As my regular readers know, I was laid off in 2020 and refreshed my cryptocurrency investments (time and money) in early 2021. Soon after that, I took a part time gig supporting miners (and later farmers) on Flexpool, a small cryptocurrency mining pool that grew to being a leading pool in Ethereum and Chia among others.

I always told the owner that I was looking for a “real” job, namely one that would enable me to sustain and survive in Silicon Valley, and when the time came I would leave Flexpool support. After the end of Ethereum mining, support demand dropped off a cliff, like the crypto market, so I was able to keep up with support with a small amount of time before and after work and on weekends. For context, it was less time than I spend preparing coffee in a given day.

Well, with the crypto winter being as it is, and the pool owner probably wanting to live away from his laptop for more than an hour at a time, Flexpool is closing down. And with that, on November 1, I have retired from my second round of end user customer support.

I’m still in the crypto world, farming Chia and mining Neoxa at the moment. I’ll still answer questions on Discord for my new pool and some other venues. But I’m no longer loading up the time clock app, and I will be refocusing on some of my other side gigs (ebay sales, affiliate marketing, and so forth) to keep the mind and the toy budget rolling.

I would say that means more geekery and less crypto on the blog and the YouTube channel, but I don’t think I can commit to that. I’ll work on it though, as I have footage in the can for a couple of coffee devices, and I’m building a new server this weekend if all goes well.