What I learned at an Ethereum Convention

Web3 social is super fragmented

My experience from most to least commonly mentioned socials:

1: telegram

2: X/twitter

3: Farcaster

4: anything and everything else

Met some people excited about open social/ATProto, also met a lot of people who had really never heard of any of it.

ENS seems cool

Identity I added this weekend: jakesimonds.eth. It aliases to an ethereum address, and it seems like I can use it for things? It cost me $5 + fees, though funnily they charge exorbitantly more for 3-5 character names (like if I wanted jds.eth).

ENS is expanding/exploiting/inspired by DNS in kind of a different way than ATProto uses/expands DNS. I told a Dev Rel guy for ENS that I'd rather have 'pay.jakesimonds.com' alias my wallets, and it seems that's possible but I didn't set it up.

Got scammed out of $20

I pushed a private key. At a workshop. And at the time I knew it was bad practice but it was just a dummy wallet for the workshop and I was trying to keep up with the live coding presenter and so I just did it. And then signing up for ENS, the wallet hooked up to that exposed private key...I was still connected to it via my browser wallet and not really thinking too hard so I moved $20 of ethereum from coinbase over to it (to buy my ENS thing, because traveling/idk why but ENS moonpay didn't want to take my debit card), and it was instantly drained.

As soon as it happened I thought, "Oh I'll definitely blog about this." Now, though, I'm finding as I write this I'm feeling worried that I will be judged for this.

As much as I'm I think being honest in the above about how I was fairly intentional about playing fast and loose to just ... try to learn things at this convention, I can definitely see how I could have made a similar mistake and lost a lot more.

Or had I not gotten burned for $20 just now, would I have even realized that I was using credentials that were exposed?

mental model for wallets improving

I know I exposed the private key. I am hoping that was the source of me being scammed. If not, I do have a slight concern that I interacted with some malicious something (and I interacted with A LOT of apps/services this week, not always understanding what I was doing (lol)).

That said: I burned the compromised wallet. I created a new wallet. I verified that my browser extension was legit. I transferred a little ethereum to it via coinbase, then did the ENS flow. And (anybody reading this, correct me if I'm wrong) I feel pretty confident that this new wallet is good. I have my secret phrase stored somewhere secure. I won't ever give that to anybody. And I'll probably try to learn some more before I ever start dealing with real amounts of money on web3.

Idk how I feel about it all

I'm of two-minds with this stuff.

On the one hand: Wow, it's all so super elegant. Private key, public key. Signing verifies identity. On chain prevents double spend. Vitalik is a genius. Visa and Mastercard are not long for this world. etc

On the other hand: Maybe we can have a little centralization, as a treat? Maybe the fact that "You have two gibberish looking things, one of which you share with EVERYONE one of which you NEVER SHARE EVER!" is just like a fatal flaw? Because build all the UI you want on top of it, it's still just...is that a feature or a bug that you make a mistake and it's forever?