Luftie The Anonymous

Posted on Mar 30

From Zero to Crypto Hero (Week 4) - Week of Break from Coding and Big Regret

#web3 #privacy #event #discuss

Hello Dev.to Community

This time I'm writing the article one day later, as I usually kept to push the updates to appear regularly on sunday. Well today is monday, so I guess it's not a big deal 😅 (Especially coz mostly my posts do not make big outreach). Anyways, promise is a promise, thus I upload this tiny update on my work.

Are you ready ? Let's go !

Introduction

So if I said, that I took break from coding, it means I've been buggering around, doing nothing and I just post it to just keep the streak ? Well technically correct :D

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this part, don't forget to hit a like or some other cool emoji and till next time. See ya !

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Ok, I was joking 🤣. If you're still here to read further, congrats your curiosity is out of space 🚀.

This week perhaps was not filled a lot of with coding/programming whatsoever. But for sure it was not boring or completely wasted time.

So what have I been doing throughout this week ?

Let's start with the fact, that I've been 3 days out and about in Warsaw on the conference Next Block Expo, specially devoted to cryptocurrencies but discussed from financial angle. I have shared more of my views on the event in that article (If you're interested go on and read it)

Luftie The Anonymous

Mar 27

My Experiences from NBX and Privacy Hell For Crypto....

#discuss #web3 #event #blockchain

5 min read

As I reached my home-town and woke-up the next day, I honestly felt as though someone would have completely stolen my batteries🪫

In general, I liked the event from the point of view, that there were more projects that were genuinely interesting me than on the last edition, however here are yet couple of inferences that came into my mind. Not only about

Inferences

I'm not a fan of big cities

I know in previous article I have written, that I do not like big cities, but that was very general statement. I've written in the article that I hate big cities, I forgot to add that at least in Poland, but more on that later.

Before I start let's define what is a big city (at least for me) ? A big city at least for me is a agglomeration in which live 500k+ people (incld. commute-workers + students).

Although I personally do not live in some hicksville, I used to say so about place where I live. Warsaw felt for me like rotten, toxic and fake. I felt more endangered than even in Berlin tbh, whereas Berlin got the most unliked city in my hierarchy.

And additionally the air-conditions in Warsaw seemed awful to me (However I'm kind of over-sensitive in this case, so I might be biased). I mean indeed, the centre, accompanied by skyscrapers is looking nice and the most popular places are impressive, but for me it was enough to see how the city looks like 2/4/6 km away from the highlight-spots, to realise that Warsaw's beauty is only marketing (as always lol).

It's actually quite common in Poland, but I guess every city has it's issues, regardless of the country. I remember back 2023, as I gone for my first ever solo-trip to Manchester, England. I've been there for about 4 days, back then I really didn't experience something that would be hideous in some way, except a hobo, who pissed on a wall while I've been walking through the city, seeking a place to purchase a ticket for public-transport.

I admire always England for their infrastructure and architecture, when it comes to metropolis like Greater Manchester. I always laughed that Manchester is smaller than my city, but then I realised that the cities fade between each other and I remember that I could not realise if I'm in Salford/Trafford or Manchester. So were my experiences at least.

The World is centralized, not by government, by technology:

Sorry, I had no clue how to name this inference lol. I want to tell about my experience in Warsaw that indeed, was very mixed because I had kind of emergency situation. I haven't taken the phone-charger to my phone, although before leaving the house I had been plugging in the power-bank to pack it into backpack.

Unfortunately both power-bank and charger have been left at home by the time of my departure. Unluckily, my phone's battery's level was decreasing rapidly, like never before.

And I was looking for place where to purchase a charger and I had impression that almost everything is against me. Suddenly some arab-guy and afterwards a hobo wanted to scrounge money from me and as I gone to the mall by bus, there was some shady-guy following me weirdly as though he wanted to pick-pocket me or something, he resigned after I have shown him a pepper-spray in my hand, not having even made an eye-contact with that guy.

I gone to a first mall and the charger cheapest charger was 100 PLN, it was Media-Markt shop. I asked the assistant, if can help me choose some cheap charger, and shockingly he advised me to go to the mall on the other side of the street to buy a charger in a supermarket.

The price there ? 18.50 PLN (for cable and the charger-cube) ! Whereas the cable at Media-Markt its-self was 79 PLN ! Can you comprehend it ? There is more 500% spread between price in special IT-RTV-AGD Shop and Super-market. It just blew my mind, honestly speaking and would never say it was reality.

