Vacation!

black DSLR camera near sunglasses and bag

Prepping for a trip, and making sure the future is secure

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, which means today is a national holiday. Whee! To keep from going insane, my wife has taken off a few days next week. I took Monday off as well, and we will be heading out tomorrow morning to spend a few days with my father in law. Hiking, canoeing, and fireworks will ensue. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get the house ready for our departure. I’ll be cutting the grass and weed-eating, then I need to get our security cameras connected to our new ASUS ZenWiFi AC access points before we leave. We’re also hosting our quarantine family over movie and game night.

I won’t have to worry about Zombie, LLC for the next couple days, but I’ll probably be doing some work for my consulting projects. I just picked up another client yesterday, for a local political advocacy organization. I already got the wordpress site setup, and the client is going to handle the copy and content, so it should be a quick win that hopefully won’t serve as a distraction from my main project, which I’m into the third month on.

It’s Friday, which means that my cron jobs on my workstation upstairs is about to purchase twenty five dollars of BTC and transfer it to the wallet belonging to one of my daughters. All I have to do is keep the funds loaded, since there’s no way to initiate a funds transfer over API. I could do it using the exchange’s automated service, but they’d charge over a dollar for the transaction.

Since it’s the first weekend of the month, it’s probably a good time to review finances and take some optimization steps as well. I’m in the process of moving USD out of my daughter’s Lending Club accounts, converting it to BTC and dropping it in their BlockFi accounts, where it will earn a higher percentage yield. My own BlockFi account is earning a nice amount as well.

My IDEX masternode seems to be paying off now as well, after several years of middling returns. The IDEX token has doubled in price recently, and daily volume has been picking up, so I’m anxiously watching it to see how things progress. I’m currently hosting a level one node, and am hoping I’ve got enough staked that I’ll be able to run a level two node when it’s released.

I was reading something earlier this week that said that one doesn’t have to hyper optimize everything, that it’s ok to be happy knowing that you’re on the right path without worrying that you’re milking every last percentage point out of the markets. I’m currently holding positions in over three dozen publicly traded equities, and have at least a dozen cryptocurrencies in various wallets. Less than a third of them are even worth two percent of my portfolio, so I’m not getting caught up in micromanaging every one of them. Even the recent parabolic run on XHV, while placing it squarely in the top off the profitable coins that I’ve mined in the last two and a half years, hasn’t made my rig profitable.

And that’s why I turned off my mining rig, named lambo1, a few days ago. Managing it is just not worth my time right now. Finding coins to mine is a crapshoot, and keeping the blockchains current for a dozen different bags is just too cumbersome. I’m going to have to spend some time figuring out a way to not only manage what I have, but to make sure that I have documentation packed away in case something happens to me.

And that goes for all the things I’ve mentioned here today. If I was incapacitated, my wife would have to call in an expert just to retrieve my Bitcoin and Ethereum. Showing her how to use my hardwallet has been on my todo list for several weeks. Now that I’ve got a home intranet setup, I can start documenting all the various components of our finances to make sure that everyone knows where everything is. It seems like a great way to make sure that my kids know about the investments that I’m making for them and the family, and that they are crypto-natives as they grow up.

I mean, that’s why I’m into this whole blockchain thing in the first place, isn’t it?

Evening pages

macro shot of chronograph watch

Work, and stack sats while I sleep

I wasn’t going to write tonight cause I wanted to do some testing with Docker, but I figured it was best to do it to keep up the habit. I already posted once today as I never actually published the phishing piece that went up on on my professional network yesterday, so that’s live now. I stayed up late last night, not too late, and my my morning routine was interrupted due to a visit to Hangover City and a visit by my dad for breakfast. We didn’t do much today other than cooking a huge breakfast on my new outdoor griddle and cutting the grass. Ordered Chinese takeout and watched half of Attack of the Clones with the kids.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I did have a sort of business call with someone who found my short-lived crypto podcast and wanted to talk about some non-profit business venture that he was trying to pitch. I wasn’t terribly impressed cause it’s not really my wheelhouse. I gave them some local resources to check out and told them I’d follow up in a month to see how things were going.

