A Guide to Buying Spells of Genesis Cards

This is a companion article to this writeup about blockchain-based trading cards.There are a few methods to buying SoG cards. These are outlined below.

Book of Orbs app

The simplest is through the Book of Orbs app, available for Android and iOS. Simply install the app, and it will then create a Counterparty address for you . Through this setup process, it emphasizes the importance of writing or otherwise backing up the 12 word passphrase that it will show you in the beginning. Do not take this lightly; if it is lost you have no recourse to recover items contained in that address. (The passphrase will be available to you within the app after the setup process, but if your phone is lost or destroyed, and you don’t have the passphrase written or backed up, all is lost.)

Once you have everything set up, you will need to deposit a small amount of bitcoin to the address, as well as some Bitcrystals (Which can be sent to the same address). Bitcrystals are the currency used to trade the cards, and they can be bought on the Counterparty Dex, or on various cryptocoin exchanges Poloniex is the exchange that handles the lion’s share of Bitcrystal trading. It trades under the symbol “BCY.”

This article is generally aimed at people already familiar with sending and receiving cryptocurrencies, but feel free to message me if you need more information about this.

Your buying and selling will be done with the Bitcrystals, but you need a small amount of Bitcoin in the account to cover the transaction fees for using the Bitcoin network.

After the normal ~10 minute confirmation time, those currencies will show up in your wallet, and you’re good to go. At that point, you are free to browse through the list of cards. Using the “Market” tab at the bottom, you can search for cards and purchase/sell them.

The interface is fairly self-explanatory- you can place a “limit order” by using the “custom order” button at the bottom. Or, you can simply select one of the existing sell orders and fill it. In the example to the left, someone is offering to sell 16 Satoshi Lite cards at 320 Bitcrystals each. If you were to click on that order button, you could choose to buy a single one of those 16, all 16, or anything in between.

One quirky thing about trading cards on the app is that a few of the earliest cards (including the coveted Satoshi) are divisible- meaning you can buy a fraction of a card. Later cards are coded in a way that prevents this.

At first the idea bothered me but I’ve since come to not hate it. For one thing, the cards are tokens just like Bitcoin, and people think nothing of buying 0.5 or 1.5 BTC. Additionally, having it this way allows someone who really wants an expensive card to purchase it little by little.

But do pay attention when buying cards on the app-there are both buy and sell orders for fractions of cards. This is less of a problem when buying- if there is an order to sell a full card, you can fill the order and receive the full card. However, when selling a card if you list a sell order for 1 card, there’s nothing stopping some buyer from purchasing only 0.05 of your card (if it’s one of the few divisible ones). For this reason, when it comes time to sell one of these cards, especially an expensive one, you would probably be better off using a swapbot, discussed below. A trusted escrow is an option as well.

Counterparty Dex

This is fairly similar to using the app, except you are working directly through a counterparty wallet. I used Counterwallet.io. Again, you will need to write/backup the recovery passphrase. And again, you will then need to send a bit of bitcoin to the address, as well as whatever currency you will be using. The Counterparty Dex is an exchange that largely uses Counterparty tokens (XCP) as the currency, but Bitcoin, Bitcrystals, and a number of other currencies may be used. Here is the tutorial from Counterparty itself on how to use this option.

Once again, for the cards that are divisible, there may be fractional listings.

Swapbots

Swapbots solve the problem of divisible cards for anyone wanting to sell an entire card as an “all or none” transaction.

These are very simple to use to buy cards. The bots are programmed with a smart contract which facilitates a trade- basically it specifies a price for a given asset or set of assets, and if you send that amount from a counterparty wallet, it will then send your wallet the agreed-upon item(s). If you don’t send the full amount, after a brief period it will simply return your funds (minus transaction fees).

The bots selling cards may be found on sogassets.com (Dex listings can be accessed here as well- not to actually perform the trades, but to see Dex bids/asks for any given card). To find a swapbot, simply go down the list of cards and find the one you want. See the screenshot below for the listings available for the Satoshi card.

Here is the link for the TCG 1 bot listed there, if you wish to see it.

I have not created a swapbot to sell a card, though from what I understand it is relatively easy. As mentioned previously, it is probably the way to go if you are selling a higher value divisible card and want to ensure an “all or none” transaction.

I did go to the swapbot/tokenly site and after registering, there is a video with a tutorial on how to set it up. It appears relatively straightforward; I would do a few trial runs with cheap cards before putting a Satoshi in one, however.

In my searches for information on all this, this tutorial video came up which might be of additional use.

That’s all the information I have, hopefully it’s useful to you!