Afro-Crypto: Black Wallstreet and Bitcoin

Scams, scams, sKaMs, SkAms, Hella SCAMS

This one goes out to the mysterious lady on Facebook Marketplace with the iPhone 8 with a broken screen and backplate. You came on all friendly when we said we wanted to buy it for $75. Sending us messages and promising to deliver in two days. We even share a laugh when we fumbled through downloading CashApp. Then once the transfer was made, you ghosted us.
I'm not gonna lie. It hurt. That was supposed to be our biggest flip. One that we needed, after coming off of the last buy at Clark Park.
(Anyone need an iPhone 7 Plus with a broken front facing camera?).
It wasn't just the fact that you ran with the $80. It was how you did it. We weren't sure if you were shipping or not, so we waited. We sent you messages, asking, "Whas, up?".
We thought that maybe you were super shy, and had expended every bit of social energy you had closing the deal. You'd send it. You just needed space.
Maybe you'd just fallen into a ditch. Twisted you ankle. Lost your phone, or bumped you head and lost your memory. We wanted to believe the best, so we hoped.
Yeah, we peeped your FB page. You need that money more than we do.

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FApple-iPhone-6s-32GB-Rose-Gold-Unlocked-AT-T-Used-%2F383746260047&h=AT0p1awsllGWvbK8Ivh_phctLY2j-khSsQr3yzQH_3nLHK0L1BdjFOGh2j2Djuwd_0dD75SPNIw6DH0vxYBhDh2fwcoA3_9bGaOd1sKjORpQzxhBl_sB1LaIIF2VP_AB9A&s=1

My first baby. I bought it from a young brother during a rain storm in the Northeast.
It has a new screen, because the old one looked like hell. It has a new battery, just because.
Practice practice practice...
Also, wanna buy a nice little phone?

Sunday.
A brother is standing in Clark Park, with about 300 members of BLM, Antifa, larpers with foam swords, dirtbag baristas and so many other beautiful, grimy, ferociously righteous citizens of West Philly.
They're waiting for the Proud Boys to show up, and Afro Crypto is walking among them, texting a dude about an iPhone 7 Plus.
We need to talk about this.
We're looking at a so-called reporter. He's skinny, dressed all in Black and he doesn't sit right with us - reporters don't completely cover their faces. There are the do******gs racing around the perimeter of the park in an old Chevy Aerovan, a Trump flag flapping along its side. There are the brothers on their ponies, right there in the middle. And there are cops. About 20 of them, sitting in a little swarm across the street from Green Line Cafe.
A brother is ready to fight, but damn, he wasn't thinking about any of this when he told dude to meet him in Clark Park at 3. We only wanted an iPhone 7 Plus.

How do we get here? Not by choice. We skid here. We fall down the steps and wake up here. We wanted to get from behind the wheel, and freelance web design seemed like the most direct route. Then the car started to hesitate when it got hot, and DoorDash went from a flood to a trickle.
It became a trap. Push hard for three more months? It seemed like a good idea for a smooth dismount. Now, all we can picture is the car sitting on the Platt Bridge, steam hissing from under the hood, a huge order of Chic Fila getting cold in the passenger seat. No money to get it fixed. No smooth dismount.
It was a recipe to taking Uber to a job at UPS where we would watch our body break down just like that Subaru Outback, one 50 pound box at a time.
And our phone broke. And the new one - the expensive Android that we didn't want, but was the only thing that they had in stock - had a firmware issue. And so, when the iPhone repair course popped up on our FaceBook feed thanks to the algorithm, it had our attention.
How long does it take to get momentum as a web developer? Two months? Three?
With iPhone repair, it's weeks, not months.
The only hurdle is the cost of the inventory; two replacement screens for each model. It's less than a grand, but way more than a brother has. Which is how we end up at a counter protest to a Proud Boys rally. We can't afford the inventory, but I can afford to buy a phone, and I can afford to fix it and flip it.

