November Thoughts
Crypto Ponders
Bitcoin and Ethereum are still level and people are just waiting for it to drop way lower to buy up at the $10k-$15k range and that may trigger a pump in Bitcoin above $25k per coin. The pump back up into the $30k range won't have a sign telling everyone, it’ll just slowly happen. In 2024 there may be a scenario where Bitcoin and cryptos trend along with whatever the stock market does until Bitcoin’s next halving cycle in 2024. It may be hard to time the market though so it’s probably nice to dollar cost average whenever. Not advice, just an observation for others. The Incubator discord server has been pretty slow and they created a group chat on Twitter. The Incubator does spaces on a couple of days of the week but that's just like a group phone call. The pump of the month happened this week, most alt-coins went up a lot, and bitcoin some. Puppy tokens, as I call them, Shiba Inu and Dogecoin pumped the most this week. We’ll see if this week’s pump holds or not but Polygon and Cardano went up double digits, and Ethereum went up big also but not so much for Bitcoin. The crypto market is at the spot where it’s down large amounts over since last November but any pump makes it seem like it’s the bull run again but like I typed previously, that probably won’t happen for another year. The crypto market may pump along with the stock market but it’ll really blast off in 2024. Dogecoin pumps off of what Elon Musk says or does, so when he bought Twitter this week, Dogecoin pumped 50% in one day. People think since Mr. Musk owns Twitter that he’ll integrate Dogecoin somehow.
Cardano
Cardano is another cryptocurrency that was added to Robinhood, probably because it will be here for a long haul and make it to the top. It’s a top 10 crypto too and offers to stake on Coinbase. Coinbase sucks because it just has so many odd things making it not a place where you can trust, in my opinion of course. Others may love Coinbase or Coinbase Pro but not me, it leaves a small amount of the cryptos it offers people for taking quizzes. So when you transfer “all” of the amount to Bitcoin or cash, it leaves a penny in that crypto it gave you for free. So you always have a penny of 20 different random cryptos from the quizzes, that is mainly the only reason I don’t use it. Cardano has lots of projects operating on its blockchain or using it for another reason, making it a coin that people believe will go up rather than down. That is the whole idea, buy cryptos you think will go up in price rather than down. Cardano is just one of the coins that people hold because of what it has with it.
Polygon
Polygon is another crypto that lots of people hold, and is also a top 10 coin, and runs off Ethereum from what I know. They have layers to cryptos, and I don’t know that much about that but will learn over time. From what I know gas fees are only for Ethereum and were used for NFT transactions on Opensea. Opensea is an NFT marketplace and has gas fees to just buy an NFT or sell an NFT, or just any transaction. Polygon is an option on Opensea and doesn’t have gas fees from what I know, making it almost better crypto. What shocks me is that Dogecoin and Polygon are about the same in market cap, while Dogecoin is just a meme coin. When I was making my photos and artwork into NFTs, I used Polygon because I could mint 100 or 10000 NFTs for free and no gas fees if I used Polygon instead of Ethereum.
Coding (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, React, & Python)
I started coding again every day, and the website keeps track of how many days you code and how many challenges you finish every day. It’s on Freecodecamp.org, and I started with the JavaScript course and just want to finish it. It usually gets too hard at the end of the course and I just want to finish. I did a python course 3 times on Codecademy, but JavaScript is a whole different language. It goes over everything and after JavaScript, I am just going to do as many challenges as I can in different languages. I think React is worth learning because others have said it’s a nice one to learn.
The old course challenges give a hint and some explain through a video but you still need to know what you’re typing because copy and paste aren't allowed. The newer course for HTML and CSS doesn't give out hints anymore, so if you’re stuck you really have to think hard. I am starting the web design stuff, HTML and CSS, building easy simple websites on the side with what I learn. I kind of still think the HTML is pretty easy but would be hard for someone who never used HTML before. HTML is the way websites become websites, if you remember myspace profile pages; that was all HTML. Adding a song or photo to your myspace page was HTML, we just all copied and pasted chunks of HTML. Websites aren't going anywhere soon so learning HTML further is still important. One thing I am doing is trying to learn the material freecodecamp offers so I can understand it more.
I started watching the new MIT 2020 algorithm lectures on YouTube, MIT has open courseware for some courses. I never took an algorithms course so everything the professor says is new to me. They have a Python programming course from 2016 that I may go through too. I might pay for the python course on Codecademy and watch the MIT lectures at the same time as I do the python course. I got to the end of the CSS and HTML courses and had trouble just creating a page for the certificate. So I then went way back to the basics and made a hello world text file in notepad. I then added what CSS I knew and made a fun page to share on Instagram but nothing serious. I wasn’t creating much with the course and it really brings your brain strength out or not so much if you can’t do what code you want to do.
CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is what makes the website fonts and borders the colors and sizes they are. It connects styles to the HTML code, myspace didn’t do this, this is more advanced than copy-and-paste templates. Freecodecamp.org starts with easy challenges and goes on with hard further on in the course like the others. CSS takes boring HTML, the building blocks of the internet, and makes them the style they are. If you want to make a website and have the words all gray, you would change the CSS. I found out I know some CSS when I made my Hello Universe website, but the deeper concepts of animation of letters and blocks of code I can’t figure out where I learned that on freecodecamp.org.
Be a nice human.