Taking a $60 Labor Day Weekend Vaction

We stayed two nights at a really nice place and the rate was $400+ per night.  Each meal cost us at least $150 and we ate a lot as they have great places.  We got souvenirs, went go-karting, and did all the normal yearly things including my annual eating of a lobster with a bib and all.

So how did I pay only the equivalent of $60 you ask? Back on January 7th, I purchased 28.11 SOL for 2.19 USDT each and staked it to earn more SOL.

SOL is the coin for the Solana project which is one of the newest and most promising crypto ecosystems out there.  Solana aims to allow DEFI to move at an alarmingly quick pace with 400 milliseconds blocktimes and hard set transaction costs of 1 penny or less.

DEFI, if you aren’t aware, stands for Decentralized Finance and was introduced by the Ethereum blockchain a while back.  One of the first players was Uniswap.  DEFI is a place without banks where you, and only you, hold your crypto.  To do a transaction on DEFI one must pay a “gas fee” no matter what network you transact on.  When ETH DEFI began the automatically calculated gas fee was worth about $1.  Not bad – make a $5,000 trade for $1.

The challenge on the ETH-based DEFI was when NFTs came out the transaction volume met up against the limit of the ETH network and this forced transaction costs to skyrocket.  Recently, I have seen quotes to pay upwards of $3k just to sell $100 worth of tokens.

Anything I own in ETH-DEFI is forever frozen until this problem is fixed 🙁

The fee increases are dynamic and make ETH DEFI rather unusable.  This has opened the door to other competitive solutions like Solana (SOL), Polygon (MATIC), Avalanche (AVAX), among many others.

One of the reasons Bitcoin is so valuable is because only 21 million BTC will ever exist and that creates scarcity.  The scarcity of BTC is greater than gold. The two main thrusts in my January purchase of SOL is because the project has one of the largest forces in crypto behind them (FTX / FTX US) and ONLY 488,630,611 SOL will ever exist!   SOL is scarce, as is BTC, but not quite as scarce since more SOL will exist than BTC.  So a long-term HODLer (like me) should most definitely keep a bag of SOL.

All of these factors led to my initial purchase and I wasn’t surprised when it shot up by 7719% in 244 days.

Prior to leaving for my trip I sold enough to return my full 61 USDT investment and pay for my family vacation.  The funniest thing is that I know others who did the exact same thing.

NOTE that I also sold enough to cover the taxes on this transaction. I always keep an extra 30% aside from every crypto sale so I pulled out 130% of the money I needed to pay for my vacation as the extra 30% will go to the IRS.

Cheers to crypto! Here’s to a longer run up on SOL as now I have a de-risked bag of this crypto staking. I’m also earning more SOL and a few from a bot that is doing rather well with the volatility of late.  This is one I intend on holding for a VERY long time. 🙂