So this post was a long time coming but it wasn't until recently I really realized how poorly Ethereum was designed and how it is destined to fail.  Ethereum right now is a necessary evil in my opinion. I went on a journey to make my first purchase of a physical item with crypto. I've been around crypto for a few years and have been slowly collecting crypto without ever using my own "money". So everything I have in crypto is pure profit. I went into this journey knowing that and knowing that if I ended up loosing the funds it would be okay.

However, with all that in mind I am so mad at Ethereum it isn't funny. A little backstory, I wanted to buy a graphics card for my computer. A while back I heard of a site called shopping.io. It is a website that acts as a portal (3rd party buyer) to purchase the item you want from Amazon, Ebay, Walmart or Aliexpress. You then send the crypto to shopping.io to cover the costs and hopefully you get the physical item you bought. That is the general idea at least. ( I say hopefully because I personally have never used it, I know of others that say its legit but we will get to that later).

Now I have been using Brave Browser for a while now and have amassed a little stockpile of BAT. And while normally I want to keep my BAT because I believe in the Browser and I take pride in owning that much BAT I was left with no other options but to spend my BAT. That is not where I started at though. I started with wanted to swap all my FARM, Ampleforth, Hydro, BMB (basically all my Publish0x tokens).

I have most of those tokens in my Trust Wallet (which I don't like anymore, but more on that at a later time). Trust Wallet has a built in DEX that lets you buy and sell and trade your crypto. What I didn't know at the time was that the swap pairs are not what I wanted. I was able to successfully swap my FARM for Ethereum and Ampleforth for Ethereum. Or so I thought, I paid the Ethereum gas fees and "lost" the source tokens but have still yet to receive the Ethereum so that's cool. $60 lost somewhere, maybe I will get it back, maybe I wont. It turns out that I shouldn't have even bothered with this step as it wasn't enough anyways.

It was at this time I decided to check out Shopping.io and create an account and find the graphics card I wanted. I found it and put in my cart and went to the pay screen. I was given the option to pay in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, and I think Dash. There may have been 1 more that I can't remember. With that in mind I knew that I was going to have to pay in Ethereum. A lot of my tokens were Ethereum based and it was going to be the easiest solution. Now as a note to anyone who wants to go down this road keep in mind to use Shopping.io you need to have MetaMask installed on your browser. Luckily I had it and have like $4 in Eth already in it.

It was at this point that I started to get really annoying with Ethereum and their gas fees. Here you can see I had 96 BAT in my Uphold account. I wanted to send it to my MetaMask account and was going to have to pay $12 to send $71 of BAT. That is stupid.

I also sent over my BAT from Trust to MetaMask. I didn't write down the gas fees for it but it was about $18. So now I had all my BAT over in MetaMask. I have 552 BAT that I needed to get into Ethereum. This is were I started having issues. I thought that I could just swap my BAT for Ethereum and call it a day. Turns out the flippin' gas fees to transfer 466 BAT was $120. Read that again.... to change my roughly $400 in BAT to ETH I would have to pay $120 in Ethereum in order to do it. How is that sustainable to anyone? Why are we still using Ethereum guys?

I thought about trying to get together another $100 of Ethereum to perform the swap I just couldn't. I said this before that all this money is free money to me so 'paying' the $120 wouldn't be a huge deal but it was the principle of the matter. I couldn't justify paying $120 to switch currencies. That was just out of the question.

I then turned to my friends on Noise.Cash and pegged the question to them. It is where I came away with "SimpleSwap". It is a website where you can basically send them 1 token (of your choosing) and get another token in return (of your choosing).  It is the same concept of swapping tokens but you don't have to use a DEX that has the exact pair you want.  It quite literally is a drop down list and you pick what to send and what to get.

There is a minimum amount that you have to send in order for it to let you. You can see here that I picked BAT as the token I want to send.

Then on the next drop down I picked Ethereum as the token I want to receive.

I don't have screenshots of the actual move (sorry) but the gas fees for this operation were $16. That was WAY more my speed. If you use SimpleSwap I can verify that it did work for me. It took about 2 hours though so keep that in mind. I have heard though that it has taken some people as quick as 5 minutes for smaller transfers. I however was sending 542 BAT worth 0.228 ETH.

At the top you will see "Waiting" - "Confirming" - "Exchanging" - "Sending" - "Finished". You only need to input anything during Waiting where it will tell you the exact amount of the token to send and to what address to send it to. After that SimpleSwap does it magic behind the scenes. If I had to guess is that they buy a lot of the tokens on the cheap and have them stockpiled. Then when you want to swap with them at the current rate you think you are getting a deal just paying the gas fees, while they are making money because they bought the ETH for way cheaper months ago. That is my theory at least.

