“This sh*t is still too f**king confusing to be mainstream”: A crypto owner loses $300 trying to avoid a $30 gas fee

Reddit (or rather, its users) is an endless treasure trove of valuable practical information and stories about how not to do this and that. Including the world of virtual assets. For example, a user under the nickname UnionMysterious8381 shared his story of how he lost $300 trying to avoid a $30 gas fee.

Always read the fine print carefully

The peculiarity of the story is that this person was traveling and could only check his cryptocurrencies when he had access to WiFi — that is while staying in hotels. At the time, UnionMysterious8381 had already been using an Argent wallet where he stored less than $50 worth of Ethereum (ETH) for several months. And one day, our protagonist learned about an exciting project minting their NFTs. The value of the public mint was $300 USDCstablecoin bound to the U.S. dollar.

“While at the hotel before my trip, I decided to transfer the $309 I had in my KuCoin account to my Argent wallet to be prepared in case I decided to mint and had a chance. When it came time to send the funds, Kucoin listed all the compatible networks and associated fees, with ETH worth $20 and other networks worth $1 or less. Of course, not wanting to spend 19 extra bucks, I chose the Polygon network,” Reddit user has mentioned.

But in the end, it turned out that his money was gone because he chose the Polygon network instead of the ETH network.

“It’s more of a rant about how even for someone who’s been in crypto for over a year now, this sh*t is still too f**king confusing for it to be mainstream. Granted, I don’t know jack sh*t about the technical side of the blockchain, but for mass adoption to happen, sending funds needs to be 100% idiot-proof. I’m annoyed with myself for being impulsive while rushed to hit the road and not being more diligent about the correct way to safeguard my funds,” UnionMysterious8381 pointed out.

And the saddest part: judging by the comments of sympathetic users, there is no chance to recover the lost funds.

Don’t risk the whole amount — check the transfer first with a very small

The following story is equally instructive and also concerns Ethereum. So please take it as a tip: before you transfer your funds anywhere, check all data by moving a small amount. A person named Snowbattt says he decided to transfer all his ETH to a cold storage walleta hardware device to store cryptocurrency offline. But before that, he first decided to test it with a small amount. And for a good reason.

“Turns out I had accidentally copy/pasted the wrong address. The test amount never arrived. Thankfully, I only lost about what was then €15. Otherwise, I’d have lost all the ETH I’ve been accumulating since 2017, which would have made me very angry. It shows you the perfect practice to do it with a test amount. This technology is still young, and you have no protection against this kind of dumb typos,” he wrote.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of pretty silly stories about crypto. We already wrote about the guy who spent extra money trying to save on his gas fee (yep, the greed trap again).