A Week Full of Data and Stories

Outdoors, Fitness, AI Agents, and a Bit of BTC

Morning everyone,

Plenty of things to share with you this week. Let’s go step by step.

As you all know, for the past few months I’ve been using the Whoop bracelet to track my body. After the initial excitement (when you check your data every few hours), I thought I’d keep it just a few months before removing it. But honestly, I’ve gotten used to wearing it, and for now I’m more inclined to keep it than to get rid of it. I don’t check it daily, but I like to see the trends week by week or month by month.

For example, last weekend I went camping in the Ticino mountains with Daima, and it was interesting to track how my calories burned changed with the strong effort of hiking up the mountain:

Saturday was more than double my average day (which is below 2,000). And I can guarantee I felt every single calorie burned going up this steep mountain with a heavy backpack under the strong sun. But it was worth every effort.

It’s always magical to be in the middle of nowhere, eating freshly caught trout, swimming in the lake, and enjoying the company of a fire.

Another recent function of the Whoop is that it now provides your “Whoop Age”. And honestly, I’m pretty happy to still be in my twenties (my real age is almost 35) 😜

I have to admit that since stepping down from GOLD AVENUE, I’ve really been focusing on myself: hitting the gym more regularly and adding a lot of cardio exercise. Especially with the SkiErg I started a few months ago, where I keep reaching new highs (5 km in 20:25 min is my new record — share yours with me if you use it too).

From a health and sports performance perspective, I think I’ve rarely, if ever, been in better shape, and I feel great. It takes commitment, but listen — if you can’t commit to yourself, it’s hard to commit to anything else.

Now, enough about me :)

Something cool I started using a few weeks ago is ChatGPT “agents”. I’m not yet a pro, and I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface, but it’s really impressive what you can do. In my case, I asked it to connect to LinkedIn, visit the profile of someone who creates interesting content, extract all their posts with engagement results, analyze them, and prepare an Excel file with ideas based on my profile matched with their approach. The result was impressive — and you can do it for many different tasks. If you haven’t tried it yet, just select “agent” in ChatGPT by clicking the “+” icon.

Another fun thing: I had a baby crow visiting me this week on my terrace, and I got this funny picture. Then I asked ChatGPT to transform it into a cartoon. I really love the result.

Back to VESS.

As you know, I’m waiting for the first podcast edit from my freelancer before sharing it. The first version was OK, but I expected something more elaborate, so I asked for improvements. Since in Italy most of August almost everyone is off, it’s taking a bit longer than I expected. I’ll probably also ask a second freelancer who gave me a really, really cheap offer — almost too low to be true — just out of curiosity to see the result.

In the meantime, we sent out our first-ever invoice 🙌, for the renovation of five apartments. Not the most exciting project ever, but hey, we have to start somewhere. Here are a couple of photos of the worst apartment we renovated (before vs. after):

Yes, it was in catastrophic condition, but the result turned out incredible considering the budget we had to work with.

To generate the invoice, I used a new website, bepaid.ch, built by a friend of mine, and honestly I was very happy with the result. Easy to use, intuitive, and the invoice looked very professional. If you want to support an entrepreneur and improve your invoicing, check it out.

I could keep talking about plenty of updates, but I want to keep the last few lines for a strong image:

Bitcoin fees have dropped to their lowest point since inception. The “ordinals” mania (NFTs on the Bitcoin chain) increased fees last year, but the momentum faded, and fees are now dropping sharply. The main reason is that Bitcoin is not being used as a payment tool, but mostly as a store of value, with speculation happening on centralized exchanges, ETFs, and more — without increasing on-chain demand. This is risky because miners rely on fees, and the price needs to increase systematically to keep incentives aligned.

Maximalists will say that if miners leave, the hash rate (difficulty) decreases and the system auto-adjusts, but the reality is that the more miners leave, the more centralized the system becomes, and the higher the risk of an attack.

Bref, I’m not spitting on BTC, and in the short term there are no big implications. But I keep seeing people screaming “Go full BTC, it’s digital gold, it will go up forever”.

Yes, maybe — but maybe not.

You can be extremely right or extremely wrong. Always allocate only part of your portfolio to speculative assets, and rebalance from time to time. It’s fun when it goes up, but very painful in case of a reversal.

Cheers everyone, talk to you next week.

Ales

P.S. Here’s a picture of our salami production from this year — everything self-hunted and self-produced by me and my friends 😋