GAME05

I'm actually quite far behind when it comes to retirement savings. Making little money in my 20s and being out of work for much of my 30s did the trick. Grad school was a waste of time and money, too. But now debt-free, credit cards at $0 and basically no rent for the house. I'll be pushing pretty hard to save over the next 15 years.

I debated the same thing with my student loans and personal vehicle, but I paid them down instead of investing the extra. Sure I'd have made a little more investing, but I considered if something bad happened there's a bigger benefit to being debt free than still making monthly payments on stuff.

What programs are you guys using to sync up your holdings for tax accounting? I'm trying a couple but they either have trouble grabbing everything or all I get out of it is a mess of numbers. ----------------- Have a bit of cash that I could add to the market, but I haven't decided yet whether the market is at a bottom or it has further down to go, so I figure it's best to just hold as cash for a while longer and see what happens. Although MonkeyBall got a ton of hype and is way down right now. DTravel is also way down.

My retirement is confusing since I won't have 30 years in with the pension and paying a percent of health care benefit, etc. If it costs a couple hundred bucks to see a financial analyst that sure seems worth it to have someone else figure it all out for you, not to mention they'll know variables maybe you/me haven't thought of yet. And a lot of the times whatever company does your company's 401k will meet with you for free.

Grad school and then not finding a job after the Crash sucked my savings dry. I've got a 6% matching 401k and what will be a modest pension, but I'm hopefully starting a second job soon and intend to put every penny I make into retirement. The second job is specifically because I need the extra income to retire. Ideally I plan to expatriate to Belize and if I can, a tiny place back in Wisconsin.

I had a Wal-Mart thin crust yesterday and it was pretty good. I forgot the price so that makes it hard to call it good/bad. Tasted good, but if I paid $7, it didn't taste THAT good. I may be slowly turning toward the sausage preference, too. I love the caraway flavor. And the pepperoni on a lot of brands is way too spicy.

No doubt the problem will only get worse. Not to mention all the people who lost money because they accidentally sent it to the wrong address. Still holding my coins. I think I just started to get bored and stopped paying such close attention to the market every day. And now that it's down I feel like now's a terrible time to sell. I sold out last week in the regular market, so that sure timed nicely, but not so with crypto.

There are lots of different designs out there for making a brick oven. I've always wanted to make one, but I'm not in a permanent house yet. But it isn't something super-difficult.

That does help, thank you. About what I thought the downsides were, but being told assets could be liquidated really confused me. I'm confident enough staking the Avax/Cosmos/Sol of the world, so I'll eventually have to take a deeper look and see what the APY is for them. I'll give Osmosis a look, thanks for the suggestion.

Sounds to me like they had someone picked for the job already but just had to do the formality of posting the job opening, and so they paid about no attention to the other applicants. My first interview for the career I'm in now was like that--before any questions were asked the lead interviewer congratulated me for making it to the interview round.

Thanks. Since you mentioned LP (?) and DeFi staking, I was reading that it's considered high-risk because if the market goes down a lot in the time you have it staked, you risk your assets being liquidated. Is that true? I'd been thinking I'm a bit over-leveraged and so I wanted to do something else with a chunk of my money. So all I could think of is staking non-Tether stablecoins. Otherwise I was just going to long-term-hold a bigger project like Solana or Avax after this current bubble settles down and then just ignore any dips. I feel confident I'll do a better job taking profits next year. Plus I hopefully have a second income coming which will be used as my "buy the dips" fund.

Been a big learning year for me especially in terms of taking profits and using volatility to my advantage. My value-investing background says "The best time to sell is never," which doesn't so much apply to this market. I'm looking forward to next year now that I have a better sense of taking profits when a token reaches something of a high. I plan on checking the Fear and Greed Index a lot and using that as the big indication of whether I should be in or out of the market. Also may look to stake a decent percentage next year, too. I'm feeling like I'm a bit over-leveraged with what I'm actively trading, and so staking an L1 coin should be good to be able to ignore some of the ups and downs but make a small amount of interest on it.

Yep. Cold oven @ 405. Pizza is ready about a minute after the oven dings that it's come to temperature. The thinnest of crispy layer on the bottom the way pizza is supposed to be.

I've heard before that only certain types of flour work well if you're going to overnight-proof dough in the fridge. Anybody know what I should be using? OO?

