At some point, I got this bright idea: why not give all my family members some crypto for Christmas? I'd held a bit of bitcoin through ~10x gains, and giving some bits of that away felt like a perfect way to share the love.
Then I procrastinated. And in the few days before the holiday hit, transactions fees were going crazy and I got discouraged. My intent was to share the magic of transacting in crypto, but this wasn't feeling very magical. In some flash of inspiration, I decided to look again, to see if I really couldn't get my hands on that Bitcoin Cash that should just be waiting there for me, if I'd used the right kind of wallet.
See, I put my bitcoin in a 2of2 multisig wallet that seemed like a really great choice as a newbie. It wasn't a custodial account, and it seemed to be more secure than many other options. I was following the scaling debate somewhat closely, but I guess I missed the part where I had to switch to a new wallet to claim coins on forks. When I saw BCH rising in market cap, I did some research and concluded that those coins were probably gone forever, since the wallet provider wasn't signing BCH transactions. Needless to say, this was a big aha moment about what controlling one's keys actually meant (I had full control over my BTC via time locked recovery, but that didn't lend control over BCH in this case... confusing, I know).
As luck would have it, that wallet provider, under popular demand, did start offering an API call to sign BCH transactions. YAY! But they weren't offering a full tool. So this meant relying on a 3rd party tool offered by someone posting on reddit, with some reassurance that some folks had checked the code to make sure it wouldn't just steal all the coins. Good enough, I guess. I downloaded the Python script, installed a BCH wallet, and tried to get my coins, only to be met with an encoding error. Only a couple days to go until Christmas, and I knew I should be spending the time with my family, not hunched over my laptop trying to figure out what was going wrong. Shucks.
Defeated, I bought everyone chocolate bars for Christmas, my usual fallback. The paper wallets I'd printed (while being paranoid that the "smart" printed I'd used might have saved the images, which might have been snagged by a hacker, which might have resulted in my gifts being worthless by the time their recipients tried to redeem them) remained unfunded. We all had great fun, and I did get to have some great conversations on crypto with my family, but I was a bit disappointed.
With the holiday over and my siblings headed home, I dove back in. A bit of tinkering revealed the destination address I was trying to send the BCH to was the problem. It didn't take long then to determine that the wallet I was using had adopted a new convention for writing BCH addresses (to prevent confusion and trying to send funds across chains), and all I had to do was convert the address. Bingo! The script dumped out some strings of numbers that I copy pasted into a website to broadcast onto the blockchain, and I saw the funds show up in the wallet. This was all pretty nerve wracking, cause a little copy paste error could have cost a lot.
I got to send some crypto for Christmas today, even if it was late, and there was something quite special about it. Something felt fundamentally different than giving or spending fiat. I didn't get that sense of loss and dread that I've been trained to feel when seeing money go away. It felt good, and weird, and nerdy. The fact that hacking away at a terminal screen, scouring the web, and applying a little ingenuity secured me a valuable asset that I could use to spread joy to others... well, that's priceless.
