He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
- The onboarding was nice. They say I don't need to worry about backup codes, so I guess I won't, but I'm feeling a little nervous about that.
- did not use iPad-native dimensions (was a scaled-up iPhone app)
- seemed smooth until it opened a screen that said "recovers in" with a countdown timer, "1 day, 11 hours, 58 minutes, 45 seconds"
- iPhone app now shows "your wallet will move to a new device in", showing same countdown timer, with an option to cancel
- I can't use the same wallet from multiple accounts??
- disappointed, clicked "cancel recovery" on iPhone, but then it got stuck in "canceling recovery" as both devices continued to show countdown timer
- eventually got popup on iPad, "The wallet owner and their Guardians have canceled this recovery" – Guardians??
- wanted to try out their "Guardian" feature, so I invited a bunch of slightly-open-to-try-out-crypto-with-me friends
- three of them signed up immediately, and one of them agreed to be my Guardian! It will take 24h for Argent to approve it
- the one who agreed to be my guardian signed up for the promise of ETH, so I sent 0.01 ETH. Argent paid the tx fee. Thanks, Argent!
- I have an Argent username (chadoh.argent.xyz), but this doesn't show up on etherscan for my address (https://etherscan.io/address/0xD24881c09Dcb8e3eCDf3c569e73e876975a5cda5) – is this only stored in Argent's database?
- ah, I can find my address when I search for this username on https://etherscan.io/enslookup – so it is registered publicly
- the friends I invited do not immediately show up in my Contacts after creating their own Argent wallet via my invite link – why? https://twitter.com/chadoh/status/1281764916794466305
- a couple friends have now agreed to be my guardians, and I theirs. A weird number of confirmations are required during this process. (I already said I want them to be my guardian; why do I have to re-confirm after they confirm?)
- this used Wyre, which used Apple Pay. Transaction fee was ~25¢ and Wyre charge was ~90¢. Total fees of $1.17 is better than many ATM withdrawal fees. Not bad!
- had received email that I would get 100 free "FOX" tokens if I signed up by the 10th. Ok, sure. Why not.
- signed up using my Ledger Nano S. Required updating firmware & apps first. What a painful experience. If security goes up as UX goes down, then the Nano S must be very secure.
- was told "We will send your FOX to your ETH address. It should arrive very soon. Happy free trading!" – I guess "trading" is what I'm supposed to do, for this DeFi game, but honestly it just sounds like a hassle and a bummer.
- sent ETH to Nano S ETH wallet so I could try out trading on ShapeShift
- I have a friend who's into HEX. He warned me that many people think it's a scam.
- I read this article from bravenewcoin about it and... yeah, definitely seems like a scam, no thanks
HODLing seems like the best long-term strategy to me, while the frothy trendy world of [insert current trend] makes a good part of a diversified portfolio for people with the motivation to keep up with it
trying to verify this suspicion, I sampled some five-year spreads from Bitcoin & Ethereum history:
-
july 2015: $286 (steady crypto winter)
july 2020: $9,221 (steady crypto winter)
~30x growth -
july 2010: $0.06 (v early days)
july 2015: $286 (steady crypto winter)
~4,700x growth (early birds got worms!) -
july 2013: $94 (during a climb)
july 2018: $6258 (during a crash)
~66x growth -
Feb 2014: $865 (a relative peak)
Feb 2019: $3472 (a relative trough)
~4x growth
- august 2015: $3 (<1mo after launch)
july 2020: $238
~80x growth
Long articles, and some of the articles they link to. It still takes me a long time to get through finance-related info.
- https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2020/7/9/21314119/stock-market-day-trading-reddit-dave-portnoy-barstool-robinhood
- https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained
yolo
Things I'd like to understand better:
- "interest" rates of hodling
- tumblers
- trading (and why I should care to)
- what is liquidity mining? https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained
- specific details of AMMs – read uniswap 1.0 source?
- comp mining