Hello, Fellow decentralists,
How are you? I hope you all are doing well both in health and wealth. 😉
If you’re wondering where I vanished to: I didn’t get abducted by aliens (so don’t believe Trump’s UFO disclosures). I just moved permanently to China… and then I did the most unnecessary, masochistic thing possible for a grown adult with Western degrees:
I decided to take a real swing at the Gaokao.
Not because I needed it, purely to see how I stacked up. No shame, just data.
Result: It wasn’t easy… and it was humbling, because some of those teenagers still outscored me. Which tells you everything you need to know about their discipline. Those kids don’t “study.” They weaponize studying.
So, my life became: work, workout, Gaokao, repeat back then.
I’m also at university part-time now studying AI + robotics (double major). My first major was engineering back in the stone age, but this is different, new material, new methods, and doing it in Chinese adds a little extra degree of difficulty. It’s every bit as hard for me as it is for the Chinese teenage kids. I wanted access to the AI and Robotics companies and the best way to get it is exposure to them at the undergraduate level (for me).😉
Business-wise, I’m still doing what I’ve always done: moving merchandise for clients (West, Asia, Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America… basically anywhere people want reliable execution). The difference is I’ve automated a lot of the pain, but the demand has also increased. So, hard labor still. Nothing easy!
Why I joined this site (and why I bought Lifetime)
I used to lurk on the other site ages ago (pre-2017). Then I disappeared, forgot my login, lost a computer, lost a cat, lost the plot, something like that. I was just lurking; never posted.
Fast forward: at the beginning of the pandemic, a private bank did due diligence, old U.S. criminal trial history popped up, and suddenly I got the classic “we appreciate you… from a distance” treatment. I had a chunk of money there from the late 90s, and I didn’t feel like turning my life into a paperwork archaeology project.🤣
Around that time, I got months of relentless browbeating (mostly from Johnny D, plus Wellington and a few others) to stop overthinking and buying more Bitcoin.
And yeah… they were right.
I dumped the funds into BTC. Later, that move, because BTC went up, made it possible for me to get financing against it through a Chinese banking channel, which helped me relocate permanently, set up the university arrangement, and build this whole warehouse + robotics workflow.
So, I didn’t want to do the awkward thing and pop up like:
“Hey Johnny D, thanks, can I PayPal you gratitude?”
That’s weird.
Instead, I joined this site and bought a lifetime membership. That’s my “thank you.” Not a promo, not coordinated, Johnny D didn’t even know I was going to post this. If you’re skeptical, good, skepticism is how you avoid becoming somebody else’s liquidity.
There are a bunch of you I’ve stayed in touch with off-site since the old forum days, mostly via Telegram, Session, WeChat, e³ma, etc., the usual backchannels, so I wasn’t totally disconnected. In fact, that’s how I found out I was apparently “dead” over there: someone DM’d me a screenshot and I had the exact same reaction you’re having now, wait, what? Furthermore, I’m not sure who from that crew is here, but it’s roughly a handful, call it ~9 people, that I’ve kept up with.
Funny enough, those same via Telegram, Session, WeChat, e³ma, etc., backchannels are how I learned Johnny D launched this site. The moment I heard, I joined, and I grabbed the lifetime membership (when I recovered one of my wallets – more on this later) as a straight, uncomplicated “thank you,” because that man and some of you gave me the kind of advice you almost never get in real life: high-conviction, high-signal, and completely non-self-serving. I’d been buying Bitcoin already, then I stopped because I thought the price was getting silly, and he (and some of you) kept hammering me until I restarted.
Where I’m at now
Robotic automation has cut my workload by ~50%…
…and, ironically, because the service got better, faster, and more efficient, clients increased orders, so overall volume is more than double what it was before I moved.😒
So yeah: I’m back, but now I’m in China indefinitely. Main hub is Shenzhen but traveling to other cities to verify inventory.
Ask anything. I’m here, on and off because the private VPNs that work in China get turned off at 10 to 30 minutes of inactivity.
Not much I can do about that.
