Many no-coiners like to refer to Bitcoin as a "digital pet rock".  Though they are fools, it is quite understandable the reasoning behind this position.  And frankly that's exactly what an NFT is.  At least with a pet rock there was something tangible to own.

The thing that bugs me about NFTs is everyone has now seen that they were a scammy rugpull, and yet the public is still fascinated with then.  They are CLOSE to something useful.

When I bought my Jade HW signature device I received a token on Liquid that would be tradable for the Jade when it came in stock.  I remember thinking... look at that... an actual "ICO" like token with an actual functional USE and rooted on a BITCOIN sidechain, therefore secured by BITCOIN but adding no stupid bloat to the base layer.  Transferred using some of Monero's privacy tech!  Neet.

This was one of the moments that I came to be a fan of the "evil Blockstream" as this is all the real functionality being promised by Ethereum, but with the CORRECT tradeoffs chosen.  At least an acceptable set of them.  I do think a company headed by a wizened cypherpunk is a good thing.  Jade is also OK.

My point is there is a right way, and a dumb way to do things.  I do not think we have seen the actual utility that the NFT concept provides.  But it took a while with tokens, too.

Oops

My mempool.space page running on my node shows a long list of FULL blocks and a current backlog of 6-9 blocks worth of transactions waiting to get in.

And I don't need colossal storage, bandwidth or computation power to see it all.

I would say it's running as intended.

___________________________
Covid update.  Tested neg today.  All the cold symptoms 90% gone aside from very slight chest congestion (I never really had a cough). Only really annoying thing left is a powerful fatigue and fairly strong heart palpitations on exertion.
I feel this is reasonable payment for superhuman immunity. Hopefully the spike proteins did not lasting damage.  Little fuckers.

Reasonable...  And just so you know, I think you are doing fine.  I cannot speak for smooth, but I would guess his complaints are different than mine.  For me recently the absolute free for all of assholes has been astonishing.  But some of these are old timers that has seemed to break recently... dunno why.  Also the influx of loquacious noobs has been interesting.

These two things tend to happen at the bottom of cycles.  Since we are not at the bottom of a cycle right now (just judging by time alone) then that makes it interesting.

Also interesting is the sustained unusual Monero action.  Boy I hope we can keep some traction here...  It's long overdue for the king of the shitcoins to take his throne.

There are exactly two main camps.  And I have heard from both since i got Covid.  I am "double vaxxed".

1.  You are going to have it much worse, and your heart will probably suffer. Unvaccinated folks aren't even getting it.

2.  Thank goodness you were vaxxed!  That's why it was mild for you!

That covers about 99% of humans, I am afraid.  Then there is this tiny sliver of folks who are able to hold the tension of not knowing which it is and also can see that things are NOT as we have been told.

I should take all that back.  99% of people are not opinionated assholes.  Can't be.  There are also plenty of people who fall into one of the two camps, but are kind enough not to wave their asses in your face.

Evidently I am tired...  Goodnight.

Oh, and by the way... I am satisfied that I just licked my own elbow.   As much about tongue extension as other limberness...

Good grief if it made any LESS sense it would be entirely random.  And yet there are enough relevant nouns in it to know that whatever algorithm produced it was tuned in SLIGHTLY to this thread.

Odd.

I have to interrupt all this trolling and wall observing and Proudhon proclaimating to tell a story.  A selfish one... but maybe one of you will feel a little of what I felt experiencing it.

I am taking my second and hopefully last day off from work for COVID recovery, which I can tell is wrapping up.  At least the hard bit, I think... Which really was not so bad after all.  Yet at the same time I can see it might leave a mark.  It's hard to imagine not being exhausted by the slightest things very quickly for a while.

So I log in to my work email for a sec and see my boss, a woman much younger than I, who I have known for several years, is about to have her second child!  A little early... but we all knew it could be any time.  And here we are.  Thing is her family has been WRACKED by illness over the last couple weeks.  She had a long respiratory illness (very like my own) which had her down for about 2 weeks over the VERY END of her pregnancy.  Then just a few days ago her firstborn got a stomach bug, and it was SO BAD and he became so dehydrated that they had to go to the hospital for him.  Got him stable and came home.  This is about the time one of her employees (me!) got Covid, but as much as that has been a central part of my life barely on the radar for her I imagine.  And then the husband got the stomach bug.  BAD.  And then just a couple days into all that... baby #2 decided it was time.

It seemed to me an awful lot for a mama to carry.  But at the same time - giving birth is a thing that will not only take it's own course entirely, but it will then erase all of the sting of the hardship endured on the way up to it.

So I found myself rejoicing for her.

And then in an odd moment I was caught up in a sort of vision.  I don't want to be dramatic. I suppose it was just my imagination fueled by cold meds and dehydration.  A dinner table, some 15 years in the future.  Where two teenage boys got to hear for the 20th time the story of how the week the little one came the big one was SO SICK, and so was dad.  And I could imagine the older one saying something sarcastic, and all four of them laughing.

