I always get a little worried when Friday rolls around. It tends to be a bit of an off day for me as far as posting goes. I try to fill it with interesting facts and tidbits can I hope that everyone can enjoy at least one of the things that I share.
Some weeks, things just come together a bit easier than other weeks. I've had plenty of Friday's where I am scraping together thoughts and ideas and I think this thing is going to get downvoted as a crap post for sure.
Then I have other weeks like this one where the content is coming at me so fast, I'm not sure how I am going to contain it all in a single post. Let's see if I can manage...
While not a proper Finance Friday post, I am going to talk about finance quite a bit. I'm also going to talk about tech, cars, and even a little bit of precious metals (I guess that's finance right?).
Let's start with the really important stuff though. Today is Hive Power Up Day and I was only able to pull together 300 HIVE to power up. It's quite a bit less than I was hoping to, but like many people, I found myself at a deficit in DEC when Splinterlands Lands launched. I had to move about 250 HIVE into DEC. That would have put me at the 500 HIVE I was hoping to power up this month.
I set a goal for myself to make it to 75,000 HP by the end of the year. That doesn't look like it is going to happen at this point, but my hope is that I can get to at least 70K. It's going to be a tight squeeze I think.
I've been dollar cost averaging into the COTI token for a while now. I heard about it from 
Someone in the channel suggested I open a support ticket. I clicked the link and had a chat started with the support rep. I've done this in Leo before, so nothing about the process triggered anything with me.
We talked for a bit, then they said that I needed to do an "integration check" with my Meta Mask wallet and their chain. They gave me a link to follow where I could do that check.
I can't say why, but for some reason I hesitated. It's not that anything was screaming "scam" to me, but something just didn't feel right. I reached out to
It was then I knew I needed to just back away slowly and count myself lucky for not having been duped. I'm so lucky I didn't relinquish full control of my MetaMask account. There's not a ton in there, but it still would have been devastating. Be careful out there folks!
I'm not usually the sort to shill projects, but every now and then something comes on my radar or I have a friend developing something that I feel compelled to share. I have an acquaintance in a Telegram channel that I have known since the last bull run. We are part of a faction in the Alien Worlds game and he has been doing developing and blockchain work for quite a while now.
Garage ID is his latest project. If you are a gearhead this is definitely for you. It's an dapp and community built around the love of cars and all things related to that. When the project is fully running, you will be able to load your vehicles in, track them, earn discounts for products and services and all other sorts of stuff.
Garage ID is currently a work in progress and they have a KickStarter campaign that you can check out in the link above.
I know there are probably a ton of shady Kickstarters out there, but I remember one called Steem Monsters that I donated to early on and look how that turned out for us...
Full disclosure, I still haven't committed funds yet, but I've thrown $50 at dumber projects backed by shadier people, so I don't really see much risk here.
Do your own research of course, but if you are a gear head, you definitely want to check this one out!
This isn't going to be a full post, I am going to save that for another day, but I finally got around to picking up some more silver for the holidays over the Thanksgiving weekend. I tried to visit the one store in person, but they were closed. The other store was opened, but they didn't have a huge selection.
I ended up going online, biting the bullet, and paying $10 for the shipping charge to pick up these beauties (and some other stuff). I plan on keeping one of the Year of the Dragon 1 oz rounds for myself and the other I will give to my nephew/godson for Christmas. They are pretty sweet looking and I can't wait to share with you more info about the place I bought them from.
I was doing my usual browse through the Yahoo news headlines the other day and I came across this article that I found really interesting. Apparently an agency in Spain got sick of dealing with spoiled and nagging clients, so they created their own AI influencer.
Oddly enough, the Instagram account for "Aitana" a 25 year old woman from Barcelona has skyrocketed to 150,000 followers and the agency states that the AI generated woman is brining in $11,000 per month in revenue for them.
She isn't only an influencer they also have her on a platform like OnlyFans making revenue that way as well. It definitely opens the door to the debate about exploitation of AI and where or if there is going to need to be a line drawn.
As a tech guy, I think it is kind of genius. You are solving a problem by removing the "unknown" factors and reducing the chaos that can be introduced due to the human element.
So far people don't seem to mind too much. In fact, a well known celebrity slid into Aitana's DM's and asked her for a date, totally oblivious to the fact that she wasn't real.
This could be a slippery slope or the most innovative thing to happen this year. Time will tell...
Finally, I just want to reiterate how important it is to check your witness votes. Until recently, I had a handful of witnesses I was still voting for who had since gone offline. I've actually been seeing a lot of people spin up nodes lately and I think that is very encouraging. I don't know if it is the impending bull run, perhaps something else, but it is nice to see people putting "skin in the game" on the HIVE blockchain.
Of course, I would be remiss not to mention 
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 
