what did you say about running before you were walking?
I was borned and raised by the sea. It has been my home since forever. So, whenever we saw those tourists on the beach venturing in the water we knew we needed to keep an eye on ’em because more often than not, they would need us to drag them outta water. In surf lingo we call the haoles, a Hawai’ian term to call an outsider.
That was exaclty how I felt the other day. A haole. And believe me, there is nothing worse than being a haole on someone else’s beach.
The feeling started when I decided to buy an NFT (a non-fungible token. OK, I will talk about these guys later on, don’t worry) in a private sell, which would be like a pre-pre sell. Something that only an insider would -allegedly- know about. As someone who has not been long in the crypto world, this move turned out to be a typical haole one. Something like: “oh, look at that wave! I will impress my buddies and ride it!” In fact, it was a bad wave and.. well, you remember what I said. We locals had to go out there and rescue the…haole.
My haole moment began when I thought I knew more than I actually did. No wonder I ended up in hot waters and asked for help of locals who looked at me with a what-a-morron-like face. After two days trying to connect my wallet to a BNB network so that I could buy an NFT no one else knew about ( except that I that I read about this darn thing online, so….not much of a once in a lifetime deal at all) I finally got to buy it. But then…I couldnt see it in my wallet. This was when a local ( my wallet’s agent) told me something that sounded chinese, making it sound super easy, what that just made me feel even more dumb: “No worries, easy! When the token transforms to a different one, if it is not the native token of the network, it is necessary to add the contract of the token to see it. A swap transforms a token for another. It does not move it fro m the network, so you just use a third party platform called a bridge”.
I stared at the notebook screen for a moment that felt hours. What the heck was this guy talking about?? The only answer I could type was: “I have no clue what you’re talking about, dude”. After long chats and little progress I stuck with the NFT in my wallet hidden somehow in the crypto multiverse. However, a good local approched me days laters and said: “hey, man. If it’s a pre-sale you won’t see it yet. But you will. As for the tokens you wanna move from BNB to XRP, you need like a translator to mediate their talk, becuase BNB doesnt speak XRP and vice-versa. This translator is the bridge”. Wow!! I finally got it.
The takeaway in this post is: never run if you can’t even walk straight yet.
