. Still, I think the goal was to assert myself, so -1 there.
3. Find a new job. Failed the Sixty Days to Six Figures goal that I set for myself. Gave up looking after I convinced myself that I’m happy working for lower pay with more freedom.
4. Freelance work. I’m neutral on this one. I did do some work here, but it all trailed off near the end of the year. WordPress management isn’t what I want to be doing anyways, so I don’t feel like this one is too bad. +0
5. Younger still sleeps in the bed with us, she creeps in during the middle of the night. This year is the year. -1
6. Elder the defiant: man she is willful. Being home during COVID has been good, overall. I feel like we have a better relationship. We’re not dealing with the stress of morning chores, and getting out of the house so I can get to work at the proscribed time. She, and her sister, still have their days, but we’re coping much better, and I’m not abusing them the way I was abused as a child, so that’s a plus. Actually going to give a +1 on this one.
7. Meditate: +1. I’ll have to look up whether I did the 60 for 60 this year or not, but despite a lapse, I’ve been doing twenty minutes quite regularly this year. I’ve even been doing an extra evening session the last two days, since I’ve been writing at night.
8. Exercise: -1. Not enough, not regularly. Need to do something about this since I’m no spring chicken.
9. The drink: Let’s be honest, -1. I’m still drinking myself to an early grave. It’s a problem.
10. Piano: +1. I managed to work through four or five Bach pieces, plus re-learned Fur Elise again. And I’m about three quarters through memorizing Claire De Lune. It’s been slow going getting through it, and I’ll probably need another year to play it comfortably, but this year I want to learn how to play Let It Go, just so the girls can play along. Elder has been doing really well learning as well; I’m not pushing her as hard, but she’s starting to push herself. I’m trying how to figure out how to get Younger going as well. That will be fun.
11. Writing/blogging. +1. I didn’t write every day, but I just passed four hundred posts. My original goal was two hundred words, and I’m easily writing four times that, so I’m going to give myself that one. I wish I had a word count. I started and abandoned a substack, more from fear than procrastination — I’m trying to hype myself up to write. If I keep this up I’ll convince myself I have a book in me. One day.

So it looks like it’s a wash, as far as my planned goals were. Overall, I have to hand it to myself. We were extremely fortunate, and lucky. We not only survived 2020, but we flourished. Our family has grown tighter, and I cannot overstate the level of financial security that we’ve achieved. It’s really hard to overstate. I mean, we’re not multi-millionaires, (yet) but the amount of money that we were able to save coupled with the gains that I’ve been able to accumulate in the equity and crypto markets is life-changing.

It’s really hard to complain about anything. Even on a day like today.

Well, today was interesting. Markets blew up again, I was up six months salary in my IRA thanks to MARA, RIOT, and my various Grayscale holdings. Three more days like this and I’ll have hit a goal that I set for myself that I made when I was in my twenties, to be a millionaire. On paper, anyways. Half of that will be tied up in retirement accounts, a quarter in real estate. Only the last quarter would be liquid, and I dare not sell any of the rest of it, both for fear of capital gains and being left behind. Thankfully lending platforms give us some options.

The main goal remains to work and wait, to accumulate enough assets that can generate enough income-generating yield to cover the bills, mainly the mortgage and day-to day expenses. And there’s the student loan debt, should it ever come due. It looks like the Dems are favored to win in Georgia tonight, so who knows what Biden will do with a Congressional and Senate majority. Print more money, that’s for sure. I’m not so sure about student loan forgiveness, maybe. Permanent stimulus? I’d rather see universal healthcare. That’s the only question for our family. Healthcare remains the biggest question mark in our early retirement plans. What to do? What country with socialized medicine should we move to? It’s hard to say at this point. I still have hope that the US will do the right thing, but probably too late. Alas.

I made a bit of a post-New Years Resolution earlier, that every time I bought alcohol I would buy the same amount in bitcoin. It’s probably my one vice right now, and my worst from a health standpoint, and I figured this would be a good way to stack and cut down at the same time. So when I opened a bottle of Merlot for dinner tonight, I made sure to pull out my Voyager app and sell ten dollars of USDC to buy BTC. We’ll see how this works.

I was inspired by talking to my friend, E., yesterday. He had told me that he wanted to quit his smoking habit so he could buy bitcoin a few weeks ago, and I followed up with him to see how that was going. He was scheduling a doctor’s appointment to get a prescription to help him. I told Missus, and she said that if he follows up with it and does it then he’ll literally owe me his life. We drink a lot, and she remarked how much we would save if we stopped drinking. I said I’d start buying bitcoin every time I bought beer. Either we’d wind up too cash poor to get drunk, or maybe too rich to care.