I almost burst in tears when I have experienced the vibration of my phone going out of battery and me being not even with knowledge, where to purchase a charger.

What I meant by centralisation is that everything nowadays is heavily based on electronics and current/electricity. Perhaps that's another problem to be solved, huh ? I know it's my fault in the end of the days, that I hadn't taken the charger 😅. I do not seek for excuses.

Small events > Big events: I reckon smaller events that are highly technical or devoted specifically for specific topic, are better than big events, where there are a lot of people. Big events tend to be more general and kind of discombobulating, as there are so many people talking to each other one has an impression to be a weirdo, not having talked to anyone.

Big events have also a flaw, that there is very intrusive and pressure-full marketing done and on one day you can buy the same ticket for 65$ and the next day you can have 2 tickets in the same price, which is annoying. Smaller events often have stable price of the event-ticket, which I find a great solution, even if for someone it out of budget.

However for sure good things about big-events is bigger amount of projects and companies to be approached and talked to, to know what services are nowadays offered on the market.

And therefore, the amount of stickers is also greater :D Here's the new layout/design of my laptop. Hope you like it 😁

Whereas smaller events like for sure Monero Konferenco could be such event......

Unfortunately, I guess I will not be able to get to the event, due to the financial circumstances on my own. Now, I've an impression as though I wasted my money on NBX to be honest, although there are visible benefits from that event.

I really would love to visit Monero Konferenco this year's edition (even though it's in Warsaw). This event is going to be technical and specific, something I had dreamt about and could not find so specifically. It sounds it's not going to be sort of scattered gibberish about financial matters.

Don't get me wrong, finances are super-important field of human-life, but when it comes to such events, it ends up on artificially looking for me severe talks about the future, another 101 sessions instead of bringing some more medium-advanced/advanced knowledge so people can develop.

And unfortunately a lot of speakers in my eyes are just dreams-sellers and are excluded from reality, pushing from the stage some truisms about hard-work, persistence, everything everyone knows about. But in the end of the days, everyone has to deal with their own issues and do everything what they can in their scale to solve them, not in the speaker's scale.

Furthermore, I do not preach that big-events, are bad and you should not attend them. No I just present the trade-offs of both types of events. Both have pros and cons, that should be basically taken into a count and should be treated separately and not as a comparing-pair.

I have to confess, even though there were projects that interested me like Gen6, Relocatify or Sealed. Most of the projects were already about combining Tradfi with Defi. Speaking outspoken, that hurts. Cryptocurrencies were the hope, which were about to turn the way we understand finances and the way we pay. Unfortunately, it seems that cryptocurrencies become only an asset instead of what their real purpose was. It seems crypto became alternative and is not going to become a payment-system. At least not in next 5/10 years, I suppose.

That doesn't mean however that I stopped being engaged in cryptocurrencies and blockchain. No, I just know that I'm just likely to build a very niche product if I were to build a private-blockchain and it will not be something that institutions would put money into (Which I actually would not like them to do).

We saw how big pump was on ZTrash (ZCash) and even bigger dump occured, only to pump the narrative and take the money from naive people, who blindly believed in privacy-turn. Unless markets are controlled by big whales, that operate in fiat, psychotically indulge theirself in seeing wars and blood of other innocent people, and understand only money-language, no change in financial-system is about to occur, and people will exist, so long will the markets be manipulated.

Resign from my privacy standard was a failure - On NBX, I came to a conclusion, not to cover my face as I usually do in public and not only. I did it for common convenience and not to trigger controversies among people there (usually a covered face is associated mostly with criminals, than carrying about privacy). Also as I got to the venue, it turned out light was shit and the air was slightly humid for me, so I could suffocate in the mask and could basically fall on someone or cause damage while walking, if I had my glasses on.

Also I gone there with an attitude that, if I don't show my face in social media anywhere, so I will not be recognisable by anyone (Previously I used to post my images in a mask online).

Big events have their flaw also that there are basically cameras everywhere, everyone is recording something and I genuinely felt, when I was just resting after networking as though someone would basically put the camera right into my face. Whereas MoneroKonferenco seems to be a really private arrangement. They have even their Photo Policy, which sound like:

Ask before snapping, all persons in a photo/video must have explicitly given consent to be photographed/recorded. As such, please avoid taking photos/video of large crowds, audience, or workshop participants.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those all fluffy stuff about that conference, trying to scrounge money from you guys or something, no.

