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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?

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Waiting for the season… altseason

red vehicle

A couple altcoins are seeing action. Are they signs of things to come?

I don’t even know where to start this morning. It’s a new month, and it feels like I’ve got twenty things going on. I spent most of yesterday working on my client’s WordPress project until I was burned out, then I grabbed my iPad and started reading through the WordPress developer documentation until I was ready for bed. I woke up bright and early, and here I am.

I’ve got a lot to dig into today. For Zombie, LLC, I’ve got a remote worker who’s laptop is completely hosed that I’ve got to deal with, a Github implementation and server hardware replacement project that I’m trying to close, and I’m also trying to get onboarded with Apple Business Manager so that I can handle mobile devices for another client. That’s on top of the weekly call with my WordPress client. Plus, I’ve got several tasks for my other retainer client that I need to get on top of. Domain SSL cert renewals, end user email problems. This is the life I want, I suppose.

I turned off my mining rig for the second time in as many months. I had been trying to manage it remotely via HashR8 OS, but couldn’t figure out how to tell which mining pool it was working on. Answer: neither. HashR8 is apparently rebranding as RaveOS or something tomorrow, and I just didn’t have time for it yesterday so I just shut it off. My cards are two and a half years old 1070Ti, and I’ve just blindly been mining Arrow for some time now. I still haven’t dumped any tokens that I’ve mined since I started, and stopped tracking daily values months ago. I check it once or twice a month now, the values of the tokens have been sitting around one third of the original hardware costs for a year now. Apparently Haven has been on a tear lately, since they’re supposedly a month away from going live with their offshore features. We’ll see if they can keep this price action up for long.

XHVBTC price

The Mayer Multiple number (orange) in the bottom pane is the moving average of the current price divided by the 200-day exponential moving average. The current EMA multiple, over four, is quite significant. I went back through and look at the past couple years of the tokens that I’m tracking in my watch list, and most of the short-term parabolic runs only see about one and a half on the EMA multiple. There’s a couple exceptions though, ones that have gone higher, but my point is that those high numbers aren’t sustained for long due to the simple fact that the averages will eventually rise to meet the price level. If I was a trading man, I would probably unload some of my XHV right here and wait for a pullback till the price hits the current plot line. The price could actually be higher by then, of course, it all depends on whether this is the start of a new bull run or not. My position in XHV isn’t significant enough for me to take action at this point. We’ll see if there’s another alt season or 10-100x left for XHV.

While we’re on the subject of altcoins, I do want to note that I am having some serious FOMO around two other tokens, REN, and LINK.

RENBTC chart

REN, as you can see, had a nice run that peaked in mid February of this year, at a 1.8 EMA multiple. It then bounced off of this EMA multiple EMA, before launching again, where it’s currently just over 2x.

LINKBTC chart

LINK has been on a tear. I bought a very small amount during the ICO and really wish I had gotten more. My point to this discussion, though, is that again, is that each parabolic run is followed by a pull back, and one could have made some nice sting trades buying these dips to the EMA, and selling these peaks, around 1.8x.

In fact, my strategy for our next Bitcoin run, if and when it ever happens, will be triggered by Bitcoin’s price in relation to it’s EMA multiple. Most of the parabolic runs have peaked at about 1.5x, but the run in late 2017 that saw it go from five thousand to twenty in just forty days hit 2.88. Based on the current price, I would predict a fast, parabolic run would put us around $25,000-32,000. That said, I’m not planning on unloading all of my holdings. After holding all the way up through the last bull run and subsequent drop, I told myself that I wasn’t going to make the same mistake next time. A price value at 2.88 times the EMA multiple would likely be a local top, and I’m going to take some profits this time.

Generally speaking, I don’t have enough of any alts to worry about it at this point. I’ve got a lot of ETH locked up in BlockFi right now, along with a stake in IDEX that seems to be doing well right now. I don’t know if we’re going to see altseason again, but the action in XHV, REN and LINK are very promising. I’m just waiting for their granddaddy, BTC to show them the way first.