First of all, I have had a strange relationship with my name throughout my life. Pre-internet days, I had the strange (and apparently misguided) thought that my name was kind of odd or unusual. At the roadside Stuckey’s, it seemed like I could rarely find my name on a toy license plate. Maybe that’s where the problems started.
I’ve rarely been able to get my name on an email address other than a work-related one or one where I bought the domain (maybe this is why I was an early adopter on buying internet domains. Even there, I didn’t really get one I liked until many more TLDs came along and garysmith.us popped up.
Yesterday, on more or less a whim, I noticed the .eth TLD and recognized its relationship to Ethereum. To be honest, I’ve never even bought digital currency before. But for some reason it occurred to me to wonder if garysmith.eth was available. Unlike a typical internet domain, this is a naming convention designed to allow you to replace a long hex string identifying your ethereum account, or holdings, or – I’m still really fuzzy on the lingo, but the point is – I have it now.
It was a long, fatiguing process. When people talk about digital currency being less frictional and driving down transaction costs – that’s like saying the Wright brothers had a better way to travel. Yesterday’s transactions and mis-steps, as I remember them:
- find https://ens.domains/ on a Google search
- discover that you can’t really interact with this site except through a Dapp
- or a wallet
- Try to create and fund an ethereum wallet at about 3 different places that turn out not to work with my bank
- End up at https://www.coinbase.com/ and successfully buy ethereum
- Find out I still need https://metamask.io/ to interact with app.ens.domains
- Try to do the transaction and find out that the funds have to be transferred from coinbase to metamask; it’s a separate account/wallet of its own
- Do the first of 2 transactions to pay for the domain (if that’s what you call it)
- Try to do the second transaction a minute later and find that ethereum value had fluctuated and I was just a little bit short in funds
- Find out that I can’t transfer any more money from my bank to coinbase to send to metamask
- Repeatedly check until the value fluctuated in the right direction and I had enough to complete the transaction.
One of my sons has done a bit with digital currency, and he had to help me with some of these steps.
I’ve probably left some things out. Next steps – make sure that EVERYTHING I could possibly need to document is in secure storage so I don’t lose it (already made a start, but I’m paranoid about this). I’m also interested in whether there is a way to create a site or a pointer from this domain to a regular website.
Much to learn I have.