Thank you for that kind post. Unfortunately one of my faults in investing is I don't hold on to tokens long enough. I made some money off of AVAX but didn't catch the craziness. Fortunately, though, I'd moved it into FINA and Sandbox. I'm thinking next week I may start pulling out 10% per week just in anticipation of the crash. Dunno. But I'm scared of holding too long and just eating a big dip.

The ProShares futures ETF has a 1% fee. Grayscale has a 2% fee, and even free stock trading exchanges you're paying a market maker. Somebody somewhere is always making money off you/me. I almost forgot that Robinhood offers crypto, too, but just a few of them. So it can depend on what you're looking to do, too. Some folks just want Bitcoin and Ethereum, and for that, Grayscale/Robinhood/futures ETF or waiting for a spot ETF is probably your best bet. But if you're hoping to find that next 10x, then you'll want a crypto exchange. But yeah, when you get into it, for a good long while it'll feel like you're seven years old and you just lost your parents in Chinatown. But hey, you've always got us here!

What I'd recommend is going to Coinbase Pro. Remember it'll be different from regular Coinbase. Pro will be the one with the candle charts. It'll take a couple days to get your bank verified and all that. Definitely use a strong password and 2FA. I haven't ever been sent one, but definitely if you get an email from Coinbase that looks all official, assume it's a scam. You can also get one-time-use 2FA codes, which would be helpful if you ever lose your phone. Also get some portfolio tracker, because Coinbase ain't gonna give you a tax form. I use two different exchanges and will trade on them because it's cheaper and faster. I use DEXs, but only when I want to buy a token not yet listed on the exchanges. You're probably never going to have a transaction of 0.25% or less. And yeah, Ethereum's gas fees are outrageous. At this point I don't buy any Ethereum-based token on a dex unless I can get it off an exchange. I feel comfortable holding a modest amount of money on Coinbase. A bigger amount you might want to look into a hardware wallet like Ledger. Online wallets are convenient, but they also end up subject to hacks if you happen to download some virus on your computer. Should be common sense, but don't trade crypto or use an online wallet on a public wi-fi. Metamask is the most popular online wallet and you'll need some sort of online wallet to eventually trade on a dex. But also double-check the online wallet address before you download it--Fantom Wallet has a pretty bad copycat version out there now that people are downloading. Not sure if I've posted this before, but good Youtube channels: Whiteboard Crypto--a great "What is ___" about crypto and doesn't push opinion Invest Answers--some opinion, but generally good quality stuff Altcoin Daily--The Nightly News of crypto Alex Becker--good for degenerate low-cap gaming coins Elio Trades--Been liking him more, though he can be overly bullish at times JRNY Crypto and Sheldon Evans are also good It's also of value to go on CoinGecko and use their "categories" tabs. It helps you learn basically what each coin is about. Especially if you have an industry skillset like you know the Real Estate market, you can focus on just the coins in that category. It's also a great way of investing because there's otherwise just too much out there to properly learn.

When the market crashes I'll be curious if NFT prices go with it. If they do I'm thinking I may well buy "land" on Sandbox.

Stuff like Valkrye that just came on the market is a futures ETF. Grayscale has applied for a spot ETF and that's likely to be approved mid/late December. Right now Grayscale has a few different cryptos it offers, though technically you're investing in the trust which only owns that particular crypto. It's worth looking at some of the differences, as Grayscale doesn't track perfectly with the crypto market. But otherwise yeah, just go with Coinbase Pro. It has a good security record, though I wouldn't hold six figures there. Alts are where it's at!

There's regular Coinbase and then there's Coinbase Pro. Regular Coinbase is simpler but charges 2.5%. It basically exists just to rip off the newbies. Coinbase Pro and Binance US charge 0.5%. If you can find 0.25% let me know! I'd recommend one of those for an exchange. Or KuCoin if you want to trade more than the ~50 coins the other two offer. If you don't want exchanges, then you're talking about a dex (decentralized exchange). Each blockchain has their own. So Ethereum has Uniswap and Avalanche has TraderJoe, etc. You'll need an online wallet like Metamask to use those (not every online wallet accepts every blockchain's coins). But then you're paying gas fees, which will vary by blockchain as well as how busy the network is at the moment.

Nothing about a 10x sounds like boring basics to me. Well done! So the Infrastructure Bill is set to make crypto effectively illegal in 2024. Any trade of $10k or more of any digital asset will require the buyer to collect the APY (identification, including social security number) from the seller. The wording also makes special note that multiple trades of $9999 won't fly. Failure to do so will be a felony. There's some hope, anyway, that since it's three years away that this particular part of the law will be repealed in time.

