Image SourceBlubber In The Game
Welcome to the thoughts of a "casual dabbler"! I'm someone who dabbles in different projects and if I like the look of them I'll tend to get involved and get some skin, or blubber, in the game! In the crypto world, we have the terminologies related to marine life which are cleverly used on HIVE with gamification of staking by getting to certain levels such as minnow, dolphin, orca and whale.
Over the last week or so, I've been diving in to the calculations to figure out how much of each token or coin you need to have staked to reach certain levels like with LEO. Call it a gamer's obsession but for me, I find it easier to stay motivated if I have a rank to aim for and I have settled on the fact that Orca is the benchmark for me. If I get to this level of stake, I'm pretty happy as the jump up to whale is frankly ginormous!
Having said that, if I reach Bitcoin orca of 2,439 BTC, then we're laughing but even I'm not that deluded! I'll be happy with BTC redfish (2.439 BTC) barring a lottery win! I'm mostly talking about staked Hive and Hive-Engine tokens here.
You Can Have Your Stake And Eat It
The beauty of orca levels of stake is the decent-enough compound interest you get just from having it passively sitting there. As I've grown my HIVE stake over the last 2.5+ years, I have noticed the amount growing bigger with each day vs when I had say 100 HP in the first few months as a fledgling happy-go-lucky HIVE tadpole!
A combination of buying at the low points, like we have now (and just seen today that it's dipped below 600 sats on Huobi), leasing/delegating out to curation guilds so they can put it to use and keep on posting whatever I can and hope it passes for some interesting read and gets some post rewards all contributed. Yes, I got a bit lucky with the creation of HIVE which helped accelerate a bit more but I still wanted to get to Orca before the end of the year.
Has My Finance Mindset Changed?
100% yes. When I first started out here and indeed with crypto, I had no concept of investing at all. Sure, I'd be a good saver for "rainy day" funds but the savings never really got to work because interest rates in the UK have been pretty dismal ever since 2008. Nearly 3 years in to crypto, I'm finding myself thinking more seriously about what I'm spending my income on and investing, getting passive returns from staking and building a pot that I can hopefully use to bring forward my retirement even if it's just by a few years.
You know what I'm going to say don't you...? Spreadsheets!! There a templates out there that you can use if you wanted but I made my own because I'm like that 😎 I can't tell you much of a wake up call this was to see where I was hemorrhaging funds and managed to nip a few of those expenditures in the bud and pop them in to things that might grow such as BTC, HIVE and other investment vehicles. Credit? No no no! Not if you can help it!
I had a conversation with my friends about budgeting (for better or for worse) and asked how they did it as some were going to buy a house or make renovations. They said, "we just look in our bank account and see if we have enough". I was like, "Don't you use a spreadsheet or something to see what you can afford?" They said, "Hell no, I'd rather not see that! I'd probably have a heart attack". I ended the conversation as that seemed to be a massive contradiction but they were having a BBQ at the time so didn't want them to poison my sausages!
In any case, safe to say that my spreadsheet which has the income/outgoings on will be used to see how I can start maximising the sats train and where the passive stake I've got going now all adds to the overall pot, particularly now there has been a 37% increase in BTC in the last 30 days (from £8,156 - £11,487)! Time to put sats to cells!
How about you? Do you have a level you're aiming for? Has your attitude to finance changed since getting in to crypto? Let me know in the comments below!
Nicky