I also talked to my friend T. for the first time in several months to catch up. I told him I was almost ready to retire. He laughed, I said, no, I’m serious. He got quiet for minute. I told him how things were going and he disclosed that he’d been into crypto as well. “I had the chance to buy a couple coins back when it was two thou and I didn’t. Really regret it now.” He told me he had a Kraken account now and I was impressed, so I asked him what bags he was holding. Bitcoin, Ethereum, some Chainlink, and Polkadot, he told me. Now I was really impressed. Proud, really. He told me he was sober for four years, it was probably about how long since we had really hung out.

I finished another Expanse book last night, and since Missus was reading Ready Player Two on my iPad, I picked up the copy of the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It put a lot of things in perspective, and said some things that I’d been trying to get out of my head, much more eloquently than I’d been able to. It was the part about work, of course. Optimize your work for freedom, not money. It’s one that I’ve been living by for some time. Every year that goes by without a raise, and I take my raise by decreasing the amount of time I spend working. Basically, I’m increasing the internal wage that I feel I’m worth, and decreasing the amount of time I spend working. That’s not to say that I’m not getting things done. I’m just separating the inputs from the outputs, which is another big concept that he talks about. It’s about finding leverage, always learning, and building a unique skill set that places you apart from others. It also explains why I hate support calls so much. The inputs are bound tightly to the inputs. The problems they fix aren’t easily replicated; it’s hard to build any sort of leverage that can scale. It’s got me thinking though.

I think that’s part of the reason I’m so frustrated recently. I’ve been unable to make that trade. I took my current job out of necessity – I was unemployed and my first daughter was three months old. It’s been eight years, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to leave. I told Missus I had been looking at various opportunities out there and that I might be close to finding something that would give me a raise at a part time schedule, and she basically told me I was full of shit. I keep trying to tell her that there are opportunities out there for her as well, but she remains convinced that she’s not going to find a job that beats her cushy gov’t post. She feels that she’s already at the top of the pay scale in her field, she doesn’t want to take on the responsibility in a management role, and no private firm is going to match her benefits package. She might be right, but then again, I might be also.

I keep thinking about this chart from @vgr, and thinking that I see way too much of myself in the ‘dark’ column. “Fail to launch,” is me. Not in my personal or professional life, quite the opposite, really, but more from the position that I’ve never launched anything, despite all my idea. Lack of execution. I’ve got that @jason quote in my Twitter bio: starting is easy, finishing is hard,” and yet it’s hard for me to think of anything that I’ve actually shipped. Sure, I’ve finished lots of implementation projects for clients over the years, but when it comes to building something that people want to use and actually shipping it, I’ve failed miserably. Maybe that’s why I get such a fulfillment from getting Github commits on projects that I use, it’s my way of adding a little stamp to a project. I haven’t stuck around for anything though, I always move on to the next thing.

Maybe this writing will help change that. Maybe I can continue to hone my ideas and use this as a way to drive that habit home, focus my ideas and figure out what to leave behind so that I can finish something. I honestly don’t see how that happens unless I’m willing to make a drastic change. Between the job and the kids, something has to give. I’m doing too much. Maybe Twitter is the problem. I spend a lot of time there, but I justify it by saying that I’m getting a lot out of it. I think I know I’m lying to myself. Maybe it’s time for a reread of Atomic Habits and Digital Minimalism. Maybe it’s time for me to shut all that shit off until I work on my own project for x hours a day. I’ve been working on this recovery project for work for two days now, so it’s not like I don’t have the drive or ability. I think it’s just that the reward is so immediate. Ten hours at double the hourly rate, payable to Bossmang, to pay my salary for two and a half weeks. Meanwhile my personal net worth goes to the moon with every tick of a green candle.

This shit cannot continue.

I can’t believe that we’re already four days into 2020, and I haven’t written a thing since Dec 30th. That’s not a very good way to start the New Year, that’s for sure. My vacation is officially over, as hard as it was to go back to work today. I don’t have fuck you money yet, so I still have to call it in every day. We’re close though. Last time I wrote, BTC was at twenty-nine thou, and in the days since it almost topped thirty five, bounced back to twenty-seven, and is now already back almost to thirty three. Oh, and ETH is at eleven hundred dollars. So we’re looking really good. Just a simple 2x from here outta do it, promise.

