Hello my dear lovely people,
I have had my eyes on CryptoKitties for quite a while now. Since Hive forked from Steem and pretty much my wallet got doubled I felt like doing something with my raw Steem and SBD-s. So I converted some to Ethereum.
This story is written from a total newbie's point of view who's goal is to buy some cheap cats and try to breed them for fun.
I got Ethereum solely through blogging
This was the first time I used my hard earned magic-internet-tokens to buy something, so it was a really exciting process to me. I registered to Coinbase to have a universal crypto wallet and planned to convert some of my SBD-s to ETH through BlockTrades but they accept Steem only. So I converted 2 SBD-s to Steem then I converted them to ETH. I calculated that this small amount should be enough to buy two from the cheapest cats so I can start breeding with them.
And that is the story of how I recieved my first part of a top-tier crypto just through blogging.
Getting those cute money cats
So I just went to the CryptoKitties site and bought my first cat. Easy, right? Nope. I had to register a Metamask wallet, send there my ETH from Coinbase. I realized too late I could just simply transfer my exchanged Steem tokens there, so I could have left Coinbase from the procedure. Ayway I am glad I got to know that platform as well, it is very clear and well established.
So anyway, I finally got my money on a wallet I could log in with to CryptoKitties and started looking for cats to buy. Yay!
I could finally choose two which I liked and they were cheap enough to my poor wallet. And then I experienced my first shock --> gas prices. I knew there were going to be some transactional costs but it really hit me in the face when I saw that my 0.38$ cat's transaction fee would be over 1$. I planned to buy 2 from 2$ as an experiment and that suddenly seemed not to be possible. I figured I could change the gas price and limit, so I set the limit very low - thinking it would take ages my cat to arrive, but at least it is far more affordable that way (lol.. I'm talking about cents here. But hey, money is money)
This way I started two transactions for the 2 cats I liked and waited. After a while I got a notification that neither of these tranactions succeed, one got dropped and the other timed out (or something like that, etherscan could not find its status). But I lost the gas fee I paid, leaving me wih 1.5$ worth of ETH.
I had a rough start due to my lack of knowledge. I read some forums afterwards and people suggested to pick only from the default transaction fees on CryptoKitties, it is sure the transaction will succeed that way. The next day I gave it another try and happily realized that gas prices were lower so I could buy two cats.
Please welcome
They were both cheap and I kind of like their looks so hellyeah.
Then yet I had to face the ugly truth again. Breeding costs like 2$... :D
So we can say I f*cked it up a bit. Buying cheap cats is not worth it at all. If I would breed them and sell the offspring for let's say a dollar I would be still in deficit.
Summary
I do not personally think CryptoKitties would be the ideal collectible crpyto game since it is based on Ethereum and transaction fees are quite high. If you would like to make some $$ by selling and breeding cats I would suggest to do market analysis first and buy some rare and expensive ones to breed rather than common ones.
However, I gotta admit, the design of the website and these cute cats is just pure art.
Have you guys tried CryptoKitties? Or any alternative sites maybe?
Let me know what you think :)
Thank you very much for reading!