This story begins with a stubborn human seeking to learn more about cryptocurrency. This human is not the adventuresome type. He has no interest in fighting dangerous Crypto Exchange beasts or hunting for mythical Moonshot cryptocurrency. As a hobbyist, this human is looking to get involved without locking up all of his hard earned Earth Credits in this new hobby.

After reading about Loopring – this human wanted in. He had to get involved with this amazing project! And what better time than now, when there’s a Publish0x contest (https://www.publish0x.com/publish0x-contests/300-dollars-in-prizes-my-first-trade-on-loopringio-dex-excha-xxmxow?a=xkazY98eJ0) AND an LRC Staking incentive (https://loopring.org/#/post/lrc-staking-and-claiming-instructions)!

TLDR:

1. I had to grind some surveys on Cointiply to get enough coins to meet their minimum withdrawal. I got lucky and qualified for a big reward from TheoremReach (about 25k coins), then spent another hour or so doing YourSurveys.
2. My Cointiply withdrawal cost about 800 Satoshi, leaving me with 0.00070060 BTC.
3. My CoinSwitch currency exchange (BTC -> ETH) cost about $0.28 (including the Bitcoin transaction fee and the Gas), leaving me with 0.02598 ETH.
4. My deposit into Loopring Exchange cost about $0.22 in Gas.
5. The Minimum Order Size must be met for BOTH currencies in the exchange pair.
6. I ended up with $10.87 worth of USDT and 0.0012 ETH left in my wallet.

Level 1: Farm for resources

Thanks to the fantastic articles here, I was able to scrape together enough crypto from sites like Cointiply.com and CoinPot.co to bribe my way past the gate guards and get into the city.

My bank (Cointiply) says I have to wait up to 72 hours before they’ll release my funds. Well this is worrisome; I’ve only got 48 hours left if I want to get in on this Loopring promotion! Ah finally, 25 hours later I’m weighed down with pockets full of nice shiny coins.

WARNING – Math ahead

Cointiply coins are worth 0.0001 USD at the time of this writing. I withdrew 54166 coins, which resulted in 0.00070060 BTC. Cointiply sent BTC to my address as part of a multi-output transaction, so if my fee was distributed evenly across all recipients, my portion of the Bitcoin transaction fee of 0.00076958 BTC was about 800 Satoshi (or about 650 Cointiply coins), 1.2% of my withdrawal. Those minimum withdrawal amounts and wait times start to make a whole lot of sense!

Level 2: Upgrade my inventory

Well now that I’m in the city, I can’t very well be walking around with my pockets full of coin. Time to find a Wallet! Most of my money is in the currency of my homeland (Bitcoin). I want to be able to carry my Wallet around with me, so it’s got to be portable, but of course it needs to be secure. I’ve opted for Electrum (https://electrum.org/).

Unfortunately, they don’t accept BTC in this city, so I’ve gotta find another Wallet. I have this dusty MetaMask (https://metamask.io/) wallet just sitting here…it makes me a little nervous sitting in my web browser, but let’s try it out.

Speaking of security – how can I protect my Wallet from rogues, thieves, riffraff, and hooligans? Well, one easy solution is to use a password safe (https://pwsafe.org/) to store my seed words. It’s free, time tested, supports 2FA, and portable; so I can back it up to cold storage, or even e-mail it to myself.

Level 3: Sneak into the market

The guard at the door laughed at me. Apparently I need to level up my stealth. Of course nothing’s free in a big city like this! I can’t just BUY ETH with my BTC; that would be silly! I have to introduce myself to an Exchange and prove that I’m a trustworthy individual. Why can’t I just give them my money in return for a different currency? Yeesh.

But wait! This sly looking Fox (MetaMask) says that he knows a guy who knows a guy that’ll swap my currency without all the rigmarole. So off to CoinSwitch (https://metamask.coinswitch.co/) I go! I don’t know if I’ll have enough to cover my ticket to the big show, so I better skimp on the transaction fee. Maybe I’ll get lucky…

CoinSwitch is very easy to use, but completely hides any fees. You select the currency that you want to send, the currency you want to receive, and the amount you want to send. CoinSwitch queries various exchanges and presents you with the amount of your selected currency that you will receive. This presented amount already has the fees deducted, so this should be the actual amount you receive at your address.

Level 4: Do the deal

I finally made it to the market place! I’ve done my research, I’ve got my $5.43 worth of ETH….but what’s this? The gremlin behind the Loopring Exchange counter says they only deal with MEANINGFUL amounts of currency.

First, the minimum order size for LRC is 100 LRC. Great, I’d like 100 LRC please! What do you mean you can’t just sell me 100 LRC? Apparently there’s a minimum order size of 0.05 ETH (about $10). So any trade must meet the minimum order size of BOTH currencies involved!

Level 5: Do the deal … for real

After grinding more surveys, requesting my withdrawal, and getting my BTC into ETH, I’m finally ready to try again.

The gremlin begrudgingly agrees that I BARELY have enough money to do business with them. I deposit my ETH into Loopring Exchange, select the LRC-ETH pair from the dropdown, click the most recent green price from the Recent Trades table, fill in enough Amount to meet the minimum order size for both currencies, kiss my lucky charm, cross my fingers, and click the “Buy LRC” button.

GAH! So because I had EXACTLY 0.05 ETH in my account, the only trade I could make LRC-ETH had a price set too low. So I had to switch to ETH-USDT. And FINALLY we have a complete trade!

Final Thoughts

I hope you all enjoyed reading about this little adventure as much as I enjoyed chronologing it. I plan to share more information with the community as I continue to dive deeper into the cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds. Thanks for reading!