Digital🛢- Will you strike digital oil? — Issue #2

Digital🛢(oil) is a brand-new scavenger hunt newsletter that pays you to learn about blockchains. At the end of the month you’re eligible to strike digital oil ($500 paid in USDC) if you complete all checkpoints. Solve quick (2–3 min) and simple (easy) tasks that arrive in your inbox weekly, designed to teach you how to interact with blockchains. A smart contract will select one eligible address at random every month and will send $500 in USDC to the winning address.

Format

In case you just signed up to Digital Oil, here’s a link to the first issue, which you can read to get up to speed.

Every 4 issues we’ll have an Oil Strike ($500 USDC prize). The smart contract we’ll be interacting with during the 4 issues will determine which addresses are eligible to compete for the prize, will randomly choose a winner, and will send the prize to the winning address. The monthly winner will then have $500 USDC in their wallet. A nice feature of blockchains is that the smart contracts are immutable (meaning they can’t be modified or cheated) and that all transactions are transparent, meaning that you’ll be able to inspect (and I’ll teach you how) that the contract selected only eligible addresses and that the winner was indeed fairly chosen.

What do I mean by smart contract?

A smart contract is an app. Similar to an app that lives on your iPhone, except it can’t be upgraded and it lives on a blockchain, meaning that its execution is decentralized (not controlled by a single entity).

We’ll be interacting with smart contracts throughout the Oil Strike. By interacting I mean reading and writing (affecting) the smart contract’s state. Going back to the iPhone app parallel, an example of affecting state in an iPhone app would be recording a new Contact in the Contacts app.

Our Goals for Oil Strike #1: The Funniest Joke

Here’s what we’ll do in this and the next 3 issues:

1. Create a crypto wallet in your browser and submit your account address to me so that I can send you 1 free MATIC (a token valued at ~$2).
2. Submit a joke to the smart contract.
3. Vote on the funniest joke (you can’t vote for your own).
4. Participate to help reach quorum and trigger the raffle (at least 10 people needed).

Your First Task

Our first task will be to get you set up with a Metamask wallet. Metamask is a browser plugin that holds the keys to your crypto accounts.

Go here to download and install Metamask on your computer: https://metamask.io/download/

Once you do, click on the little fox icon that should have appeared in your browser in the extension section:

That should bring up a welcome message. Press Get Started:

Press Create a Wallet:

Then, create a password:

Enter the password you created:

Watch the video if you wish. Then press Next:

Click to reveal the recover phrase words and (normally you would want to write them on paper) save them somewhere in a notepad on your computer:

Now, click the recovery phrase words in the order in which they appeared, and press Confirm:

Now you’re all set. Click on All Done:

And now click on the little fox icon again and you should see your Metamask wallet pop up in a corner. Now click where it says Account 1, and that should save your account address to your clipboard:

Lastly, submit your e-mail and account address to me here:

Google Form

I’ll send 1 MATIC to this address. In the next issue I’ll teach you how to connect to the Polygon blockchain and you’ll see 1 MATIC in your account.

Until then,

Adam