I only touch crypto with a 10ft pole

I try to approach most technology with a healthy dose of scepticism. But I do try to approach it, most technology isn't worldchanging yet almost none of it is dry of some good ideas.

I did make about a 14€ mistake today, which I want to write down so I can be reminded of it and not spend another Wei on this nonsense. I did set this money aside for experiments and the sort today, but I'd still very much preffered if that didn't end up being the case.

ENS and NFTs

What is actually a good idea here is the ENS project. Most people today laugh at the concept of NFTs, I absolutely agree that the vast majority is terrible garbage. Part of why that is however is that nobody was willing to actually put up anything truly valuable, perhaps due to the relative obscurity of the sector at the time at first, and the fact that profit hungry gamblers took it after it became popular.

Yet to this day you can't own Tom nor Jerry, nor Rick from Rick and Morty. This is what NFTs could've been, they uniquely identified that some person would now be the owner of something truly valuable and perhaps could have a say to what that character does or could have the legal right to use its likeness outside the studio.

Adoptables

If we take adoptables for example, where an artist offers to sell someone one of their characters, them then being the sole owners and being able to ask for comissions or consult on their portrayals. This of course depends a bit on the actual artist.

Nonetheless this is something where you might say NFTs would be useful, what if Alice wants to authorize Bob to draw Charlie's character? When Charlie sees the character used normally, she'd issue a copyright claim, but Alice bought the rights... so she could just sign a certificate that authorizes Bob to make a drawing and Bob then signs the drawing and attaches the certificate. Easy, well-known cryptography, no fucking chain required.

Why Domains

However, bitcoin did start life as a "verifiable and anonymous public ledger of transactions", if we do want somebody completely anonymous to be able to register a domain and point it at something, this would be an interesting application of that tech.

Seeing a domain as some owned item where everything you can do with that ownership is insert a small snippet of keys and values into a global public database that also keeps historical records is quite a nice abstraction.

Mind you, Ethereum switched to a proof of stake mechanism in 2022, which makes the fun change of not having to burn insane amounts of energy to perform every single transaction, which would kinda be nice.

Where it all goes haywire

The issue here isn't in my honest opinion the fees around ENS itself, 5$ a year for a domain is perfectly fine, it's about what I give for my .CZ TLD domain now. Running all this isn't cheap.

My issue sort of comes unrelated to what I've been talking about up until now. I am not very well versed in the actual internals of crypto, and I think that is probably to blame, but I'm not necessarily completely clueless either.

Coinbase to start was incredibly obtuse, the main account cannot be used as an actual wallet, you have to download "Coinbase Wallet" specifically which lets you register an account, however this account will not have exportable phrases at all it seems. I mean the button simply isn't there on mobile, and if you open it in the browser and explicitly select the account to export, it exports... a different account? Nevermind the fact I don't even know how to actually check what account some recovery phrases correspond to without exposing them to some program (obviously I wrote it down next to them, but what should you write down when what you're exporting doesn't even line up with what you downloaded). And the app itself doesn't seem to work for most logins it should accept, simply stating something akin to "Cannot do Phone to Desktop interaction". I mean WHAT?????? Most crypto wallet apps only allow you to verify the smart wallet with a sort of in-app browser... why????

Btw, sending Eth seems to always place the fee burden on the sender, so sending X causes X to arrive but X+ε to be subtracted from your balance... so you can't move all your funds because you only have an estimate of what that ε is. They call the ε gas fees, and I would like at least the option somewhere to act as a classic debit card where you send X and X-ε arrives, for some specific cases where that's useful.

Okay, so I made an actual real Eth wallet with a recovery and everything, imported it and wanted to transfer the ENS name to it, once I tried that I got hit with this bug: link. Still, I haven't managed to find what exactly the issue is. And this isn't just about the ENS, now no funds can leave the wallet without that paywall, and the price seems to fluctuate based on what you're trying to do?

Alright, sure, my issue here is the lack of transparency and debuggability. Cause, if you try and dig into all this you'll find the space invaded with people seemingly just trying stuff and a strong lack of documentation explanation, etc.

To compare that feeling, imagine an old Unix admin, with his little /etc/passwd file, content with life, suddenly getting tasked with recovering Google accounts... argghhh!!!

This would be fine if the entire subject didn't revolve around actual physical money. When you're working with money you do need to hold yourself to a much higher standard, or be held to that standard either by your customer or by your government.

The integration of the real world with the crypto world seems to be quite lacking for now, from both sides though as I've stumbled upon.

Cryptobros aren't really helping either, this lax attitude, invasion of people wanting to profit and lack of general accountability in all this, has to be addressed thoroughly before I'm setting foot in this space again.

You might disagree, but until crypto becomes a dull and boring regulated commonplace thing, I won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

In all honesty though, Coinbase has covered my training expenses more than enough, as they offer learning rewards on their site. People want their crypto stuff to be popular and sometimes quickly clicking through a mindless 10 minute quiz can get you 40€ worth of some cryptocurrency which I immediately pull out of before it tanks two days later. But hey, yeah, I guess this has still been more than net neutral all in all.