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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Waqas
@worqas
May 2023, exactly 2 years ago. :(
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androidsixteen 🌲
@androidsixteen.eth
Consider the opposite had happened -- that it was some type of scam, and your credibility got tainted by association with some shady crypto stuff The barriers to entry to understanding crypto are very high and you protected yourself from downside risk. The cost was human connection -- but you're paying it forward 🤝
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