Mythicats are a ‘collection’ of NFTs I’ve been interested in since September last year. To save me describing what ‘Mythereum’ is and what ‘Mythicats’ are, here is the blurb on the Opensea collection -
Mythereum was the first trading card game on Ethereum and the first to build an interoperability bridge as part of the Mythicats edition (CryptoKitties x Mythereum).
When I first saw them, I thought ‘Why are they ripping CryptoKitties off?’ before I realised they weren’t ripping them off - they were ‘forged’ from CryptoKitties! Anyways I’ve tracked their floor price on and off since first seeing them. They went to ridiculous prices not long after (3-4 ETH!) as the ‘historical’ NFT narrative took off.
I once owned a mythicat (for a couple of hours at least).
I was bored the other day and decided to check what prices they were listed at now. There was one for 0.3, another for 0.31 and a really cute one for 0.4 - super-cheap compared to weeks and months earlier, but ‘I’m not buying any more NFTs during this bear market’, I thought because I wanted to wait until max pain sets in and better deals come along (plus it’s a big deal for me to scrape together 0.3-0.4 ETH). A day or two after that (also when I was bored) I had another look to see if anyone had bought them. They had but also that there was a mythicat listed for 0.0578 ETH. Wait, what? I did a double-take. This can’t be right. OK I’m not buying NFTs but I am buying this one. As soon as I hit buy I thought, ‘What have I done?’. The seller has probably listed for that price by mistake - a fat-finger, in this case accidentally putting a zero after the decimal place. But then I thought if I hadn’t bought it someone else would have - or more likely something else, aka a BOT! Anyways I had a relic - a mythicat, one of just 547. I was all set to move it over to the hardware wallet when some DMs popped up on twitter. It was the seller. They had fat-fingered. They were devastated and asked for my help. Well, there was only one thing to do - the right thing. They transferred the cost I paid and rounded it up to a nice neat number - I said they didn’t need to do that but also that if it made them feel better I wouldn’t argue - and then I returned the mythicat to their wallet.
The mythicat’s adventure
This person in my DMs then told me about a scam they fell for that ended with them losing a lot of value in NFTs and crypto and that I was such a great guy for helping them out - I made them feel better by telling him I’d made some dumb mistakes in crypto over the years. I didn’t go in to detail - I never have publicly because I’m too embarrassed. But here goes -
Dumb mistake 1
In 2018 my wallet was drained because I had my seedphrase in my Evernote. My Evernote was hacked a month or two earlier. I even got an email from Evernote to change my password. I did but I didn’t make the connection that something more valuable was in there. I should have created a new wallet and transferred everything in there as soon as possible. I didn’t. One day I noticed there was (basically) nothing in the wallet. I thought - this can’t be right. I checked on etherscan - there it was, the day and time it all happened. Thankfully I had almost no ETH in there and obviously no BTC because it was just a MetaMask wallet. It was all just sh*tcoins that are almost worthless now. They also drained my NEO wallet - the seedphrase was also in my Evernote.
Who would store their crypto passwords in Evernote?!
Anyone remember Ian Balina? He was a sleazy YouTuber who was very popular during the 2017 bull-run. He famously came out in 2018 and said that he’d lost everything after his Evernote had been hacked. I thought how stupid is this guy! That was me and I didn’t realise it. Who’s stupid now?!
Dumb mistake 2
After that I created another MetaMast wallet. In the UI I labelled it ‘HAKME’ to be clever. One day I noticed one or two small transactions that I don’t remember doing myself. I wasn’t 100% sure if it was me or not. There was barely anything in the wallet anyways but just to be safe I decided to make another wallet. A few months later the UniSwap airdrop happened. I was lucky enough to get a decent amount (in my third wallet). I was stoked. That night I checked the ‘HAKME’ wallet - sweet! That wallet was also eligible for the UNI airdrop. Did I claim the tokens that night? No! When I came back to the wallet a day or two later, I went to claim the UNI tokens only to find the message ‘You have already claimed’ - No I hadn’t! - checked etherscan - I hadn’t but someone else had! Crap. So although I had the UNI airdrop in my third wallet, someone else had run away with them from my ‘HAKME’ wallet. Sigh.
Dumb mistake 3
Last year I received an ‘airdrop’ for something called akswap. Must be a sh*tcoin, I thought. In spite of this, I had a look on Uniswap to see if people were selling them and how much they were worth. It was a decent amount, or so I thought. I decided to sell mine - free money! I tried a couple of times but the transaction failed. I didn’t know it at the time but this was a ‘honeypot’ - it was programmed to not allow trades. They put liquidity in the pool to make it look like it had been trading and that it had value but it was worthless!! When I checked etherscan to try and find out what the problem was, there was a message saying to visit their own site. So I did. The site at first glance looked like a Uniswap fork. When I tried to swap the tokens on the akswap site, a MetaMask confirmation came up. Stupidly, I clicked it without reading it. What it said was that I was agreeing to allow akswap to withdraw my ‘cUNI’ tokens (UNI tokens in Compound) which at the time was the largest holding I had in the wallet (I believe it was programmed to look for the largest holding). When nothing seemed to happen for a while I searched akswap on twitter to see if anyone had posted about their experiences using the site. I was shocked to find that I had been scammed. Again I looked on etherscan and saw that there were several transactions withdrawing cUNI from my wallet. Crap! I then had to do some panic searching to find out how to undo what I’d done, which I did but they’d already withdrawn about 90% of the tokens. Dumb mistake. What is it with me and UNI tokens?!
So there you have it, I have made more than my share of dumb mistakes. Thankfully I’ve always only invested what I can afford to lose and I’ve made other ‘investments’ in crypto which have made up for these dumb mistakes. I also have a hardware wallet now which doesn’t mean I can be any less careful. I still need to make sure I read everything before clicking anything!