We've got four phones now. The first was an iPhone 6s that we bought from a skinny kid in the Northeast. There was the iPhone 6 picked up from a chubby kid in Wilmington De. An iPhone 8 with a broken front and back glass. Hopefully it's in the mail. And the 7 Plus, from the Antifa rally.
We're in flip mode, building up seed money. The goal is the habit. Have the capital to buy a couple of phones a day, and the inventory to flip them and sell them quick.
By the 20th phone, we'll have an inventory. Driving DoorDash will be a distant memory, and We'll be doing iPhone repair at Uncle Bobbies cafe, because it's dope.
We can talk about freelance web development later. It's still a priority, but it's phase two.

Tomorrow, let's talk about not getting scammed. That's what we talked about with the dude at the rally, selling the iPhone 7 Plus. He tried to school us to the game as he tried to game us with a phone with a broken camera.
So yeah, sit down. Tomorrow we're talking about protection.

Pictured, the Clark Park rally. We were there. There we were.

You ever listen to one of those multi level marketing courses? And, you're leaning in, because it's getting good. People are getting rich, and there are ranks to achieve and merit badges to earn. It's a cross between the Boy Scouts and a snake dancing cult that worships the allmighty dollar...Amen...have-mercy.
And you're listening and taking notes because you know you'll go home and none of it will make any sense at all. And then they tell you how to get started. How you're going to climb that ladder of wealth and status, just like the founder, whose picture is on the wall above candles and a small offering.
And they tell you that you'll have to go to your friends and family, and just like that, your inner fire flickers and dies. It's over. You'll never become a Double Diamond, and you'll never be on the stage at their Expo in Miami, talking about your how they changed your life, because you're not that dude. You don't ask your friends to help your hustle.
Well, that's a brother in a nutshell. It's why AC could never do Amway, or Nutralife or Prepaid Legal.
Once a brother did a website for his wife's friend. It took months, as she tried to figure out what type of site she wanted. She then mysteriously pulled the plug because she decided that she no longer needed it.
He was out the time and the money, and the flicker of excitement that he got from doing work that he loved.
Before that, there was a little old lady who did jewelry in Atlanta. He took photos of her granddaughter and wife wearing that jewelry. It was a $500 site that too long to finish, and included him writing every letter of copy, and doing all of the photography.
To this day that little old lady trolls him, and leaves comments in odd places on his page because, after she invested zero dollars in promoting the site, it generated zero dollars for her.
There was the web copy done for any number of businesses that his brother had cooked up. Those paid a grand total of zero, but had the added bonus of driving a wedge between the two men that remains to this day.
A brother (he is I. I'm the brother...) learned the hard way not to work with family and friends. And when he got to that part of the course on Freelance Web Design where he had to drum up business by hitting up loved ones, he signed off.
A brother decided to go back to the long road. Build out some projects and then get a gig with a development consultancy.
Fast forward.
Some time ago, a friend needed some site updates done, and another site for an ongoing project. We told her we'd help. We didn't talk about money.
We did some of the work. She insisted on paying, and who were we to refuse? A brother needed money.
A brother sent out the invoice a couple days ago, and yesterday there was money in his account. From web development and design.
The most interesting thing is, this would be our third project with WordPress. That's a baby portfolio!
We were ready to back burner web development for another three, four...six months but a friend and common sense said otherwise.
The hustle is real.
A brother wanted to get from behind the wheel. How close are we?