None of us are here forever.  And THESE are the things we are here for.  My own children are the ages of those sons in my "vision".  And a am deeply proud of them. Though we are in the midst of very hard times, we too will laugh at the end of it all, I am sure.

Some day some virus like the one I am now overcoming will take me out (possibly with the help of my own DNA hacked to produce the damn spike proteins by either fools, or malicious people).  I will not have the strength to beat it that time.  And I hope, in the midst of that God will grant me another vision.  This time looking back over the years I was given, and the things I laughed about.  Drinking wine with my wife around a campfire while I hear my two small children alternately fighting and laughing in the camper...  supposed to be going to sleep.

It is easy to get caught up in work, or drama, or politics, or the bitcoin price.  And all these things are important.  

But none of them hold a candle to what we were made for.  I guess I needed to remember this.

What if Jack Mallers is an attack?

Merited because of understanding...

What about this....  What about the guy at Apple high up... the one that he talks to regularly...  Called him. 

"Heya Elon".  Nice move there with the TWTR purchase.  Don't know what you are planning to do, but I can tell you something buddy.  The big guys are talking about pulling The Twitter from the App store.  You don't want that, I'm sure"

"Oh yeah?  Google beat us to the punch??  saying the same thing?"

"Odd that."

"Anyway... nice talking to you as always".

Click.

I don't want this post to be combined with the last one.  So I am starting a new one.  But I assume it will still get combined.

I have been looking at the areas of interest between here and 500 USD.


Looks like they are coming in at ~:

250
275
300
350

Plus/Minus a little.  

But after 350 there's very little gonna hold us back.

What's it gonna feel like if we make it back into that open sky.

Next I am gonna do some analysis of the BTCXMR pair.  So someone post something to make fun of THIS post so I can make that it's own post too!

I would suggest the second strategy suffered more from the bull market making buying less common than once per month.  If you were to adjust for that it might even come out ahead...   How to adjust?

Cup and handle formations have been some of my favorite indicators in the past few years, particularly with Monero.  This is largely in part because they are typically accurate, and play out.

Well Since I have covid I have been spending some time during my misery playing with charts.

Gentlemen.

If this one play out... Boy oh boy.  And I think that since this is based on the XMRUSD chart then that implies a little influence via BTC.  This is one of those perfect storm type things that if it plays out... well look at this:



What I do not have is the right kind of chart here to measure how far up it might go.  But my back of the napkin sort of math says this...  If it can do the 2x needed to complete the handle (from here, roughly) then we havea cup stretching from ~$40 to $520.  That is a 13x.  So a 13x from $520?  $6760.

That means in this overly bullish scenario that we could see a rocket of nearly 30x from where we are right now.

Wow.  And sorry for jinxing it!


Edit!  I went searching for some extra premium conformation bias fuel on trading view and found this "Don Yakka" fellow.  He seems to have seen the same thing I am seeing, but with better squigglies, AND he's projecting further up into the 8k range!  So there's that!



Also you can load some more candles and see the price breaking out of that downward wedge he has on the handle:

Yes.  And evidently they plan on a next act.

I do not think the west will be as wholly compliant this time around.  Of course the choir is ready to sing what ever they are told to sing.... but a lot of folks on the other end as well as the middle are not going to play this time.

Some of us have been stocking ammo.

Even worse listen to people screaming from their apartments after being locked down completely.
https://twitter.com/patrickmadrid/status/1512600420610363394?s=20&t=7oMjQTeImkJGQxBPWCV7uw

Somewhat worrisome is the trend that what starts over there tries to come west too.

I think if that is attempted the perpetrators have a surprise waiting for them this time.

Originally my plan was to just try clightning. But I also noticed I could do some cool balancing things with both, so I've just kept going!

I seem to getting along OK...  Sore throat remains the worst bit.

I have tempted fate more than one by exclaiming "This? This is all it is, and we shut down the world for it?"

I know its been far worse for some.

Thanks!

No one goes there anymore, its always busy - Yogi Berra

Have fun!  I have to admit, I have given this a lot of thought.  And to be honest, I am still not exactly sure what the best ideas are.  There are advantages to a clearnet node, but also TOR give interesting advantages as well!  Particularly all the routing details get folded into TOR.  No port forwarding etc.

The server you describe will be more than able to run bitcoind and lnd and/or cl.  For sure.

One of the things that has puzzled me...  I think my node has gone through these periods of time where it is routing TONS of payment... and then it will just dry up.  The channel you   and I have up seems to have routed about 40 millions SATS.  Not bad.  But I have another channel with (let's say) another prominent WOer that has routed NOTHING.  Puzzles me a little.

But I have some fun with it all, really...

Anyway if you want, when you get the new one up, you are welcome to connect to either of my nodes... I can even do a little triangle with you and my 2.

True!

The only thing I would add is it's seemed to get WORSE recently.  Not sure what that means.