The problem with Web3 is time and money.

I signed up for Greg Younger’s Write3 Challenge. It’s all about using Mirror and writing NFTs for 30 days. Greg has it set up really cool where to join the challenge, you collected an NFT from his site (Write3.io). The NFT gave you access to the Discord challenge server. You only had to pay the gas fee for the NFT. Well, the gas fee was in Polygon’s Matic. It was only a couple of cents but I only had ETH.

I bought some Matic but somehow screwed up that it’s still on the ETH blockchain, not the Polygon one. I tried to do a transfer but it cost more in gas fees to transfer than I originally bought in Matic. Thankfully, someone was nice enough to gift me the cents in Matic I needed to get the Write3 Challenge NFT.

The first part of the Write3 Challenge is to collect another person’s work on Mirror. Well, Mirror is now on Optimism, which I don’t have any of. So I went to do another transfer.

I wanted to collect this post by Cryptoversal. It’s free to collect but you still have to pay the gas fee. Ok, I’m down. So I go to bridge some ETH to Optimism. Does this make sense to anyone?

From Ethereum Mainnet to Optimism. But I’ll receive .001 ETH? Balance ETH to ETH but they’re on different chains? Am I doing this right?

Apparently, it doesn’t matter because even though the Gas fee to transfer is $0, I have insufficient funds. Ok, we solved that problem at least.

By now, I’m too worn out to trust myself to buy some Optimism ETH and have it correctly go to my wallet. So much work to collect a piece of free work. Looking at the clock, I spent at least 30 minutes trying to figure this out.

And to whoever works on the UX for these bridge sites, can we make it less confusing? How are we supposed to trust ourselves when everything has the same name? Maybe platforms like Mirror need to help a gal out with building the bridge into it. Or maybe bridging should be built into our wallets. Why does it cost a gas fee to bridge? This must be more like a foreign exchange than cash to credit.

So, if you’d like me to collect your work, please consider collecting this piece for a price so I can afford to collect yours!

Photo by Ricardo Díaz on Unsplash