My Baby Steps into Crypto-Currency

As a US ex-pat living in Japan my recent wade into the crypto-currency and NFT world has been a sometimes exciting and often frustrating adventure.

Every dude I see on the internet always adds a disclaimer about their shit not being financial advice right before they give a shitload of financial advice, so taking their cue, I’ll say this isn’t meant to be financial advice.

In fact, you would probably be an idiot to take almost any advice from me on almost any subject. But this has been my experience so far in trying to set up crypto wallets, crypto platforms, buying crypto, selling crypto, exchanging crypto for other crypto, making and trying to sell NFTs and cashing some of it out for Japanese yen.

Steemit

Steemit was actually my first adventure into crypto, but at the time I didn’t really understand it at all. I thought Steemit was just another writing platform like Medium that paid. I tried and got almost not traction. The reads and likes were 1–5 a week if I was lucky. And since I never earned more than a few dollars worth of Steem (the platform’s crypto-currency), so I never bothered to learn how to get it out of my wallet and cash it out.

I’m mainly a fiction writer and at that time Steemit seemed to be mostly people writing about crypto-currency or con-artists trying to steal it from you. So, eventually after being ignored on Steemit, I gave up and returned to Medium.

Pay Pal and Crypto

As luck would have it, my next dip into crypto coincided with my first pay out from News Break. I started writing for them in January 2012 and received $1000 into my Pay Pal account on February 15th. I’ve had a Pay Pal account for several years, but up until now I haven’t used it much. So, when I logged in to check my balance I was surprised to see that you could now “buy”, rent actually, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.

At the time I didn’t know much about crypto wallets, HODL (hold on for dear life), buying on the dips, or really anything else other than that Bitcoin was skyrocketing at the time. So, I spent around $500.

I did a little bit of reading after that and learned that you kind of don’t buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, or Litecoin from Pay Pay, you sort of rent it until you sell it back to them (for a transaction fee of course) for whatever fiat currency you are using. With Pay Pal you don’t have your own crypto-wallet (sort of like a tiny personal bank vault), so you can’t store it off of Pay Pal in a desk top wallet or in a cold storage wallet like Trezor or Ledger.

According to what I read the main problems are If Pay Pal were to disappear or if they decided to close your account it is possible that they could also keep all their Crypto and go home. I won’t try and pretend I know how blockchains work, but part of includes an address that acts sort of like a complex password every time you perform a transaction using Crypto. Because Pay Pal has these you never own the crypto since you can’t transfer it to a wallet.

I’d like to think that something like that could never happen, but bigger institutions than Pay Pal have been vaporized by economic down turns (Lehman Bros anyone?) in the past, so it is possible.

Platforms and Wallets

Reading about Pay Pal convinced me that I needed a wallet to store any more crypto I decided to buy. This is where things get complicated. Or maybe where I complicated things for myself.

Though a lot of online reviews of various platforms claim they work in Japan, many of them don’t. I know Japan cracked down a lot of Crypto-trading after the big Mt. Gox hack in 2014 and several of the larger platforms stopped offering their services to Japan. Also, with the draconian FATCA tax laws for US ex-pats in place now investing or even opening a bank account in Japan for Americans can be pretty complicated.

I started with Kraken. I wanted to use them since they were one of the largest and oldest platforms and also based in San Francisco, sort of an adopted home city of mine ranking slightly lower than Seattle for me. I was able to set up an account, but had a very hard time trying to get verification which you need to do much beyond stare at the screen. I eventually got frustrated and gave up on them (temporarily).

Coin Mama was my next choice, but I couldn’t get verification with them either despite their claims that they are the easiest crypto-platform to get verified on.

I was able to set up an account and get verified on Coinbase, but I learned all I could do in Japan is buy Bitcoin. Since I wanted to speculate/gamble a bit on alt-coins Coinbase wasn’t going to do it for me.

Eventually I found Paybis. I can still only buy nine different coins through them, but they have no problem with me using my US debit card to do it, so that makes it much easier for me.

