Waqas
@worqas
Story time. A couple of years ago one of my followers on Twitter made worqas.eth ENS and just gave it to me. I didn't know the guy at all and it felt like a really nice gesture. He said that I can use that and fund my journalism through crypto. I said thank you but no thanks. I had never even considered that possibility up till that point. He insisted that I accept this gift. So I thanked the guy profusely, and to show my gratitude I tweeted about it. I tweeted that this random guy I don't even know has given me this ENS (I still don't know how it works) and I am excited about it. As soon as I tweeted it, a bunch of my dedicated haters (Pakistani military has a lot of trolls) descended on that tweet, started quote tweeting me etc and saying that I was running some sort of crypto scam and there is no random guy who has donated me anything. Someone even took out some screenshot of a blockchain transaction "proving" that I had purchased the domain myself. I didn't know what to make of all that.
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Waqas
@worqas
It got so bad and I felt that these random rumors could hurt my credibility as a journalist and I was doing some pretty important stuff related to Pakistan those days. The rumors also made me a bit paranoid, I knew nothing about ENS and all the talk about scams made me think that maybe that guy is trying to scam me in some way. So I messaged that guy and said that I didn't want to accept his gift and now there is all this bullshit floating because of his insistence. I was pretty rude about it. That guy, who probably really liked my work and wanted to thank me, got really sad. He said one day I will realize what it meant and then he turned his Twitter account private.
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Waqas
@worqas
Fast forward to last month when I was setting up my Warpcast account, I saw a lot of people had .eth usernames and remembered I had one that the guy sent to my metamask wallet. I dug it out, sent some eth to my metamask wallet from Warpcast wallet and renewed the domain. After doing that, I felt so sad that I was rude to someone who didn't mean me any harm, who just wanted to do good. I went to his Twitter and it was locked so and it looked like he hadn't used his account for a while because he had no mentions. I really really want to apologize to that guy and tell him that he was right. Now I understand.
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Waqas
@worqas
I don't know why I had to tell this. maybe it's my regret about how I behaved from a place of ignorance to someone who was only nice to me, whose gift I still have. My ignorance also made me paranoid enough to reject a sincere gift. I'm sure there are a lot of paranoid people out there who reject crypto only due to the paranoia that comes from ignorance. I still have my doubts about many aspects of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but now I feel I should apply my regular filter system here too. There are good people and bad people in this space like everywhere else, I shouldn't shun nice, sincere people just because there are bad apples out there.
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