Always Do Test Transactions

I think in the day that we live in, where the contemporary banking system we have ways of "reversing" things like transaction mistakes, we have gotten used to being able to make a fair number of mistakes in a financial sense.

With the advent of digital assets (formerly known as cryptocurrency) though, there is a paradigm shift that a lot of people have to take in order to be able to take advantage of the financial freedom that it offers. One of those paradigm shifts that we have to get in the habit of doing is performing a TEST transaction!

Any time I do transfers of digital assets that is not on the Hive ecosystem, I always always always do a TEST transaction first! This is such an important element because there are so many things that can go wrong with just sending full payments willy-nilly. I haven't gotten to the point where I am buying things with Bitcoin and others in the physical world but when I do, one of the things that I am going to make sure even if it annoys the other party that I am doing transactions with, is performing a TEST transaction.

A TEST transaction is such an easy and basic step. If you are going to buy something from someone and it's 500$ worth of Bitcoin, that isn't an astronomical amount but at the same time, you don't just transfer it right away. You do a test transaction of 20$ or something of a much more nominal value and wait for the transaction to be confirmed and received by the other party. This is especially true and important when you are working with people you don't know. They don't give a shit if you made a typo or an error in transferring them 500$ worth of Bitcoin. All they want is their money. Yes they may feel bad for you but at the same time they need their money and will not give you something even if you messed up the transaction.

This also is an important factor when you are trying to transfer digital assets between crypto wallets. Say for example you have a Coinbase account and also (should, hell MUST) have a hardware wallet and want to transfer funds from Coinbase to the hardware wallet or vice versa. It is in your best interest to do a test transaction of a much smaller amount than what you are going to transfer as a whole. If you're only transferring 50$ off Coinbase to your wallet it might be fine to just send it but even then that's a little silly, although these days with the transaction costs you may not get away with a smaller amount like that easily. Back to the point though, you should do a test transaction between the accounts to make sure that it will go according to plan. If all goes well then get the transaction confirmed and transfer the larger amount and be done with it.

This just goes back to having to take ownership and security back into our hands and wrestle it away from governments and corporations. They do NOT have our best interests at heart and we need to remember that every single day. They are in the business of maintaining a monopoly on control and that's it. The era of digital assets is a dawning of a new paradigm where they have far less control over the finances than they have for quite a long time and that pisses them off. This means that we have to take and keep that power in our hands because the more we get control back in our lives, the more that we can effect positive change on many levels.

I don't transfer funds around all the time and I've done it quite a few times at this point but one of the most important things is that I do test transactions to keep my funds safe and secure between transfers. I don't think this is a habit that I am going to break because it's just peace of mind!