Happy to help however you might need.

Yes it was a really nice time, albeit entirely too short. It's definitely crystallized for us that our next chapter will begin in Portland. We are very ready to live there. It's a very different culture and pace of life, one I really appreciate, without the insane cost of living that plagues a lot of the rest of the West Coast's metropolis areas.

Super excited for 2.0, and as ever, look forward to keeping in touch! w00t!

Yeah, agreed. Sweet article; dope headline and accompanying image.

I was wary of the falling knife stuff during the the August 1 forking event. I was hearing a lot of internet opinion in favor of moving as much altcoin as possible into bitcoin to maximize the amount of bitcoin cash. I thought that made sense, but as hedge against bitcoin potentially cratering, I only moved half of my alts into btc.

Turns out the right move would have been to do it all. But I wanted to still have skin in the game in case the Y2K-like fears actually came to pass. Wish I'd loaded up on more btc than I did. But I'm generally in a little bit too deep anyway, though I'm not exactly a risk-averse person.

Supeerrrrr looking forward to launch of DNotes 2.0. Looking at the price action of something like NEO, aka Antshares 2.0, leaves me feeling very bullish about the short term prospects of NOTE. In addition, of course, to value of the long term visioning that is always at the forefront of all DNotes decision-making.

Like Zuck said once back in the day, "I'm here to build for the long term. Anything else is just a distraction."

How can I help? Pm me...

Ah, bummer. No worries. Thought it might be work out well like it did a few weeks ago. TeeGee, I hope that your flight back is going/has gone well. And yes, it'll definitely be a good vacation. August 4th is my wife and my 10th Anniversary. Time does indeed fly when you're having fun!

Completely agree. In fact there was a great Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast that I listened to on my run the other day, about whether we should Tokenize All the Things....Pretty interesting discussion and some nice definition around the kinds of things that can benefit from the blockchain. It's conversation like that which to me really indicates some maturation in the space. Blockchain is revolutionary, but not everything must needs be tokenized.

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-338-tokenizing-everything-what-does-that-even-mean

Nice! What's you're schedules like on Friday? It's the first day of my vacation and my flight out to Portland doesn't leave until 8:40p. Would be great to sync up if we can manage it!

Yeah, I like that bit too. Nice post/find.

I listened to a podcast on my run yesterday. It's Andreas Antonopoulos talking about the upcoming changes in bitcoin. I definitely couldn't follow the whole discussion, but still found it super interesting/enlightening.

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-337-no-rulers-here

Because of course you did. Why would I have thought you weren't already 10 steps ahead? If you need, I've got some good contacts in the space who can help optimize here too.

I should have waited until this post to throw out my Caceres advice above.

Watching markets 24/7...having trouble sleeping....this is no recipe for happy holding. Trust me, I live this reality myself with my own technology startup that I work for and have invested deeply into (far more than I can afford to lose). I spend 24/7 doing exactly what you mention, not sleeping, anxiously stressing, wondering about every market machination....I promise myself that I'll never be in this position again.

And crypto gives me a chance to prove that declaration. Hold. Hold some more. And then hold longer than that. I realize I, and no one else controls how I emotionally feel about those previous 10 words. I can hold and hold, and that understanding of the long term value here means that nobody can tell me how to feel about holding through short term market movements.

I deeply implore you, don't stay up thinking of the market. You might lose your whole investment. Don't kid yourself. If you study the great Bell Labs mathematician John Kelly and his "Kelly Criterion"...the risk of ruin in the crypto space is nontrivial. You can go bust, very easily. Because it's very very hard to make bets in a completely Kelly compatible way.

Literally the only way to combat this is to bet with money you can completely lose, and divorce yourself from market movements in the short term. Because it's almost impossible to make bets with 0 risk of ruin, which is what being Kelly compatible means.

I have not bet this way with my technology startup, and it eats me alive inside. I wont ever make this same emotional mistake again, and that has started with crypto investing.