"Let's Talk About Advantage Stacking..." he said, as he finished up his last post. When those words were written, the brother (he is I. I am he.) was inspired. His heart beat a little faster, and a small fire burned in his gut as he thought about the limitless vistas before him.
That was then. This is now. It's morning, and the fires of inspiration have gone cold. Nobody cares about advantage stacking anymore. So let's talk about the Red Tails.
First of all, nobody calls it advantage stacking. We got that from a self help book, written by a Navy Seal who now inspires Hollywood types to be their best thems. In that book, he introduced the idea of stacking the deck in your favor by practicing a thing way more than your competition.
To be honest, Malcolm Gladwell did it better in his book, The Outliers. It was a detailed analysis of all of the hidden factors that go into the creation of extraordinary individuals. One concept that he visited over and over was that it takes about 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.
We're talking about reps. We're talking about doing something over and over as it goes from difficult and tedious to challenging to boring to nuanced. We're talking about the real reason the Tuskegee Airmen were able to deploy to Italy and wipe the skies with the Luftwaffe during WWII.
It wasn't Black Boy Magic and it definitely wasn't luck. It was just a curious byproduct of racist policy that meant that the Tuskegee Airmen stayed in Alabama doing complex aerial maneuvers indefinitely, while the White pilots were being shoveled into the European skies as quickly as they could enlist.
They were better, and they were better for the most boring reasons. They'd gotten in more reps.
Now that we've talked about exciting things, a brother will push publish and then going to take apart an iPhone 6s. It's our first practice phone, bought from a little brother in Northeast Philly during a rainstorm.
It looked as if someone had used it as a throwing star. The front screen was shattered on one side, and on the back there is slight discoloration because the impact bent that too. But it works.
We took it apart and put on a new screen. Still works. Later this week, we'll get a battery for it, seal it up for good and then sell it to someone who needs a decent phone.
Maybe we'll post some boring video of our chubby fingers taking the little front facing camera out of its housing. Who knows.

The Curse of the Challenge…

In July a brother posted a story about how he was undergoing a challenge to get from behind the wheel of gig purgatory and into a main hustle that would pay the bills and allow him to buy some not horrible s**t.
We’re paraphrasing. He might have mentioned how DoorDash was a decent gig, but the smell of Chic Fila was starting to seep into the fabric of his old Subaru Outback. Wet cardboard with a hint of salt and a fleck of paprika. That’s the smell.
Note: DoorDash is one of the better gigs out there; take it from a brother who has clocked about 70,000 miles doing rideshares, getting other people’s groceries, and now DoorDash. DoorDash is pretty much hassle free and highly recommended.
Below is our DoorDash link. Use this s**t and we’ll both get paid. You betta fu***ng use it.

So this brother…(he is I. I am he…) makes a post about this challenge, where he is going to run through a Udemy course about freelance Web Design, and then use the skills he has built up over the years to reach escape velocity from gig purgatory.
This post begins by talking about how, the last time he issued a challenge to himself on a long defunct blog about Black firearm ownership, he promptly fell off of the face of the earth, and didn’t post another post on that blog ever again. Needless to say, he didn’t reach a single one of the wildly ambitious goals of that challenge.
In the last post he also talked about his failing marriage, and how life has humbled him like Deebo snatching the proverbial chain that he’d gotten from his metaphorical grandma.
We pushed the publish button. Then we promptly fell off the face of the earth...
July was rough.
August was way worse.
A brother has a tendency to try to cloak heartache in a comfortable layer of humor, but let’s just move on. Too soon. Don’t ask. It’s cool.

Let’s get back to the challenge because we’ve got some news. Mistakes have been made. Epiphanies have been, um, epiphanized.
We’re doing iPhone repair. Seriously. More on that soon.
Also, we went from acknowledging that WordPress design would be the most direct escape route from gig purgatory, straight back to studying React and Gatsby in order to jump into freelancing as a JamStack developer. Then we realized that we’ve spent the past year in a spiral of the sunk cost fallacy and over analysis fallacy.
We’re gonna talk about that too. A lot.
Tomorrow, let’s talk about advantage stacking, otherwise known as reps.
Tuesday, we might talk about how a gig from a friend that we’ve never met made us realize that the time to start doing webdev was now, and not in some not too distant future when we’ve learned yet another framework.
Wednesday? Who the hell knows. We’ll be lucky if we publish on Monday and Tuesday.

This is us trying to explain July and August and why we been posting.

Image: Best Friday My Chain GIFs | Gfycat Found on Google from gfycat.com

Ere'body loves a challenge, right?
The last post from our old blog was about how a bother (Afro-Crypto is that brother. The brother is Afro-Crypto) was going to get in fighting shape to protect his family.
Fighting shape meant being able to pass both the Army PT exam and the FBI marksmanship qualifications, while carrying a dufflebag the same size and weight as his seven year old daughter.
It was called the Chad-Wick challenge, and a couple of people in Atlanta thought it was a good idea.
It didn't happen. Not the PT part. Not the shooting part. Not even the dufflebag part.
Life got in the way.
That's what life does.

