Cryptocurrency Learning Update

In 2018 I decided to learn a bit about Cryptocurrency getting into Reddit's Garlicoin. I blogged about it here https://secjohn.blogspot.com/2018/02/cryptocurrency-infosec-perspective.html.

The short story is mining has serious security issues and is ripe with ways to get ripped off. At the time I mined 76 or so GRLC. So this week I decided to try to turn that into cash for fun. My idea was to get a $0.13 or so payout for fun and post about it. What I got was far less, and I learned far more.

First I need to upload my GRLC to an online exchange. https://freiexchange.com is what all the GRLC people use so I setup an account. No deposit or trade fees, so that is good. Fired up my wallet software, and it won't connect. Crap. OK, work on fixing that, never get it to work. Download the new official wallet software and install it (not signed software, no change since my last post there) and it sees my local file which is my wallet good, still doesn't connect, bad. Google it, and find one 11 month old post about this and how the peers.dat file that comes with the wallet is bad and to use this one linked from a non official site. Literally just some guy posting the file. I looked for something more official, gave up and tried it, and yes that worked. Honestly I can't believe I did any of this on my PC, this brings me right back to the post I linked above. OK only 3 years and 50 weeks behind, let that go a few hours. Now I can move coin to the Exchange.

I couldn't send all 76 GRLC to the exchange, too big to process the fee. What fee you ask? I honestly have no idea, the GRLC gods need to eat I guess? I don't even know who that fee goes to. I had to break my transition into 3 separate ones, and each one took a fee out. So roughly 20 minutes later when they finally show up on the Exchange I had around 75 GRLC.  I honestly have no idea where the extra one went or why and I didn't bother to try to figure that out. It seems a small GRLC fee gets applied to all movement for some reason. Joy.

OK time to trade. That worked fine and now I have a small amount of BTC. Now to turn that into hard cash I need to transfer it to Coinbase. I that will cost me lets me check.....half of my BTC. Wait what 0.50% well that sounds better than half when you say it that way, and I can't do much about it now ok let's do it.

Well no, I can't even give half away to get my BTC out, because there is also a fixed fee on top of the % fee which isn't called out until you try to move it, and that is more than I have. See my hilarity below. It turns out there is a processing fee I never saw called out until trying to export BTC. That is  0.0006 BTC and fixed, and you can tell from the math below they apply it first, then take half of what is left. I have less than the fixed fee so I can't export funds without paying money. So I can pay money to export nothing, but I decided not to. 

As of writing this that is worth a little less than $5. I'm not sure what the Coinbase fees will be, based on this experience I can't trust it to be clear until I try and I don't plan to spend money to find out. What I looked up says for small amounts like this it is a $0.99 fee. I'm guessing that will apply to transfer this to USD, and again to move it off their system, so maybe I could get $0.50, if I could do it, which I can't. Oh well. 

Lessons Learned:

Cryptocurrency is more of a scam that I thought, and I thought it was a total scam. There are fees at every turn and many are hidden, unexplained, and can hit you when it is too late to turn back. 

The real winners here are the people collecting fees after fees after fees, sometimes hidden or not clearly called out, and the fee amounts are crazy. 

The security and quality around the client software is as messy as it was in 2018.

Getting a wallet to work and connect to a peer and download the chain was worse than old school torrenting movies. I swear it is like I went back in time. 

Transferring between wallets to be able to trade took forever, and I had to pay extra for the ridiculous inefficiency of it. I'm just going to say it, blockchain just isn't a good idea for any problem. It wastes time and energy for no real gain. 

Other good reading:

Moxie explaining web3 better than anyone else:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Hidden fees in NFT, more fees on top of the fees and fee fees. Take the horrible above and add more fees plus pictures! I don't recommend it:

https://www.businessinsider.com/nft-investing-crypto-art-what-is-a-gas-fee-explained-2021-3