Preface from Tim: Over the past few weeks, I have learned more than I ever thought I would learn about the world of crypto and NFTs. One of my (many) shortcomings is that I don’t pursue skill acquisition. I love to read and gain knowledge, but developing new skills doesn’t come as easily to me. So this was a personal challenge.
In the midst of these challenge, a handful (more precisely: three) Slopers have come forward and helped me one-on-one, which has made the ticker.art project go much more smoothly than it otherwise would have. One person in particular, Platinum member LegendC, is exceptionally knowledgeable and helpful. Without me even asking him, he composed the step-by-step guide below to help educate people here about how to buy NFT. Thank you, LegendC, both for your help directly as well as this terrific contribution!
Hopefully I can demystify some of the process and procedure around crypto and help you get setup to do things on a blockchain. I will write these instructions specifically for Ethereum but the concepts are consistent across blockchains. A huge tenant in crypto is DYOR, do your own research, please don’t take my (or anyone else in crypto) message as the gospel.
1. Get a brokerage. Just like trading the capital markets you need a place to onboard your hard earned fiat. CoinbaseCoinbase Pro is what I use but there are dozens to pick from depending on your location. The important things to look for in a broker are the coins they offer (if you have interest in trading on the platform), the fees, and the reputation. As a rule, when you are trading with a broker you are not actually doing anything on the blockchain, you are just trading balances with other users on that platform. This is important because you also don’t really own the crypto, not your keys, not your crypto (famous meme) unless you do the steps below. For the sake of our conversation, nearly every broker is going to be able to sell you ETH, which is the asset we want to do these NFTDeFiTrading things
2. Get a Wallet. A wallet is a piece of software that lets you interact with a given blockchain. There are many wallets for each blockchain and some wallets that work across multiple blockchains, just like brokerages, do some research on the wallets before deciding to use it The wallets purpose is to store your private key and allow you to sign messages with this key, thus sending your coins on the underlying blockchain. When you first download a wallet and go thru the setup its going to create a Private Key for you and create an address on the blockchain for you to use henceforth. Record this private key somewhere safe and preferably non-digital. Don’t leave it in a text file or email it to yourself, etc. Write it down, engrave it in metal, search around for how other people store this. If anyone gets their hand on your key they now have control of your account, this is a password that cannot be changed. Don’t ever share you key with people offering to help you, don’t ever do a screen share of your wallet. These are popular scams.
2a. On my computer I use Metamask which is a browser plugin to work with Ethereum. https://metamask.io/
2b. On my mobile I use Coinbase Wallet, and when I set it up I chose recover account and gave it my private key from my Metamask so it links to the same account
2c. You can have as many wallets as you desire on a given blockchain, some people have multiple for security reasons, privacy, etc. Just be aware that if you are not recovering your existing key you are essentially setting up a new account each time.
2d. Your Metamask or Wallet software will often have you set a password. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS YOUR PIVATE KEY. This is just a security measure to keep someone from sitting at your computer or phone from being able to do something without your permission.
3. Fund your wallet. So at this point you probably have a brokerage, and you have an Ethereum wallet. Your next step is to trade your cash for ETH on the brokerage. If you chose to use Coinbase you may want to use Coinbase Pro here as pro lets you use limit orders, Coinbase is fine but you are essentially trading a market order or spot. So now you have some ETH (congrats!) but is sitting on your brokerage and its time to send it to your personal Swiss bank account. Each brokerage will have the option to send crypto, you will use that option, select ETH and then begin the transfer process. You will be asked to provide the recipient address, this will be the wallet address you were given in step 2. Its going to start with 0x”something” and a bunch of numbers and letters. Sometimes it will let you scan a QR code to do this same thing. Double, triple check the address you are sending to because once it’s sent they are gone forever and there is no manager to speak to. I normally look at the first 4 digits of the account and the last 4 before I okay it. Within a few minutes (depending on the exchange and business on the blockchain) you will see the ETH show up in your personal wallet. Congrats again, you are now REALLY DOING CRYPTO.
4. Using your wallet to do things. At this point you have ETH burning a hole in your wallet and you want to do something with it. I don’t want to get overly specific here as each activity is going to be unique but let me cover some concepts:
Gas – anytime you do something on the Ethereum network you are going to have to pay a fee, called gas, in ETH. Its important that you keep a decent amount of ETH (say ~$100 minimum) in your wallet to pay these fees. You could have $10 million dollars of some awesome coin you found but without any ETH in your wallet to send the coin trade it etc its locked in there. If you run yourself out of ETH you will have to send some to your wallet from the brokerage again. I’m going to be very frank here, Ethereum is a lot of things but cheap to use it is not. I made a defi trade on sunday that cost 75 bucks. I wanted to buy one of Tims nfts and was looking at a $125 fee at that moment. Here is a site to track gas prices: https://etherscan.io/gastracker US nights and weekends tend to have lower fees.
Signing Things – when you are on a website there will often be a “Connect Wallet” button in the corner, this is always safe to do. Sometimes it may ask you to sign something, again, this is safe to do. These are various ways of proving who you are and for the site to be able to see what is in your wallet. These are gas free activities.
Approving Things – this is where a bit more caution is warranted. First of all, in Ethereum if you want to interact with anything other than ETH you will need to approve it. So lets say i’m going to sell hypothetical Slopecoin on a decentralized exchange like uniswap, the first thing its going to ask you to do it approve the contract to allow me to move the slopecoin. This will cost gas and you will get a popup asking you to approve the transaction. Approvals are “cheap” usually, 8-15 bucks in gas. By rule, if something you want to do requires an approval its going to ask for this first. In a trade like I used in my example you may get a transaction to approve the coin, and then a second transaction to selltrade it. For any given coinNFTwebsite you should only have to approve it once.
Transactions in general – All Ethereum transactions that require gas will generate a popup for you to review. This popup will summarize what you are trying to do and also tell you how much gas it is going to spend to do it. If you don’t like the proposed transaction just hit deny or cancel. This is safe to do always, many many times I propose the transaction to see what the fee may be, etc and just cancel it if I don’t like what I see. You have the option to change the gas fees as well, please note if you set a gas fee that is too low your proposed transaction will just sit there, waiting for gas to come down to that level. This hung transaction will prevent you from doing anything else until its processed.
Depending on what you are trying to do, and how timely it is, it makes sense to select more urgency for things like trades, and less urgency for things like approvals.
DEX (decentralized exchanges)
https://app.uniswap.org/
https://app.1inch.io/
https://app.sushi.com/swap
Information sites
https://coingecko.com/ – coinstokens
https://icy.tools/ – nfts
NFT’s
DeFi – too many to list but here are a copule
https://yearn.finance/
https://harvest.finance/