New Years was fun. We bought thirty dollars worth of junk food and party favors from the Dollar Store, then tuned in a YouTube feed of a countdown clock to ring in the new year along with Germany, so that the kids could celebrate it here 6AM local time. Friday we drove up to Missus’s dad’s (FIL) house up at the ski resort. The weather was bad, so we didn’t plan on skiing, although we did gear up the kids and let them putter around by the ski lifts just to get acclimated and comfortable for about half a hour. We’ll come back up in a few weeks when they’ve got some fresh powder, the man went crazy and stocked up on skis and equipment, with close to two dozen pairs of skis and half as many boots. What can I say, the man does nothing half-assed.

FIL asked me “how was work”, and I unloaded on that one, I tell you. A load of shit that I deal with when I’m not doing the stuff that I really want to do. The same story I tell myself, that I’m just there to save up as much money as possible so I can quit in the next couple months and do something where I don’t have to deal with the same trivial-ass problems that are other people’s emergencies.

Missus warned me not to “talk about how rich we are” with him, which is ironic considering how the man throws his wealth around. I couldn’t hide it, I had thousand-dollar alerts setup on TradingView, I woke up Saturday morning to thirty thousand, thirty-one hit like an hour later and just kept going. I was in a bit of shock.

Then I found out my dad’s sister died unexpectedly. I’m not sure I even know how to start unpacking all that right now. We weren’t close; I had estranged from her some years ago due to some bad decision making on her part, and I don’t talk to the clan back home very often. I think it messed me up a bit, considering that my dad just got out of the hospital and I talked to my grandmother for the first time in a year the day before. I think I was mostly feeling selfish for the news interrupting what was otherwise supposed to be a relaxing getaway. I called my dad, sent text messages to my cousins and brother, but didn’t call anybody. Couldn’t be bothered to since I was away, and have kept finding excuses since I’ve been back. Last time someone in the family died was my grandfather, over twenty years ago, and it’s not like I can just pack up and drive eleven hours for a funeral in the midst of a pandemic. Everyone back home was trying to be so careful, avoiding Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings, and then she just drops dead on New Years Eve.

It seems almost absurd to go back to talking about my day and what the markets did and blah, blah, blah, following that, but life goes on. I meditated, shed a tear, then tried to get on with things as best I could for the rest of the trip. Leaving felt like a dream, I was having a bout of hyper-realism when we took off for the three hour drive. And back at the house today, trying to go back to my regular routine, like this is life, this is all there is.

I’d like to do an annual retrospective or review. What did I do well this year? What did I do badly? What do I hope to improve next year? That sort of thing. I’m not sure I have it in me to do that today. I know I increased my wealth by an staggering amount, even if most of it is in an account that I won’t touch for another twenty years, and the rest is something that I dare not sell until I’ve got the balls to do something radical like quit my job.

As if to drive the point home, last night I get a text message from someone. Ex-client, quit us two years ago cause our services were too steep. Is this el? Server down. Need help. I almost said nope, sorry, but didn’t. Bossmang still needs the business, and I still need the job, even if I would rather sit on unemployment for a few weeks, stacking sats and spending more time with the kids. So I took the call, and spent most of the day dealing with his emergency on top of everything else that happened while I was on vacation, trying to maintain my calm while all of that was going on and the kids were doing their best to destroy the house and make skunk-faces at me every time I asked them to do something.

Just another day in the life, I suppose.

Twenty-nine thousand

So today was an interesting day. I had to pick up my dad from the hospital today, so he hung around the house with the kids until after lunch and I brought him back to his car so he could drive home. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be operating a vehicle at all, but he’s stubborn.

Markets were on fire today, and I took the girls to the park for a couple hours while BTC was making new ATHs up at $29,300. I continued de-risking my ETHE position, and am just stockpiling the cash until I see what happens on Jan 4th. I may start scaling back in right away, it depends on what the volume looks like, I suppose.

I spoke to my friend, E., today. I oranged-pilled him earlier this month and he texted me late this afternoon about an account verification problem that he’s having with Gemini. After we discussed that I just started talking strategy with him. It’s amazing how quick he’s picking stuff up. Apparently he’s been watching all kind of YT videos, and he already has a sense of the difference between BTC and ETH. I tried to warn him about touching anything else in the meantime, until he knows what he’s doing, but he’s obviously been doing his homework. On top of that, he’s already onboarded several of his friends. I’m really impressed!

He’s literally spamming all his friends and family to open BlockFi accounts right now, and go all in 50/50 on ETH. I just need to get him on cryptotwitter and his conversion to the dark side will be complete.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”

— Buckminster Fuller

Today was much more relaxing. I spent most of the day with the kids, we went to the library and took them to to the park not once but twice so they could burn off some much needed steam. (The kids wore masks.) They seemed in a much better mood today.

