18th September 2022 > > ETH hard fork.

tl;dr

ETH hard fork, yet again.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

For three months now BTC has been fighting a battle to stay above $20k. One day it will breach this level to the upside, never to return it again.

The difficulty is that the date of this event is a major unknown.

Occasional Series – h/t to BadPirate

I forget to mention in yesterday’s post that the information to set up ETHW and ETF chains in MetaMask came from an article on Medium written by BadPirate (https://badpirate.medium.com/).

Occasional Series – Craig Wright

The CCC tends to shy away from Hello magazine or Love Island type topics, but the ongoing crypto saga around Wright does get ever more interesting.

Straw poll please.

Do you want to hear about it?

Spoiler alert – he is a fantasist (cue libel lawyers, so perhaps I need to qualify that statement by adding “in my honestly held opinion” or something similar). But an entertaining one, nonetheless.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Minor update for the ETH hard fork

Gate.io, though it does not qualify for the much-vaunted CCC seal of approval, is a centralised exchange that I have used in the past.

I see that my account at Gate.io, holding a residual amount of ETH of 0.001029 worth a mighty $1.50 or so, has been credited with an equal amount of ETHW. They also have a vibrant market in ETHW/USDT with tight bid-offers.

I am impressed.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – ETH hard fork next steps

In yesterday’s CCC we looked at ways that one can lay claim to one’s ETHW if one was holding ETH in a self-custody wallet. If you missed it, and you want to monetise your ETHW holding, head over to https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/17th-september-2022-2-eth-hard-forks right now before reading on.

…

By now, I am quietly confident that all of you have done your homework regarding the risk of replay attacks. And you have come to this obvious conclusion.

If you send your newly acquired ETHW to say Gate.io to exchange for USDT and then again to ETH, you run a very small, but very real, risk of exposing your private keys to the world.

That is not a situation you want to be in.

Which leaves you just two options.

The first is to do nothing. During my twenty-five years as a trader at three investment banks, one piece of early advice I was given always rang true. You can buy, you call sell, or you can do nothing. The last of those options is often the right choice.

But in the long run, it gets you nowhere.

…

The second option is to sell your ETHW but first you must remove the risk of a replay attack.

The guaranteed method of doing so is to move your ETH to a new wallet.

Most importantly, the public address of this new wallet must be created from a new set of private keys, otherwise the replay risk is mitigated by not one jot.

The easiest way of doing this is to move your ETH (and any other cryptos) from your self-custody wallet to either Binance or Coinbase as a first step.

Then, transfer your ETHW to Gate.io to exchange for USDT.

At that point your self-custody wallet is empty. Set up a new one with a new private key – preferably using Ledger Nano X accessed using MetaMask – and transfer your ETH from Binance or Coinbase into this new wallet.

When that is done, swap your USDT on Gate.io for ETH and transfer your “free” ETH to your new wallet.

Your holding of ETH has now increased.

Nice.

Well done everyone.