and some other useful things to know about the world of ethereum


freedom isn't free. it usually comes with strings and in this case the strings are large sums of money paid to miners for their lordship and cpu processing capacity.

let's talk about the gas. it stinks butt (haha) everybody does it. it's the price you pay for transacting on the ethereum network. don't watch old youtube videos about this it'll just piss you off. apparently as little as a year ago people were paying like 4 cents in gas fees. jfc. anyhow, i'm no expert by any means but i'm going to try and break it down in terms i find relatable and somewhat funny (even if i'm the only one laughing at my analogy it's still funny).

walk up in the club like

so pretend there's a city with a club on every block (-chain. get it?) and lines out the wazoo to get in. you being you, walk up to the bouncer and slip him a washington. dolla bill yo. obviously you're not getting in and the bouncer just kept your dollar bill t4p. you wanna get in line but now you gotta figure out how much it costs to get in? big tips get you in the front of the line, but smaller and still acceptable tips get you in the line it just takes a little longer to get in and you're chill with that you've got friends. obviously not in real life because you're messing with crypto but maybe on twitter.

head on over to https://etherscan.io/gastracker. here you'll see what the average gas fees are for slow, normal, and fast (big baller your name magically appeared on the list welcome in).

take note when you're looking at this. those usd amounts across the top are for mundane stuff like transferring to another wallet. when you look down a little further at erc20 transfers, uniswap swap, uniswap add/remove lp, you start to get a better idea of some of the usd prices you're going to pay for whatever you most likely are actually doing other than just passing money around in wallets.

gas gets less stinky over time

gas prices change! hey just because it says it's going to cost $180 now for you to swap $100 worth of ethereum to dai doesn't mean it will be that way forever. keep checking. i've had some pretty good luck late nights eastern standard time (literally the only time that anyone cares about). i typically wait for gas to be around 100-130 gwei and typically end up spending $30-40 on whatever i'm doing. not really sure how to explain how that works out since i usually don't even know what i'm doing, but that seems like a fairly decent price in most cases. keep in mind i'm also an idiot. it helps if you try not to think about the usd cost and just ape it. and maybe have a few beers first.

ok so now you've got your introduction to gas and you clicked on that link above to see the prices, here's the main site again just in case you don't feel like scrolling up https://etherscan.io/. a little bit deeper explanation - here you can explore the ether. go ahead and browse around. this is your insight into what's going on, transactions taking place, scouting for tokens, etc. more on that later but for your homework, go ahead and look me up: iheartstonks.eth. see if you can browse through and find out my other ens name and comment below. i'll give you 2 hints: look under tokens and review transaction logs. good luck.

if you haven't already read the first post on wallets make sure to check it out dippin your toe in crypto. and if you're a real nerd head on over to blockgeeks.com for a more in depth and educated explanation of what you've got yourself into.