Whenever you start to think that crypto has gone too mainstream just remember there's two coins in the Top 10 which offer nothing but a picture of a dog. Then again when people say crypto is stupid and is going to fail, I also can't help but realize there's two coins in the Top 10 which offer nothing but a picture of a dog. I get a little frustrated I haven't made any huge ton of money this year, but then again I started off in regular Coinbase with only the major coins and only got into the small stuff pretty late. Plus coming from the stock market side of things I was going with the Buffet advice of "The best time to sell is never" and ended up eating that 50% July crash and it took a while to recover from that. I had it in my head that the market would move from Bitcoin to the Tier 1s and on down the line. Saw a video recently I tended to agree with and he was saying that in 2017 it worked like that, but that was also when information was sparse, there weren't stablecoins to facilitate trading as well as no major exchanges. But now I'm more moving to the idea of either finding an area you have a particular knowledge of, or deciding on what area will do the best and sticking to that. Ideally both. But basically finding your lane and sticking to it. But money just isn't flowing in an orderly fashion anymore. For the past month I've moved things around a lot. Not chasing trends and buying what's already gone up, but still moving around. I'm trying to stop that now and just sticking with the gaming/gambling side of things. Polkadot is still my #1 holding (was AVAX) but by in large I'm liking the tiny-cap coins and will look to just stick it out with them the rest of the way. I keep making the mistake of not being patient enough, like getting tired of Chain Guardians not moving much at $0.90, selling it and then seeing it at $1.70 a few weeks later. I'm still not great at knowing when to sell. Still fighting the value investing stock market habits. One could certainly just wait to sell when a coin hits an appropriate market cap, but that alone ignores the vagaries of the crazy crypto market as a whole. Not that the answer could ever be concrete and easy. Still, at least the long-term strategy is in place. Hope that the ridiculous fourth-year jump really does happen then get out of the market entirely for six months until things bottom out. Stake the majority in Tier 1 coins. Use a gambling-level amount to play around with new gaming coins, and then just wait four years and hope the trend happens again. And fortunately long-term plans like this *always* work out the way you expect them to! (And likely the four-year bumps and those extreme changes reduce with the further adoption and investment in the space.)

The Valkrye Bitcoin ETF was approved, though it's a futures ETF. As Mark Cuban said "Why buy futures when I can buy the real thing?" Should be a fun day on Monday when the markets open. Fantom jumped a few weeks ago and Polkadot did last week, though I expect a continued big rise out of Polkadot. I think Avax will be a big mover next. Luna took a bit of a jump recently but I think it still has a lot of steam behind it. But overall I think the Tier 1 coins will bounce first followed by the ecosystems behind them. At least that tends to be the way of things with investment money that it trickles down in order of more secure gambles to less secure. People don't want to buy a Bitcoin that's already risen, so they move onto the next best thing and so on. But 1Q and moving forward I really like gaming and gambling. It presents the most immediate use case for crypto along with some new ways consumers can spend money which doesn't exist yet. Plus we're due for a bear market soon which could last a year or so, and what tends to last in bear markets are projects with use cases compared to "what we'll eventually be able to do" projects, same as value stocks vs. growth stocks in the regular market.

Bitcoin ETF rumored to be coming maybe even this month. Load up now before everyone else does!

I do only have thoughts on trying to time things during this expected bull run. Next year my goal is just to get better at taking profits during market runs so that I can better buy back into the dips. By the numbers crypto is 8x more volatile than the S&P, and so I do think that degree of volatility requires a different approach from regular market investing. I missed Solana, too, but I think there's still some room to grow underneath it. Solana grows first and then everything underneath it. For example, Uniswap's market cap is 4.3% of Ethereum, but Raydium is 1.6% of Solana, not to mention whatever more room Solana has to grow. And I'll also be looking at more gaming/NFT projects underneath Solana because being faster and cheaper I think Solana will be the more preferred blockchain for them to use. Build on Ethereum and who's gonna buy a $5 sword along with a $5 gas fee? (I kinda hate Ethereum, but we'll see what 2.0 brings us.) Not sure what you all think, but I'd imagine if there's going to be a "next Solana" in 2022, for now I'm presuming that to be Fantom. I'll probably move into Trader Joe and Chain Guardians come December in the NFT/Gaming space.