If you’re interested in trying Ethereum. You should try CryptoKitties. Here’s a How-to.

I bought my first 0.87ETH in October 2017 at about 1ETH=$297USD, and as of December it has reached about 1ETH~$450USD. Since that time I have been pretty intent on HODL’ing my ETH and keeping it dormant on my exchange(for newbs HODL means something like hold on for dear life or ‘hold’ misspelled — I haven’t quite pinned down the origins Edit: A lot of response says its a drunk man who did the latter).

Deep down though I have wanted to experiment with making transactions, wallet types, expanding my crypto terminology etc. But it seems like there is a lot of garbage coins out there and a lot of companies who have no idea how to engage early adopters in their exciting projects. From what I have seen CryptoKitties, and learning to use it, for all its faults is the most accessible dApp out there and a great learning experience.

So I have been wanting to offer up some resources for those who are interested in purchasing their first ETH but now I think there is a great opportunity to dig right into transactions using CryptoKitties once ETH has been successfully purchased. So lets do it!

Purchasing Ethereum

This is a beginners tutorial: so absolutely no guarantees on safety. I believe in this stuff but actually this is a relatively new industry and so there is uncertainty and investment risk — purchase cryptocurrency at your own risk.

U.S. Citizen?

Coinbase seems like the safest and most popular choice to buy ETH. I have read that at one point they had 100,000 new accounts open up in one day during November. If you go this route, apparently they have a referral program where we both get $10USD in BTC if you purchase or sell $100. So here is my referral link I would love to try it out to see if it works(win-win?): https://www.coinbase.com/join/59e3d71bf5f30b01031ce0ba

Typical steps (all exchanges):

1. Registration — Easy : Typical account registration, if you have a smartphone I suggest downloading Google Authenticator and choosing 2FA (two factor authentication)
2. Verification — Medium: Typically requires passport, picture of yourself holding ID and mail showing your address. Takes several days, according to users on r/CoinBase around 7–10 calendar days maybe more.
3. ETH Purchase — Medium: There is normally a minimum purchase amount and a transaction fee. Options often include wire transfer, credit card, and debit card transaction each with different minimum purchase amounts and transaction fees.

Once you have funded yourself you can just HODL and watch your ETH grow if you want. I use https://ethereumprice.org/ to addictively keep up with the daily price and trends.

Warnings (all exchanges):

1. Support Sucks — This is not from experience, but reading the message boards there are a lot of cranky people who didn’t get it as easy as me. You are a customer so you should expect and fight to be supported, but don’t risk what you can’t lose. Be patient with verification and down-time. Also don’t expect to top of the line support; you are an early adopter in a new technology and it’s just not a well oiled machine yet.

Canadian Citizen?

Canadians can deposit using credit card in CoinBase, but not much else including no withdrawals. That’s why I use QuadrigaCX. It’s not perfect and I have seen a lot of complaints about down-time (on r/QuadrigaCX), but I myself have never experienced them! They also have a referral link I would like to try but its not win-win, it’s win-neutral: https://www.quadrigacx.com/?ref=11ubgh9z69htw8b3lf0e7rna

Typical Steps (same as Coinbase)

Warnings (same as Coinbase + )

EDIT!! March 2020 Do not use QuadrigaCX anymore. They died HARD about a year ago. I am pretty happy with Coinsquare right now. They have decent options.

2. Interac debit doesn’t work for all — You will need a debit card without the Visa symbol. Something about those debit cards just suck at online Interac purchases.

That’s about all you need to know for buying your first Ethereum, some say keeping your ETH on the exchange isn’t as safe as a wallet but for us newbs… who cares for right now!

CryptoKitties!!!!!

The main reason I like this game is because it forced me the newb, to use MetaMask, interact with the community, and make transactions. Admittedly I first thought it would make a good investment (seeing cat price double in a day), but I am no longer quite as confident. Anyways let’s just jump in…

How it works: Each kitty has attributes including a unique DNA code that can lead to rare or common “genes”, it has a breeding speed, and a generation number. Everything is a transaction. Buy a Kitty, sell a Kitty, breed a Kitty: all a transaction. Everything is traded in ETH and as of early December 2017 some people are try to sell their kitty for between 0.025ETH others ask for ridiculous amounts like 1,000,000ETH.