Rather just express my genuine willingness to appear, there though given my financial situation I know it will be tough. I will not create a fund-raising for a trip to Warsaw specifically for Monero-Konferenco, if I cannot even give you anything in exchange.

One option would be to go and work there as an volunteer, as they get the ticket for free. Which sounds as an interesting experience in my opinion, we will see if the event will fit my schedule or not.

People on the big-events: I was surprised, when I saw people who have less knowledge about cryptocurrencies than I have, are younger than me, and make money in this industry, whereas I, not being fake-modest have a quite big knowledge on cryptocurrencies both from financial and technical point of view and haven't made a single penny.

I do not complain or say I'm worse, just assert the facts that some people make money faster.

Candidly, I'm more looking on events for connecting with devs and people who build and also people who worked on projects already, than financial or businessman connection.

I decided to resign from hackathon participation

Given the fact that my financial struggle nowadays and my experience from trips, I decided not to participate in ETHSilesia hackathon, that I intended to.

Apparently everything seemed to fit in time perfectly, but the budget doesn't lie and I cannot pump it somehow out of nowhere. My investments currently are 60% down, and I will not resolve the loss.

Hence, I decided to devote this time to implement solid gameplay feature with reward system based on ZKP (likely to be implemented with Noir).

Was there something technical, that I've done ?

Obviously !

I have tested for the first time Quebes OS in VirtualBox env.
I watched couple of youtube videos from a guy called Reject Convenience and his second channel where they show discrepancies in Proton narrative and their actual state. And that intrigued me even more to read privacy policies (spoiler Dev.to has no better pplcy than other social media platforms). They openly state to sell and share data with their business partners or sponsors. But, what can I do ?

And ofc, a Week without going is lost week though :D (Don't take it literally). On Sunday/Monday I started implementing the gameplay functionality with socket.io and was fixing the bugs with the actual frontend code in my Pokestake project, that I work on.

You can see above the mechanism, that the connection between two players, has been successfully estabilished.

If you have some suggestions, feel free to visit my repos and create an issue with your suggestion :D If you see some bug or see a way to make code more efficient, also feel free to post an issue

Frontend

LuftieTheAnonymous / PokeStake-Dapp

A Pokemon themed staking protocol with usage of Chainlink VRF

PokeStake 🎴⛓️

A decentralized staking protocol where you can lock Pokemon cards and draw random rewards daily. Built on-chain with verifiable randomness and IPFS storage.

Overview

PokeStake is a Web3 staking protocol that lets users stake Pokemon cards and participate in daily random draws. Each day, stakers can claim a random card from the pool—powered by Chainlink VRF for cryptographically secure randomness and Pinata for decentralized card metadata storage.

Tech Stack

Technology	Purpose	Version
Next.js	Frontend framework & API routes	Latest
TypeScript	Type-safe development	Latest
Solidity	Smart contract logic	^0.8.0
Foundry	Smart contract development & testing	Latest
RainbowKit	Wallet connection & UI	Latest
Wagmi	Ethereum hooks & contract interaction	Latest
TanStack Query	Server state management	Latest
Chainlink VRF	Verifiable randomness	v2
Pinata SDK	IPFS pinning & card metadata	Latest

Features

🎴 Stake Pokemon Cards - Lock your cards into the protocol
🎰 Daily Random Draws - Once per day, draw…

View on GitHub

Smart-Contracts

LuftieTheAnonymous / PokeStake_Protocol

A Staking protocol with usage of Chainlink VRF for drawing a random pokemon Card

Foundry

Foundry is a blazing fast, portable and modular toolkit for Ethereum application development written in Rust.

Foundry consists of:

Forge: Ethereum testing framework (like Truffle, Hardhat and DappTools).
Cast: Swiss army knife for interacting with EVM smart contracts, sending transactions and getting chain data.
Anvil: Local Ethereum node, akin to Ganache, Hardhat Network.
Chisel: Fast, utilitarian, and verbose solidity REPL.

Documentation

https://book.getfoundry.sh/

Usage

Build

$ forge build

Test

$ forge test

Format

$ forge fmt

Gas Snapshots

$ forge snapshot

Anvil

$ anvil

Deploy

$ forge script script/Counter.s.sol:CounterScript --rpc-url <your_rpc_url> --private-key <your_private_key>

Cast

$ cast <subcommand>

Help

$ forge --help
$ anvil --help
$ cast --help