Sending Cryptocurrencies – Take Heed of These 2 Warnings!

This article assumes that you have some basic knowledge about cryptocurrency.

Great! Let’s jump right in.

We are all very familiar with warnings. Take this for example:

Safety information

Read all safety information before using the device to ensure safe and proper use.

The above is usually followed by ⚠️ (an alert symbol), the word 'Warning' and subsequently a long list of DO NOTs…

Let me ask you this question. When was the last time that you have actually read the safety instructions for the new handphone that you'd just purchased? Yes, I'm guilty as charged too. We were quick to unbox and throw everything in the drawer and immediately started using the phone after inserting the sim card. This attitude is applied to all consumer electronics that we purchased.

Unfortunately, it is with this same attitude that many bring along when handling cryptocurrencies.

Case in point: if you do a search for “sending cryptocurrency to the wrong address”, you will find plenty of cases where someone has committed this mistake and desperately looking for an answer to reverse the damage. Depending on the amount involved, I can only imagine what’s going through their mind. I for one wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

Take for example the following incidence that happened recently.

On 12 Sep, CZ_Binance (Changpeng Zhao, the founder & CEO of Binance) tweeted...

A guy just sent 800 #BNB ($20,000) to a smart contract address by mistake on Binance Smart Chain. It is effectively burned (permanently stuck).

Many of you may be very familiar with how Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains work. But for those who are used to traditional money transfer transactions, it is difficult to comprehend how anyone can make this kind of mistake.

However, as cryptocurrencies become more widely adopted, mistakes like this will be more prevalent. As it is, if you do a search for “sending cryptocurrency to wrong address”, you’ll find plenty of cases where people have made this mistake. You’ll also find answers to the question “How can cryptocurrency be sent to the wrong address?”

A similar incident hit close to home. Last week I made a transfer of $SAND to Metamask Wallet. I wanted to purchase a piece of land at the Sandbox's last LAND Presale (Round 4.2) event. I was extremely excited to get a piece of land here as I believe this is an investment with high potential. This last round of sales only accept the game’s $SAND token for these land sale transactions.

So, I went ahead and bought some $SAND tokens at Binance and did the transfer to my Metamask Wallet that’s linked to the game. I clicked send and the smart contract transaction indicated its pending and after a few minutes showed completed. However, the exchange stated there was an error or something to that effect. I can’t recall what error message exactly but something to do with the receiving address. With a pounding heart, I checked my Metamask Wallet and the token wasn’t there! There’s NO $SAND tokens! Obviously, I panicked. What should I do? I had followed the instructions exactly as indicated at the Sandbox guide.

Since how to but $SAND and "Transferring your $SAND tokens to your The Sandbox account" for the land sale was a guide from Sandbox, I was sure they would have tested it. The logical thing was to seek help from Metamask as I’d double and triple checked the receiving address before sending. I went to the Metamask site and look for support. Unfortunately, Metamask does not have chat support so I had to submit a query, which means I have to wait for an email reply. FOUR days later, I received the following reply:

Hello there,

If you sent funds to that address of that service you need to contact them:

That’s not the support or the answer I was expecting and quite frankly, disappointing.

If you’re a familiar user of any software, applications or services, you’d know from experience that if you are unable to find a phone or chat support easily and are required to submit your query through a website form and wait for a reply; you must be prepared to wait for the reply.

If the solution is urgently needed and a fast answer is critical, then you have better start doing some research on your own to find the solution. It’ll probably be faster and in my case, it certainly was. So, when I received the email reply, I’d already discovered the solution. What disappointed me was the fact that it was a simple solution and the Metamask tech support should have KNOWN the answer.

From my search for an answer, I found out that because $SAND is a new token, I needed to manually add the $SAND token as a custom token to my wallet before the deposit will show up. This is a function within the Metamask Wallet. I immediately logged in to the wallet and did just that. Guess what? Voila! The balance showed up! You have no idea what a relieve that was.

My point is that this is still a relatively new technology. There’s still a lot to be discovered and learnt. If I look at the positive side of this experience, then I should feel encouraged, as I was able to troubleshoot my own problem.

Because it is still a relatively new technology, how should we approach it?

Let’s back to the guy who sent $20,000 to the wrong address by mistake. I empathize with the guy. Is there a solution to his predicament? I don’t have an answer. Will he continue to utilize smart contracts? That’s hard to say.

As with anything, it boils down to our attitude. We cannot afford to approach it with a lackadaisical attitude. There are plenty of warnings and cautions when dealing in cryptocurrencies. Choose to ignore them at your peril.

My personal experience has taught me to take heed of two such warnings. You see, in the cryptocurrency world, you are constantly bombarded with the following cautions and warnings:

1.      Not your private key, not your money

2.      Make sure you send your cryptocurrency to the RIGHT address!

I WILL take heed. There is a reason why they are repeated so often.

If you’re invested in cryptocurrencies, remember to stay safe! Keep your private keys PRIVATE and DOUBLE & TRIPLE check addresses in ALL your transactions!

Before ending this article, I’d like to share some useful resources that I use and recommend. I encountered these as a result of my interest in cryptocurrency. I have not regretted using any of them. Just click on the name of the resource and it'll take you to the site.

You learn and earn ETH, BAT and Loopring by reading and blogging in the Publish0x platform. This is a platform that’s similar to earn.cash. In fact, it was from there that I discovered earn.cash.

Since I do quite a bit of searches online, I figured that I might as well earn money while doing so. This is why I am now using Presearch, a search engine that pays you in cryptocurrency when you do your online searches. 

Let’s get back again for a minute to the guy who sent $20,000 to the wrong address – what if the recipient address wasn’t some hexadecimal string that can easily be 40 characters long? What if it’s a name? Would he have avoided the mistake? Which bring me to my next discovery - Unstoppable Domains. It caught my interest because of 3 reasons –

(i)     I can use it to replace the long string of hexadecimal cryptocurrency addresses with a human readable name. This can potentially be a solution to the sending crypto to the wrong address issue.

(ii)    It is a decentralized, uncensorable blockchain domain name.

(iii)  I only need to purchase once and own it for life. No more payments, ever. If you’re interested to explore, do use this link and both of us will get US$10 off our domain purchase price.

 Another discovery I made during my cryptocurrency journey is a fast, secure and private web browser called Brave. Since using, I have discovered that I save on bandwidth usage because it blocks all bandwidth consuming pop up advertisements. I highly recommend that you use if, especially if you value your online privacy.

Lead Image Credit: Image by Pexels from Pixabay 

Thank you for reading. Live Long & Prosper!