Sometimes life Deebo's you and you end up in the flaming wreckage of a good marriage that you nose-dived into the ground because you fell asleep at the controls. And now your smug, Perrier drinking, college educated ass is driving DoorDash in a Subaru Outback wondering if all you'll have to show for your life is a daughter who loves you the way White people love three-legged pit bulls, and a perfect, 5 star rating for delivering Chic Fil A sandwiches to shut-ins.
..You ever write something that hit so honest and hard that you want to go curl up someplace and cease to exist for a few minutes?
No?
Just me?

Anyway, I call it the I Hate DoorDash Challenge, otherwise known as, the Rock Bottom in and Outback Challenge, or the How Many Damned Waffle Fries Do You Need Challenge?!
It goes like this.
We run through the Freelance Newbie: Become a Freelance Web Developer (available on Udemy for anywhere from $200 to $8.99, depending on the week) and we do what it says, and we see how quickly we can get from behind the wheel and out of gig economy purgatory.
Although we would like to say we would use all of his big programming brains, and only do hand coded static sites that he rendered lovingly in React, a brother doesn't want to be driving DoorDash in the winter.
AC isn't trying to flex or stunt, and he doesn't care who is impressed. He just has this wild hope that he can make more money using the knowledge of WordPress and Development that he's cultivated over the past few years than he can moving Burritos from Chipotle to a random end user.
A brother needs a break from the hunger hustle.

(Deebo, as life, right before it stole Afro-Crypto's bike, hopes, dreams and backbone...)

https://www.vulture.com/article/michaela-coel-i-may-destroy-you.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Spoiler Alert: No coding will be mentioned in this article.
It won't talk about Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies. No blockchain. No JS, Python, Ruby, C+ or any computer nothin.
What it is, is a blueprint for attacking your path.
It's a lesson in racing into a headwind.
It's how you win, but not in a Tony Robbins, rah rah rah, self help guru kind of way. Nah. The self-help genre gives Afro Crypto a headache.
Full disclosure. AC is obsessed with Robert Greene. He listens to The 33 Strategies of War, the Art of Seduction, Mastery and the Laws of Power like an emo kid in the 90's who just found the Cure, on full loop, hitting certain chapters over and over. Wanna see him geek? Ask him about Xenophon's speech at during the expeditions with Cyrus the Younger.
Also full disclosure. It's not always healthy. Some of it is toxic. Hate is fine motivation, until you can't sleep at night but you also can't forgive because you might lose some of the wind in your sails.
Anyway, read this.
Also, AC might have a low-key crush on Michaela. He might not. He hasn't worked that out yet.

Michaela the Destroyer How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the year’s most sublimely unsettling show.

AfroCrypto talks about the "Build a Blockchain & Cryptocurrency | Full-Stack Edition" course, by David Joseph Katz on Udemy.
TLDR. Should you buy it? Meh...

Did he finish it?
Ish?
This course was an updated version of another course that only built out the back end, but didn't do the front end. (Back end = the cryptocurrency stuff. Front end = the cuddly user interface ).
So, AC finished the guts, bones, muscles, sinew and organs, but ran into problems trying to put skin on it. Then he tried to debug it. Then he tried to get help. Time passed. He moved on.

How was it?
Depends on what you're looking for.
It was actually a decent introduction to test-driven development, and it reinforced fundamental programming concepts from within the context of a bigger project. It also reinforced ES6 JS syntax. By reinforce he means, you write it out that that it becomes second nature.
Those are good things.

But, what about the cryptocurrency part?
AC wanted to build a deeper understanding. Mission accomplished.
He also wanted to build a portfolio piece. Instead he built a clunky pile of code that only kind of works. He said he would go back and fix it. Will he, though?