Our quaranteam family is now actually quarantining, after a trip to Tennessee where not one but two of the grandparents tested positive for COVID. So far none of them are showing signs, but we’re going on strict vid-chat only for the next week to make sure they’re clear.

My dad’s in the hospital today for his arrhythmia, this is the fourth time they’ve had to go up through his thigh with an electrode to zap his heart, a treatment for atrial fibrillation (afib) called catheter ablation. I’m not sure what the next step will be, but I know that he’s doing this to avoid a much more serious procedure that will require several days in intensive care.

His mom, my grandmother, called to day to check in on him, and it was good to talk to her for the first time in probably over a year. Younger doesn’t know who she is, but Elder seemed more caught up in her library books when we did vidchat. She’s been isolating, and didn’t even gather with anyone for Christmas, as COVID has been running rampant in the rural midwestern area where she lives. I promised we’d be out there to visit family right after we get our vaccines.

I didn’t spend too much time in the markets today. Things were down at the open, so I only checked in a few times. I put in another sell order on ETHE, to continue de-risking as we approach the share lockout I wrote about yesterday. The day ended up much better, only down two percent, and BTC looks like it’s starting up another run at $28,000.

There’s been a lot of good news today. More firms are planning on investing in BTC, and an NFL player just announced that he’d be receiving half of his salary in bitcoin.

There’s so much stuff that bothers me about the way this is being reported. The technical fact of the matter is that his salary is still paid in USD, but he’s converting it to BTC using this new service from Strike, which I assume is some sort of ACH or direct deposit service. They’re automating what I do every week when I deposit fiat and my cron job runs a Python script to place a limit order on the exchange and transfer the calculated amount of BTC to my hard wallet. Maybe I’m a bit salty about this, but I just don’t like the way it’s being portrayed.

I don’t have a better name for the period between Christmas and New Years, so Feast of Fools will have to do. I took the week off, and will probably make it an annual thing if I can. Hopefully this will be the last year I actually have a “job”, so I’m not setting the bar high here.

To be honest, there wasn’t that much missing from my day. I did most of my morning routine the same as ever, puttering about on Twitter and gleefully rubbing my hands together watching the markets. Today started up very strong before dropping back to between four and six month’s salary. I was tempted to send out a screenshot of my IRA balance along with a message to be thankful it wasn’t an income bearing account. I’m not FIRE yet.

I tried to spend some time with the girls, but they were more interested in ignoring my directions than doing what I asked for most of the morning, so they did their best to get on my nerves until after I went and picked up groceries for lunch. Then it was over to their grandmother’s for the afternoon. Missus did take an early break from work and we watched have of Tenant, which was more coherent than I expected it to be, considering all the the confusion on Twitter. I couldn’t hear half the dialog, but I assume it didn’t really matter, considering the point of the movie is these crazy set pieces like a 747 being driven into a building.

I’ve been binging The Expanse novels, I finished one a couple night ago and have been working through the penultimate one, also while watching the series on Amazon with Missus. I’m really hooked on them. It’s sci-fi melodrama, but the sci-fi stuff and plotting is really good, and it makes for a quick read. Each chapter is about ten minutes, so I can tear it up in short or longer chunks, depending on the time of day and what else is going on.

A Twitter follower sent this over regarding $ETHE, apparently the lockup is falling and a lot of new shares are going to get dropped on the market on Jan 4. It’s probably trouble.

There are a lot of factors to consider here. Since the 22nd, the premium has dropped from 239% to 146%, even while Ethereum has been on a bit of a rise. So has the price of ETHE. The question is how bad could things dump? If ETH continues it’s climb, it might not matter, and I doubt that all of the investors that were locked in are going to want to dump if we’re in the midst of a bull run. Still, I don’t want to risk the massive gains that I’ve had on it this last few months, so I sold of a bit of my position earlier today. I may continue to do so this week and re-asses. It’s too bad that I can’t set a trailing stop on this, so I may have to settle for a limit order for now. We’ll have to see how things play out, but right now, taking some of those 800% gains off the table is in order.

Bitcoin has been on a tear recently, starting a five thousand dollar climb since Christmas, breaching $28,400 while I slept. It’s been whipsawing a bit the past couple hours, forming a doji on the four hour chart. Alt pairs are trash right now, and probably will stay that way until bitcoin decides to take a breather. Ethereum is running on the USD chart, but I’m not doing anything right now other that continuing my dollar cost averaging.

I’m almost giddy thinkin about what’s going to happen Monday morning if we stay at this level or above. GBTC and the other crypto equites are going to blast off, it will be insane.