Steps:

1. Make a MetaMask account — Easy: This is a browser extension and seems to work with many browsers but Chrome is probably the safe way to go (please please if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, just stop using it, love PC’s hate IE). MetaMask suggests downloading the Brave browser; I tried it and have found it useful to have a browser to switch to when chrome isn’t working. MetaMask will give you a bunch of special words as a password this is really important so keep them in a safe place — I wrote mine on a piece of paper in addition to keeping a text file.
2. Register for CryptoKitties (cryptokitties.co) —Easy: MetaMask fills in your public address, you also need an email address and a username.
3. Transfer ETH to MetaMask —Medium: As of early December transferring 0.01ETH aught to do for now, you can always add more later. You have a unique public address with your exchange and with your MetaMask. Public addresses start with 0x always make sure you are sending it to the right address. See picture below, the red arrow shows you where to find your public address in MetaMask (this number is not a secret: my address is 0x5075CaFecB3c121603D9eFb60cE3c8c54863EE34 feel free to send me ETH to pay down my student debt! ). There is a fee normally associated with transfers but I think the exchange may wave this. Normally the exchange also takes care of something called Gas price and GWEI but if yours does not we will cover that below.

Red arrow points to your public address.

4. Buy your first kitty!— Hard: This is where you start using MetaMask. Organize by cheapest kitties, choose a kitty and press buy now until MetaMask pops up. The maximum total cost of the transaction to buy the kitty will equal: selling price + (gas limit*gas price). Note this is the maximum fee, MetaMask shows approximately how much USD this is and it regularly falls well below this max transaction fee. As of early December the combination of gas limit and gas price that is definitely working for me is 300,000 gas limit and 30 GWEI gas price. I got this number from a CryptoKitties Twitch streamer called bry_guy13 (https://www.twitch.tv/bry_guy13). I highly recommend joining and following this fun community, good advice and there is often generous kitty giveaways! For more info on gas see MEW or check out Eth Gas Station. Any time a transaction has a number you can check it out the transaction or your public address on https://etherscan.io/. EDIT: It seems like the gas strategy that should work most consistently is set GWEI equal or higher than Eth Gas Stations SafeLow, and set the gas limit to equal to or higher than what MetaMask auto populates (right now around 260k).

i. Check for a warning at the bottom of MetaMask saying the Gas Limit is really high, (as of December this means MetaMask will auto-populate a value of over 6,000,000) PRESS REJECT, if you have to do this several times buy a kitty from a further page or wait. If you tried to submit the high transaction your transactions could get frozen for hours, I did this and then fixed it with this youtube video by Truth Force (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm9cnin9RUA&feature=youtu.be)

ii. Buying a kitty from the 2nd or 3rd page will lead to more successful transactions. **Try this if your transaction does not go through.

iii. If transactions are still failing try logging into MetaMask and CryptoKitties in another browser (Brave came in handy for this). Or deleting the MetaMask extension and reinstalling (as long as you know you pass-words).

5. Sire/breed your cat with another kitty — Hard: CryptoKitties as of December charges a 0.015ETH fee to breed in order to incentivize blockchain miners. So the max fee will be: Breeding cost + 0.015 +(gas limit*gas price). Once this completes your cat will be pregnant for a while and have a timer associated with it. If for some reason a timer doesn’t show up but https://etherscan.io/ and your account shows a transaction, don’t worry your cat still has a “bun in the oven”. It will hatch regularly according to the mating speed it’s just a piece of the UI is dislodged. I suggest just leaving it, but if you want to make a transaction to try and fix it here is a link that may get your timer working: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/comments/7hcy0c/guide_how_to_fix_bun_in_the_oven_issue/

6. Sell a kitty — this costs you nothing other than the transaction fee, and you can choose to allow the selling price to go down over time to increase the likelihood of sale! *Note this breeding and selling Kitty-Ad will stay on the marketplace until sold or cancelled (cancelling is another transaction).

Conclusions

That’s it, hopefully now you feel more confident making some transactions, I know I do. You can experiment a little bit with the gas limit and gas price, but you should join some sort of community so that you can get information on this. Also if you want to know about which Cat DNA is rarest check out http://cryptokittydex.com/cattributes. If you like any of the linked communities or their content please tip them ETH or Kitties I know they would appreciate it. As a last warning Cryptokitties can be quite addictive so BEWARE :)

If you found this helpful, or if something is unclear please tell me in comments! Or you can gift me a Kitty or ETH at 0x5075CaFecB3c121603D9eFb60cE3c8c54863EE34 gotta pay down that 40k student debt haha.