Back up your wallet (I'm an idiot)
I created a wallet to receive donations for The Koin Press recently. I backed up the seed phrase (private key) like you're supposed to, but I didn't finish my usual process. As a result, I've lost access to that wallet (so don't send any crypto there if you happened to save that link). Lesson: back up your seed phrase in more than one place.
It's one thing to lose your money, but losing money that was donated feels bad because the donor didn't get anything or see any benefit for their money. I've reached out to and apologized to the donors.
Some would take this experience and say "crypto isn't ready for prime time" -- and that's a fair conclusion -- but blockchains are just protocols (like http). It's only as good as what you use it for. I've lost money in crypto two ways now:
- losing access to a wallet
- paying fees on transactions that were rejected
Neither of these experiences felt good, but they were valuable lessons about the pain points and opportunities in crypto. There are solutions to these issues--they just need to be built into the protocol. Koinos effectively fixes the second issue by having no fees for transactions (or smart contracts).
Losing access can be prevented/mitigated by using "smart contract wallets" -- basically you build an app that holds your money, then add features like account recovery. This approach is expensive on Ethereum (would you rather pay $$$ or just try to be more careful?), but on Koinos, you can use this kind of feature for free. That's the key to accessibility on blockchain in my opinion.
More tomorrow,
-Luke
P.S. I won't be accepting donations going forward. If you'd like to support my work, let me know and I'll get you set up with early access to my paid content/services.