Also, I went ahead and opened up two additional BlockFi accounts for my daughters and moved their BTC over to it. I also started withdrawing cash from their LendingClub accounts so that I can start the process of converting them to USD coins and add that to BlockFi as well. It’s kinda funny, my oldest is only getting three percent return on her LC account, and her little sister is up around seven. It almost isn’t even worth moving her over to BlockFi, but I’m going to have the interest payments paid out in BTC, so I they can stack sats faster. Migrating their funds will take a while, since the loans are up to thirty six months, so it’s just something that I’ll have to add to my quarterly plans.

That’s it for tonight. No games tonight, just another hour until screens off and books in bed. I’m reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, since I’m doing the exercises in Designing Your Life. It reminds me of the Team Human stuff. And given how much time I’ve been spending on Twitter – and the notifications I’ve been getting, I’m about ready to take a detox from it for thirty days. Well see.

Now, to work.

If you would like to try BlockFi, please sign up using my referral code.

BlockFi interest accounts as savings earners

Why leave cash languishing in a savings account when it could be earning six percent in a USD stablecoin account?

My head has been racing with ideas recently. I had trouble falling asleep last night and got woken up by Elder this morning when she crawled into bed with me. Neither of us could fall asleep after that, so here we are, up an hour before our usual wake up time, on the couch, both of us with our laptops open. She’s working on Typing.com, and here I am with you.

Yesterday I opened a BlockFi account. They’re currently offering six percent on BTC and eight percent on Gemini and Coinbase’s USD stablecoins, as well as another Ethereum based USD stablecoin called PAX. The rates seem seems really high until you consider their lending options: over nine percent on BTC-backed loans. (We’ll leave the discussion of that for another day.) So they’re taking a small origination fee and a two or three percent spread. Seems like a decent business model. BlockFi was the first product on the market like this; I remember hearing them on a podcast last year, but more and more competitors are springing up such as Crypto.com and now Blockchain.com

Source: BlockFi. 05/21/2020

BlockFi uses Gemini for custody, which is good, but they’re not FDIC insured, so there’s a risk that customer funds could be lost if they get hacked, but I rate that risk low, since Gemini is focused on providing crypto custody services to the traditional finance industry, and they’ve got good controls. Still, I’m not ready to go all in with my funds quite yet.

I think that earning interest on my long term BTC is a great idea. I’m not ready to hand them over the bulk of my hard wallet, but I’m willing to try a small transfer until I feel more comfortable. The account signup process was pretty quick, I was able to sign up as an individual in a matter of minutes, and only had to provide my address and SSN for KYC.

Compared to the rates that Compound is offering right now, BlockFi is way higher. Since Compound is an Ethereum smart contract platform, they use wrapped BTC (which could cause a taxable event) and there is inherently more of a risk of a block swan like a contract failure or hack. BlockFi is relying on more traditional cold-storage custody solutions.

I didn’t want to break out my hardware wallet yesterday to move funds over to BlockFi, since I’d rather use it as an alternative to a savings account, so I started a small transfer from my bank in order to deposit to a USD stablecoin. That will take several days to clear. In the meantime, I’ll probably be transferring all of my LTC over there, (since it’s basically worthless to me at this point anyways,) and most of my ETH. I haven’t decided what to do about my BTC yet, but will probably be putting a fraction of my funds there at some point.

The advantage to keeping funds in BlockFi compared to traditional banking account is obvious, if one is comfortable with the risk. Missus is not, and curtly said “we’re not keeping our emergency fund in blockchain,” when I raised the subject. I however, am less risk-adverse than her, so I’m looking at it as an option to keep cash available for long term goals while earning considerable interest on it. For example, I’ve been planning on funding my IRA this year, instead of using the money to dollar cost average into Bitcoin, but I didn’t want to actually move the money to my IRA until near the April 15 deadline next year. In the event that I do need the funds for an emergency, I don’t want to deal with the penalty and hassle of withdrawing it. Putting it in BlockFi will allow me to compound it, as well as easily withdraw the entire balance back to my bank account when I’m ready.

If you are sitting on a lot of cash right now, and you should be saving as much as possible during these times, you may want to consider giving BlockFi a try. Please use my referral code.