Lately, I’ve been earning testnet points and it’s made me a bit vigilant: at first I told myself it was just practice, but later I unconsciously assumed, “I should be able to exchange for something,” and that’s exactly when you should set a stop-loss for yourself. My approach is pretty “cringe”—first set a total budget (gas + time), then set a deadline; if you haven’t made progress by then, stop. And also: don’t keep messing with any one project more than a few times—if interactions fail or the rules change in a way you can’t make sense of, back out; don’t get more and more carried away just because you’re trying to patch it. Basically, once expectations form, it’s easiest to mistake practice for an investment.

A colleague saw me clicking links every day and reminded me: there’s been a lot of phishing lately, hardware wallets are out of stock—don’t try to save that little bit of trouble. I also added one more item to my “stop-loss”: anything that requires authorization, signing, or installing plugins—first isolate a small account and a small amount, and treat links from unclear/unknown sources as if they don’t exist… In any case, I’d rather end up with fewer points than risk practicing my main wallet into a problem.