Now with that out of the way I had my money in my MetaMask wallet and it was all in Ethereum. I had everything I needed to purchase my product via Shopping.io now. All I had to do was to go through the process. I won't detail the process here because well for starters I didn't take screenshots through this process and secondly it's pretty straightforward. 
You create an account

Search for what you want

Add item to your cart

Complete checkout

Here is a screenshot if you are searching for a OnePLus Nord 10 5G. You can flip flop between the 4 shops via clicking on their tabs at the top.

The last step was to actually send the Ethereum to Shopping.io to pay for the item. They tell you the address to send it to and exactly what amount to send. You can see here I had to pay another $6 in gas fees to do it.

All in I paid ~$86 in gas fees. That is including my swap of Ampleforth and FARM that I still haven't received the ETH for. I am also left with $72 in Ethereum in my MetaMask wallet that I don't really want there but also don't want to spend the gas fees to move it back to my Trust Wallet. So there it will stay for now. I am hoping to write a follow post with me actually holding the object I bought in my hands. When and if that day comes I am sure there will be a cool NFT to go along with it! *wink* *wink*.

Now with that out of the way we need to talk about Ethereum guys.

Ethereum sucks... HARD.

I understand why it was created. I understand that it was an alternative to Bitcoin and it created a great market share for itself and it just can't go away tomorrow. There are so many other Ethereum based projects and tokens out there that rely on it. BUT something needs to be done about the gas fees. 

I whole heartedly think that Proof of Work coins need to die in place. They are bad for the environment and well the people using the tokens themselves. The only people they benefit is miners and even then its a stretch. In the same breath I like the option to pick Slow/Average/Fast transaction speed and pay a little more to get it done faster. Truth be told in the last step when I was sending from MetaMask to Shopping.io that $6.16 I paid was the fastest and most expensive option. I like that feature. BUT some places charging upwards of $100 to change your currency is just unacceptable.

If this was a normal day and a normal me I would have said "F it" and not paid any gas fees and not purchased my item. But I knew that I wanted to write an article about it and wanted more experience on the subject. I have never actually bought anything tangible with crypto before and that excited me. What I can tell you is that I will never do it again unless the gas fee situation gets fixed. Sure I will happily collect my Ethereum from Publish0x and just keep it as is. 

Listen guys, I know we want to buy into this Ethereum and Bitcoin clusterf&#$. I get it, it's fun and exciting. But we are not helping ourselves or anyone that comes into the crypto space after us if we keep perpetuating this ETH/BTC madness. The tokens are just not viable. They will die out eventually. There just isn't a future for them. Picture your grandmother or mother or uncle going to the store in 30 years and wanting to pay for groceries in Ethereum but only has BAT in his 'wallet'. Then him realizing he has to pay $20 to convert his BAT to ETH just to pay for his $5 order. In no world does that work out. 

And I know someone is going to say "well Ethereum 2.0 and blah blah blah". It doesn't matter. Unless it is here now it doesn't matter. We have solutions already. We have coins at our disposal that can offer Instant and fee-less transactions. Like if I was going to a store and paying for my food with my Debit Card. Sure I don't pay a fee but the store pays like a 1% fee to accept Visa. For example if Nano's price became stable, I would be able to walk into my local Walmart and pay for my loaf of bread for say 0.5 Nano. They would get the money instantly. I would lose the money instantly. We both wouldn't have to pay fees and everyone is happy. That is the future of crypto in the real world and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

I will always advocate for Nano like tokens. But do not confuse that with USD backed tokens like DAI. DAI serves a purpose now but not in 30 years when the USD is worthless. We need a decentralized cryptocurrency that has a static worth that is fast and free. And guess what... we can do it. There will always be people who want to run nodes to help out the currency. And if you say "no there won't unless they get something in return". You're wrong, because imagine the world that only uses Nano for instance. Every government would be running nodes of the blockchain to make sure not 1 country was doing shady things. That would in turn make normal citizens (you and me) want to run our own node to keep our own governments in check as well.

So please everybody can we stop putting Bitcoin and Ethereum up on a pedestal and see them for what they are. They are game changers. They revolutionized the digital age with a new payment scheme. They took money and decentralized it. They are great for that. But they are broken. There had to be a first to get us to this point. Now that we are at this point let us work together and bring about the best solution that is practical for the long term.

That was a long post guys and if you made it to the end then thanks! Leave a comment, tell me I'm crazy and stupid. Or tell me I am right. I welcome all comments!