Happy Birthday to Me

Another November 14th, another year ticks by.

Today is my 40th birthday!
And Bitcoin has not wasted any time trolling me for the third year in a row.
Very rude!

Luckily I have some other things to focus on.

Block 80160647

I logged into my Privex node today and noticed that it was actually caught up.

Activated on the node (broadcast pubkey) and it immediately started working.
I'm now minting about one block per hour.
Pretty standard backup witness stuff.
Still it's exciting to have actually completed the task myself.

Hive-In-A-Box (HIAB) life support

While the current setup works and hasn't missed any blocks yet, I still consider my node to be somewhat on life-support. I would personally much rather own my hardware. I still haven't set up the bot that will automatically update the price feed. I don't have a backup witness. There's still a lot more I can do to contribute to the network at this point.

Of course I'll take any @hextech witness votes I can get at this point. I've bled down the ranks from #31 to #45 while the node was disabled. Ouch! I'm pretty committed to using the money I make as a backup witness to continue learning and dedicating more resources to a robust setup. Missing blocks is not fun, and I intend to avoid that scenario if I can.

The short short tutorial for running node-in-a-box.

su
./run.sh start
./run.sh shm_size 24G
nano data/witness_node_data_dir/config.ini

• Insert witness account name + a private key for signing blocks.
• Wait for node to sync
• Turn on node using pubkey @ https://hive.ausbit.dev/witness

Basically if you run into zero problems along the way this is all it takes to get a HIAB node up and running. Of course it is only this easy and streamlined when renting the prefabricated version from Privex, but still I find it somewhat impressive. I'm excited to inevitably buy my own hardware and report back on how difficult it is when starting from scratch. Shouldn't be too bad considering a now have a little more experience with the process.

Hm let's see what else?

• Moody's is threatening to take away USA's triple-A debt rating.
  I honestly have no idea what that means other than it's bad.

• Blackrock filed for a spot ETF for Ethereum.
  Bitcoin maxis in disbelief.

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• Apparently there was a big bank hack that forced analog security measures.
  Crypto fixes this.

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1723029611796152385

- cz_binance

• Wrench attacks are still a threat to crypto users who dox themselves.
  Perhaps we shouldn't be flaunting our wealth.

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• I plan on speaking in a Twitter space tomorrow with theycallmedan, Khal, taskmaster, and anomadsoul. High roller alert!

Conclusion

All in all it's shaping up to be a pretty good day. Still annoying that crypto decided to take a dump for the third birthday in a row but these things happen. Here's to hoping for a swift recovery instead of more FUD and panic.

Feels nice having my @hextech node back up and running even if I still have a lot of work to do to get it up to a higher standard. Looking forward to buying one of these crazy NVMe drives for the first time. But for today I've already done a bit more work than I thought I would so I guess I'll be taking it easy until tomorrow.