Wallets

This one was actually pretty easy for me. I read up on Exodus, I tried it, I downloaded it to my desktop, done! It works great. And it is also sort of a work around for Paybis’ measly nine coin limit. I can buy coins on Paybis, transfer them to my Exodus wallet and then trade them for other coins like Ripple for Cardona (which you can stake/earn interest on). The transaction fees can be high, so I have to be careful of that, but so far I think I’ve earned a little bit on each transaction I’ve done.

Cashing Out

I’m mostly all in when it comes to HODL (hold on for dear life), but at the same time I also think it is smart to have a way to cash out your coins if you need to.

Re-enter the Kraken. I had hoped that I could do this with Paybis and cash out to my US bank account, but it is a hard no go. And probably best since in the event that I do become crypto-rich cashing out to my US bank account as an ex-pat would probably be a tax nightmare.

So again, I found myself on another quest for a crypto-platform that would allow me to cash out. After a fairly long search I came back to Kraken. This time I worked closely with one of their online support techs and after about a week I was finally able to get intermediate verification and successfully cashed out a small bit of Ripple to Japanese yen and deposited it in my Japanese bank account. It was only slightly harder than doing trigonometry equations in my head while getting a root canal without nitrous oxide.

At this point I figured I was done. This atheist bumbling crypto-investor now had his holy trinity in Paybis, Exodus, and Kraken.

But then I discovered NFTs. And my brand spanking new Don Quixote rags to riches jousting tournament began.

NFTs

Want to know what NFT’s are? Yeah, me too. For all the technical explanations I'd just Google it and read the first couple that pop up.

What they really are is either a piece of art, music, ect created by someone famous or created for something famous like videogames and the NBA.

But for unknown punters like myself, so far from what I can tell, NFTs are a way to try and sell your creative projects on NFT markets like Opensea, Rarible, Nifty Gateway, and others.

After browsing some of the art in Opensea I realized that a lot of the art was basically jpegs that had been turned into (mined) NFTs. At first I wasn’t sure how a writer like myself could sell my work on Opensea. But I had been turning a lot of my short poetry and haiku into jpegs and posting them on Instagram for several years.

So, I threw some of my poetry combined with some photos up on Opensea to see what would happen. And promptly got a hard lesson in gas fees ($130 worth). I also had to set up a new crypto-wallet separate from Exodus because Opensea doesn’t work with Exodus. Enter Meta Mask and more seed phrases, passwords, ect.

So far, crickets…..

And to be honest at first I didn’t really see how you could use them to market and sell longer writing anyway. If I turned one of my 70,000 word novels into a series of jpegs it would take about 250 of them at least and wouldn’t add any value at all since you can read them as ebooks or paperbacks anyway.

I get the impressions with NFTs if you aren’t famous or don’t do something to make yourself famous online your NFTs get washed away in an open sea of well, Opensea(ness).

But I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve decided to turn some of my flash fiction into audio stories and market them on Opensea as well.

I’m charging about $30 for these ones.

I’ve added this explanation to the description for each of my audio story NFTs in the hopes that any potential buyers will understand the $30 price for them.

Hello to any potential buyers. It takes me about three hours to make these, hence the $30 charge for them. $10 an hour is less than minimum wage in some places now, so I think it is a good deal. Enjoy!

In my hometown of Seattle the minimum wage is $15 an hour, so technically you could argue that I truly am working for less than minimum wage every time I make one of these. I make about $70 an hour doing my day job, so I don’t feel like I’m exactly ripping anyone off here.

Now if only I could sell a few them and at least earn back the damn $130 gas fee I had to pay when I created my first NFT.

Conclusions

I’m not sure where this adventure will take me. I’m taking the “don’t invest/gamble money you can’t afford to lose” approach. I’m only using money I earn from my writing, which I don’t use to pay my bills, so I can truly afford to lose it if any of these investments go sideways.

But I’m hoping as I learn more and with a bit of luck maybe I can use crypto-currency and NFTs to make the most out of the little bit of money I earn with my writing.