I’ve taken off all of next week, which will be my annual Feast of Fools celebration from here on out. Missus is still working, but I’ll be able to hang out with the kids and do whatever I want without having to worry about Zombie, LLC. Who knows, maybe I’ll never have to go back at this point. Ha ha, not likely. I’m nowhere near the point where my crypto holdings can provide the income I need to pay the bills. For now, it’s just a race to save and set aside enough fiat for the eventual 25-30% drawdown/shakeout that should be coming.

And if it doesn’t come, then that’s OK also.

I’ve positioned myself very, very well in my IRA. It’s sad that I can’t touch any of it for another quarter century, but that’s the rub, I suppose. I haven’t maxed out my contributions this year, as I’d rather the money go into BTC directly. I may reconsider before filing taxes next year.

I had some conversations with my mom, dad, and brother recently about what’s going on. My dad read something on Yahoo that bitcoin was “splitting”. Not quite sure what he was talking about, maybe he read something about the halvening? Dunno. Both parents are doing well, thankfully. Dad gets the economic argument about money printing and currency debasement. I didn’t get into it that much with her. Anyways, her husband is more savvy about finances. He’s been into the Motley Fool and forex and stuff like that. I bought him a copy of Burniske’s Cryptoassets, several years ago, but as far as I know, he still hasn’t bought any. Who knows, maybe in a year I’ll be caught up to them.

So I’ve been very vocal around the house the past week or so, ever since my portfolio started going crazy and I’ve been seeing five-digit gains everyday. Missus finally decided to get onboard and buy some more bitcoin, so I set her up with a BlockFi account yesterday and moved her funds off of my hard wallet. We’re still in a bit of a pickle cause she uses a local credit union that can’t link with them directly, so getting funds there is going to involve multiple steps. It’s not ideal at all. At least she’s earning interest now, and I’ll get her set up on a dollar cost average program here soon.

The SEC filed suit against Ripple Labs earlier this week, and CT has lost their collective minds. It was all over my feed Monday night. I’d say the majority of those I’ve been following hate XRP, but there are some who recognize that this suit is bullshit and are therefore rooting for Ripple. Still the details of the lawsuit look pretty bad.

Congress passed a couple of bills, one was an omnibus spending bill, a budget extension to keep the government funded, and the other was the COVID relief package, with an insulting $600 cash payment. Many people, including President Trump, conflated the two, bemoaning that we were sending millions of dollars in foreign aid while US citizens got nothing. “VETO” was trending on Twitter for a day, then Trump came out and said that he was sending the bill back and that he wanted Congress to increase the payments to two grand. Pelosi said “let’s do it!”.

Today is the first down day I’ve had in the equities market in two weeks. GBTC, ETHE and MARA are down, (#1, 2 and 4 by market value) taking the rest of my portfolio down to levels not seen since… yesterday.

Speaking of Grayscale, they’ve announced that they are closing their funds to new investors. Apparently this is something they do from time to time, although the funds are still open to their current customers. My hunch is that there is a huge supply side problem. They’re sucking up so much of the BTC (and ETH) supply, that I’m would be surprised if they’re having problems meeting demand.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, then I’m off work until 2021. I’m not planning on going anywhere, just needed to take some leave cause I can. I will try to do something productive, but I haven’t been able to do that for last two weeks. I’m going to finishing going through the Messari 2021 Theses, then start working my way through this new one from The Block.

So today is the winter solstice, the day of the Mars-Jupiter conjunction, which won’t happen again for another couple of centuries, and we can’t see the sky. It’s been cloudy all day. Alas.

At one point today, Missus came down into my office. I told her I was up over five figures again today. She was mildly surprised. The bitcoin I helped her buy three years ago is up 5x but she’s still on the fence about buying more. She thinks that I’ve got enough for both of her, and she’d rather keep her stuff in index funds for now. Alas.

Bitcoin took a bit of a dip this morning. I bought some more and put up a few layered bids all the way down in case there are any more wicks over the next couple days. BTC futures expire on Christmas day, so who knows what will happen.

BTC recovered from the dip, and ETH was fairly stable, but ETHE still climbed up almost eight percent. This market is ridiculous, and I still don’t think we’ve even started.

Spent some time going through my CoinTracking account and making sure my info is up to date. I have some old bags I’m about ready to dump. district0x ($DNT) is doing nothing, and I want to dump it to pick up some more DOT or ATOM. Avalanche is looking like a good play. They’re planning on importing the ETH EVM state into their blockchain, what they call a friendly fork, and are giving everyone equivalent ETH on their chain. Will be really interesting. Might have to move my ETH off of BlockFi before the snapshot.