Since it is Friday and I usually post about finance on Friday, I thought I would dig into my photo archives and find an appropriate opening photo for this post. I opened my cloud storage platform and entered the word "bank" in the search bar. This was the first photo that came up. Not exactly what I was looking for, but that is in fact a river bank, so well played cloud storage, well played.
Not to toot my own horn, but it is a pretty dang good photo, so I guess it will work.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the price of BTC today. It's "whatever" to be honest. It goes up, it goes down, it ends up where it ends up. Like I said, "whatever".
It is time again for another Finance Friday/Friday Finance. This is a series I started where I talk about random bits of financial stuff that I have seen, gathered, or experienced during the week. I hope as a reader you find it informational, entertaining, or both. I also hope it can generate some good discussion and edify the community.
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There have been a few things outside of BTC that have caught my attention over the past week. I think I will focus on those things versus some of the stuff that is going on in the world right now. In general, it's much more hopeful (with a few exceptions).
Travala
Now that we are in the second quarter of 2025, Travala is getting ready to start their next round of "SMART Bonus Contributor Tasks". I boycotted this program for quite some time because I was still a bit salty that the rewards they had initially promised were going to be free for SMART stakers suddenly had strings attached to them.
Last quarter was the first time I actually participated in the tasks. It turns out the things they ask you to do are really quite minimal and for the amount of work you need to put in to earn some more AVA, it's not too bad of a deal.
I plan on participating again this quarter once the window opens for the tasks. It's usually something pretty simple like posting a Tweet or following an account on social media. The hardest part is getting the AVA staked to be access the contributor tasks, but honestly, that's a lot easier than it was when I first started with Travala given the price of AVA now versus what it was when I bought most of mine!
HIVE Stuff
I hit another milestone with my alternate account @bozz.sports the other day. After #HPUD day on April 1st, I was pleased to see that I had crossed the 6000 HP powered up mark. I feel like 10,000 HP is right around the corner now for that account. I also pushed my main account closer to my goal of 100K HP after my recent first of the month power up.
I also recently put some HBD on the market to buy some more HIVE at a specific price point. With the recent pullback in BTC due to tariffs or whatever they are blaming it on these days, that buy order might fill sooner than I anticipated.
If I suddenly have a bundle of HIVE show up in my account it is going to be a difficult task to not power it up and wait for the price to go 3x or 4x so I can move it back into HBD. I'm also about 150K ZING away from hitting my goal of having 1 million ZING staked for the @holozing game.
Newton
@raymondspeaks introduced me to a crypto earning platform called Newton a while ago. It's basically just a faucet. You log in each day and roll a dice to earn some of their token (Ethereal Credits). The hope is that eventually one day those tokens will be worth something. I honestly don't know too much about it, but it's really not too much work adding a few extra clicks to my daily routine, so I figure why not.
PDT
Stocks are doing pretty crappy lately from what I hear. I honestly don't pay too much attention. I probably will once I get closer to retirement, but for now the ups and downs are pretty irrelevant. I picked up 19 shares of the John Hancock Premium Dividend Fund a while ago and I have just been letting it sit in my Robinhood account and earn dividends for the last few years.
My average cost per share is right around $12.46 for each of those shares and each month those same 19 shares pay me about $1.57 in dividends. Obviously I am not going to get rich with just 19 shares, but you can see how things could snowball a bit under the right circumstances.
FSM
Meanwhile my Fortuna Silver Mines stock has taken a bit of a hit and is sitting at less than $5 per share last I checked. The good news is, I already took gains from that stock to cover my initial investment, so I don't really care what happens there. It is interesting to see that while the price of precious metals seems to be going up, the price of stocks tied to them doesn't necessarily seem to be.
COTI
Finally, I don't remember if I mentioned it last week, but the COTI token has been successfully migrated from their own chain to the ERC20 Ethereum network. Those of us who weren't able to participate in the initial staking have been using COTI on the ERC20 side for a while now, but with this move, everyone will be fully moved over to the new chain. This move will bring several security and feature enhancements that are pretty important for a token like this. If you want to find out more, I encourage you to check out their site here
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