Storytelling. We are so similar to many other species, like the Neanderthals. But they hunted alone. We learned gather ourselves through reason to figure out how to group hunt in such a way that we could funnel meat into a gorge and slaughter them all in one go and have meat for a year. We learned to trade with each other, based on trust. Our species grew dominant by the power of stories.

Maybe it's esoteric and not super tactical, but we are not rational beings. The ability to bind ourselves via stories, informed by reason but also intuition...that is what gets people into the fold.

TeeGee's videos are absurdly good as a starting point. But, tactically, they need to be in front of more eyeballs. It's not all that expensive to promote videos on YouTube, generating tens of thousands of views within a target audience. It's maybe even easier on Facebook.

Basically, to take it from the existential to the practical...I think sophisticated digital marketing nous has a part to play here.

Every morning I spend 10-15 minutes skimming Quora. It's a really great place to learn things in quick bites. I saw a link to an article on qz.com, and it's one of the best pieces of crypto investing advice that I've seen.

https://qz.com/990088/how-to-become-a-bitcoin-millionaire-according-to-wences-casares-of-xapo/

The formula, according to Casares? Take 1% or less of what you own, buy bitcoin with it, and then forget about it for at least the next five years; ideally the next decade. “You either lose one percent of your net worth, which most people can take, or you make millions,” he told a room of cryptocurrency advocates at the Westin in Times Square.

Buy what you can afford to lose completely. Then hold. And hold some more. And then hold for longer than that. You'll wake up in a decade with real money. The only way, imo, to stomach the short-term volatility and the emotions therein...is to deliberately not care about the short term machinations of the market.

I've written this aphorism on the whiteboard walls in all four of our offices..."But if you look very closely, most overnight success stories took a really long time." - Steve Jobs, in a CNBC docu about Pixar

I feel like a sartorial genius, sporting such fancy new threads today at the office....

I'm not super well practiced at thinking along these lines. My "economic theory" muscles need a little exercising. So excuse me if this seems obtuse, but why can't the intrinsic value be thought of as the social trust of the community?

The article's author refers to gold being "shiny" as intrinsic value. What does that mean? Shiny is a physical characteristic of a thing, which people find psychologically pleasing. Building a trust based, decentralized means of exchange is also psychologically pleasing. And at it's core, it's all math. Only we are talking about the positive psychological effects emanating from math-backed bytes, as opposed to the positive psychological effects emanating from math-based bits (i.e. physics, chemistry).

And then when comparing our genetically driven desire to be social, to build psychological trust between groups, to tell ourselves stories...I'd argue that this is far better with bitcoin than with fiat currency. The economies of the United States, the European Union, is so complex, so opaque, so unaccessible. Why do we trust these government's promises, which underlie the value of their monies? Of course there are reasons, but on balance, I'd argue they are more nebulous than trusting bitcoin. Because their is a verifiable purely mathematical reason underlying the entire superstructure. There is no opacity. Well, given the example of Chinese miners maybe controlling the network one day, there is some. But I'd say that is far less than opacity of Goldman Sachs puppetmasters running the world.

Basically, why isn't long-term social trust considered an intrinsic value? In fact, if you look at this from the perspective of Yuval Harari in Sapies, this is the core of our entire species. We have the ability to bind ourselves by the stories we tell, which get strengthen over time generation to generation.

That seems to be the case with pretty much all altcoins today.

If you look at overall BTC dominance of the total coin market cap, it was like 37-38% a week or two back. And right now, it's 43+%. So, it stands to reason that on a day when 145 of the top 150 coins are in the red (with most of them being down 10+%), and a day that is seeing an increase in BTC market cap dominance....that most alts would fall further today than bitcoin.

Doesn't seem too out of the ordinary, all in all. Though it does kinda suck to lose the kind of money today, overall (in BTC, LTC, ETC, ETH, XRP, and SYS, along with NOTE) that make grown men cry.

But I'm determined to be not be emotional about all this volatility. Either up, or down.