Annoying s**t…
Many courses have the file linked to the video modules. That way you get to check your code as you go.
Sure, the author had a Github repo, but there’s such a big difference between looking at the project as it should be at the end of your current module, and looking at the finished project and reverse engineer it.
Also, the author used two different API’s to publish it. His course reflected one, but rather than updating it to show both, he kind of says, “figure it out…”
Then there’s the fact that he didn’t respond to my question.
Booo...

Bottom Line
If your goal is to become a blockchain developer, there are more direct routes. He probably wouldn’t have touched this until after a deep dive into Ethereum Dapps and Solidity.
That being said, it wasn’t a total waste of time. AC is a stronger coder now than he was before he started. Hell. Test driven development wasn’t even on AC’s radar, but he tried it and he kind of likes it.

Grade?
C for the geek factor.
The content was good, he was easy to understand and it definitely wasn’t a waste of time. The only things keeping it from an B were the lack of engagement, and a couple of annoying choices from the author that made troubleshooting harder than it needed to be.

PS. We need to talk about AC's approach. Move fast, debug later is a horrible recipe for predictable and avoidable disaster.

Pictured. A cool guy leaning coolly on a cool drum contemplating on cool s**t.
Also, how AC looks in his head, 20 years from now.

https://www.udemy.com/course/build-blockchain-full-stack/

Afro Crypto looked at a YouTube video entitled, "Becoming a software developer after 50."
AC turns 49 in August, and more and more of his Google searches include the phrase, "...after 50...". Although AC doesn't look 50, he's right there, knocking on 50's door, and once folks start digging around his resume they're gonna know. The fact that he graduated in 1989 is a dead giveaway.
According to the video, the future is wide open as long as your future is freelancing.
Afro Crypto will never be a Silicon Valley hotshot but he might get be able to freelance his way into a nice semi-retirement in
Nicaragua. Which sounds fu***ng awesome.

Sometimes simple is best.
This article presents a dead simple route to getting your first $1 as a developer. Fun fact: It took the author 8 months. To make his first dollar.
D-O-L-L-A-R.
You'll be happy to know that within the next three years he developed an app that automates supermarket robots so that they intervene when people steel grapes by hitting them with non-lethal ultrasound and now he's a billionaire...
No. Nah. Ignore that paragraph. That's definitely not true.

Earn Your First $1 as a Self-Taught Software Developer A simple loop to iterate your way into a software developer

What day is it?
I know it's summer, but what month? Julaugust? Junetember?
Why do I always feel like I just woke up?

Yeah, last time I posted I was talking about problems with implementing React in my project. I also said some blah blah blah about posting more often.
Since then I reinstalled React, picked through the code, compared it to the Github repo and then I reached out to the guy who created the Udemy course. So far he hasn't responded.
That happens sometimes with Udemy. You think you're making good progress and then you get bodyslammed by the combination of a relatively simple problem and a teacher who has clearly moved on with their life.
Now, I'm moving on too. One day I'll resolve the Cryptochain project.

Months ago I posted a course from FreeCodeCamp. It was an introduction to Ethereum and Solidity by building five projects. It's part of a much larger course; 30 projects in 30 days, that was offered by EatTheBlocks Pro.
If those words seem like a bunch of garbled mush, I hear ya.
There's a bootcamp too. Everything is a damned bootcamp. Thing is, even online bootcamps offer something that Udemy can lack. Some folks to hit up when you run into a roadblock.
The best thing is, I've got about four hours of a free trial to run through.
That's where I'm at. I'm kind of tired of Udemy. For the month I've got three goals.
1. Learn the basics of Solidity, the language that Ethereum smart contracts are built with.
2. Choose between the EatTheBlocks, Dapp University by running through their free tutorials.
3. Gain some momentum. The past few weeks have been a quagmire. I need to wall off time to study, and I need to dig back in.

Resources I Used to Teach Myself Blockchain Development I started investing in cryptocurrencies last year, and just kept going down the blockchain rabbit hole from there. Where I live especially, much of the blockchain community is focused on things like trading and investing in cryptocurrencies. Although it was fun to invest at first, I wasn’t so inte...