Cheers,
Jafo
How are you? I hope you all are doing well both in health and wealth. 😉
If you’re wondering where I vanished to: I didn’t get abducted by aliens (so don’t believe Trump’s UFO disclosures). I just moved permanently to China… and then I did the most unnecessary, masochistic thing possible for a grown adult with Western degrees:
I decided to take a real swing at the Gaokao.
Not because I needed it, purely to see how I stacked up. No shame, just data.
Result: It wasn’t easy… and it was humbling, because some of those teenagers still outscored me. Which tells you everything you need to know about their discipline. Those kids don’t “study.” They weaponize studying.
So, my life became: work, workout, Gaokao, repeat back then.
I’m also at university part-time now studying AI + robotics (double major). My first major was engineering back in the stone age, but this is different, new material, new methods, and doing it in Chinese adds a little extra degree of difficulty. It’s every bit as hard for me as it is for the Chinese teenage kids. I wanted access to the AI and Robotics companies and the best way to get it is exposure to them at the undergraduate level (for me).😉
Business-wise, I’m still doing what I’ve always done: moving merchandise for clients (West, Asia, Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America… basically anywhere people want reliable execution). The difference is I’ve automated a lot of the pain, but the demand has also increased. So, hard labor still. Nothing easy!
Why I joined this site (and why I bought Lifetime)
I used to lurk on the other site ages ago (pre-2017). Then I disappeared, forgot my login, lost a computer, lost a cat, lost the plot, something like that. I was just lurking; never posted.
Fast forward: at the beginning of the pandemic, a private bank did due diligence, old U.S. criminal trial history popped up, and suddenly I got the classic “we appreciate you… from a distance” treatment. I had a chunk of money there from the late 90s, and I didn’t feel like turning my life into a paperwork archaeology project.🤣
Around that time, I got months of relentless browbeating (mostly from Johnny D, plus Wellington and a few others) to stop overthinking and buying more Bitcoin.
And yeah… they were right.
I dumped the funds into BTC. Later, that move, because BTC went up, made it possible for me to get financing against it through a Chinese banking channel, which helped me relocate permanently, set up the university arrangement, and build this whole warehouse + robotics workflow.
So, I didn’t want to do the awkward thing and pop up like:
“Hey Johnny D, thanks, can I PayPal you gratitude?”
That’s weird.
Instead, I joined this site and bought a lifetime membership. That’s my “thank you.” Not a promo, not coordinated, Johnny D didn’t even know I was going to post this. If you’re skeptical, good, skepticism is how you avoid becoming somebody else’s liquidity.
There are a bunch of you I’ve stayed in touch with off-site since the old forum days, mostly via Telegram, Session, WeChat, e³ma, etc., the usual backchannels, so I wasn’t totally disconnected. In fact, that’s how I found out I was apparently “dead” over there: someone DM’d me a screenshot and I had the exact same reaction you’re having now, wait, what? Furthermore, I’m not sure who from that crew is here, but it’s roughly a handful, call it ~9 people, that I’ve kept up with.
Funny enough, those same via Telegram, Session, WeChat, e³ma, etc., backchannels are how I learned Johnny D launched this site. The moment I heard, I joined, and I grabbed the lifetime membership (when I recovered one of my wallets – more on this later) as a straight, uncomplicated “thank you,” because that man and some of you gave me the kind of advice you almost never get in real life: high-conviction, high-signal, and completely non-self-serving. I’d been buying Bitcoin already, then I stopped because I thought the price was getting silly, and he (and some of you) kept hammering me until I restarted.
Where I’m at now
Robotic automation has cut my workload by ~50%…
…and, ironically, because the service got better, faster, and more efficient, clients increased orders, so overall volume is more than double what it was before I moved.😒
So yeah: I’m back, but now I’m in China indefinitely. Main hub is Shenzhen but traveling to other cities to verify inventory.
Ask anything. I’m here, on and off because the private VPNs that work in China get turned off at 10 to 30 minutes of inactivity.
Not much I can do about that.Cheers,
Jafo