HODLLLLLL

Super dope video TeeGee! Happy to help, in my small way. Next step is to get our Teleporter Project out the door and we can do full capture VR type videos :-)

The whole altcoin space is getting hammered today. Always glad to pick up a bunch more NOTE, SYS, and some of the majors on these dips!

Me too! The Auburn Tri-Color is wicked sharp looking. A belated Father's Day present from me to myself :-)

I remember reading Warren's Buffett's autobiography, "Snowball", and was struck at how lucky he considered himself. In fact he considers it one of his chief pieces of luck, that he started early. In fact that's the entire reason why his book is called Snowball. The earlier you start, the longer the hill becomes for your snowball to roll down the hill, accumulating with each turn.

The point is, just start. And given that you are so young, you have the benefit of being able to broaden out your risk parameters. You can invest in volatile risky things when nearing retirement. Even though I'm a firm believer in crypto, imagine if you are retiring next week. And then tomorrow bitcoin decreases by 30%. Sure, it will double and triple again in time. But that means nothing when you are retiring next week. So the fact that your time horizon is so long is your chief advantage. Just start. And then understand it's for the long haul. Sock the money away and don't give it a second thought. Practically pretend that you don't have it. And then one day you'll wake up and then you'll have a nontrivial sum.

One app that I absolutely love is called Acorns. It takes all your purchases, rounds them up to the nearest dollar and invests the "round ups." A quarter here, a quarter there, and next thing you know I have enough in this account to buy 1 bitcoin, which is what I did. And now my account is low. And I look forward to building it again through more round ups.

It's basically an app which automates your idea of taking small chunks, very regularly, and putting them into something meaningful over the long term. Essentially you're just cutting out the Acorns middle man and investing chunks yourself this week. Good on you. I tend to need something to force me to do this, so Acorns is a good fit for me.

I am an elder millennial with three kids, so I don't have a lot of spare cash flow. I say that to tell you that whilst you have relatively modest cash needs, be as aggressive as you can with investing. Not necessarily with what you are investing (dont just go buy a bunch of deep out of the money options on a pink sheet stock, for example), but in terms of how much you invest. Seek to put as much away as possible. Put some in a retirement account like the US, and put some in DNotes.


Given my online handle, you might guess that this is how I got into crypto: on the mining side. Folks might make it seem super hard. But honestly, if I can do it, anyone can. In terms of deep technical expertise, I'm mostly just a novice. I learned by doing.

I spent $2400 on my first mining rig three years ago. Good motherboard, open air mining case, Intel Celeron CPU (aka a cheap one), 4GB of RAM, a used monitor and cheap keyboard/mouse, a free Linux distro for the OS, a cheap hard drive, an add2psu component to string together 2 PSUs (it's way cheaper to string together 2 750w PSUs, than buy a single 1500w PSU), some powered USB risers to keep the GPUs off the mobo for heat management purposes.....just to be clear, super inexpensive components....and then top top of the line GPUs.

I mined for a long time, and then shut down my miner, and sold it for parts. All told, the net cost was $1300. And I mined coins which are many, many times that. To the point where they could pay off my house today (of course, I don't live in a fancy mansion, but hey). We are talking thousands of percent ROI on that net rig cost.

The major mistake I made was to stop mining when it became basically breakeven, in terms of the value of the litecoin I was mining versus the cost of electricity. And it sounds stupid, but I didn't into account the idea that the litecoins (to give an example, but I mostly mined DNotes, actually) might rise in value over a long time.

So I basically gave up on mining, way way way too soon. If you put in the effort and capital to make a rig, keep it going as long as possible. Because likely future appreciation will make it profitable to mine even if it doesn't quite seem so in the present. Lemme know if this spurred any questions. Happy to help further here.

In fact, I literally am putting together a new rig right now. Assembled the thing today with my daughter. Now just waiting on the GPUs (6 EVGA GTX 1070 Superclocked cards) to get here midweek, then I'm off to the races!!

"If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."
-Steve Jobs, in a CNBC docu on Pixar