My Experience Accepting Crypto Payments For The First Time

At the risk of sounding like an old man who’s out of touch with the world, I’m not particularly well-versed in crypto.

However, since starting my forum Office Outlaw, I’ve begun learning more about cryptocurrency in order to eventually accept it as a payment method for upgrades there. After all, crypto is often requested as a way to pay for upgrades, especially in the internet marketing industry.

Now, I knew some things about it and had various cryptocurrencies already, but I had never accepted crypto as a payment for anything nor had I tried using it to buy something until recently.

Accepting Crypto For The First Time

So my first attempt to accept anything was with USDT TRC20, which I believe is something called a “stablecoin” whose value is tied to a fiat currency (in this case, USD).

I’m just going to describe the experience as being odd, but definitely interesting. I was asked for my USDT wallet address, so I sent the one I had for Tron.

But no, no, no; it’s not the Tron wallet address I needed nor was it my ERC20 wallet address, but rather my USDT TRC20 wallet address (but I think there was also one for just TRC20?).

So it takes a little while for me to figure this out, and I’m going to blame Ledger Live’s set up for that. I sent what seems to be the right address, and the payment was received!

​I accepted another transaction after that one as well for the same wallet address, so at least I now have some experience with accepting cryptocurrency as a payment method.

Trying To Buy Something With Crypto For The First Time

So I wanted to buy the new server with crypto as I have enough in there to pay for the servers months in advance. I saw that they accepted TRON TRC20.

I thought, “Hey, I know that one”, so I selected that as the invoice option. I’m given the wallet address to send the payment to, so I open up Ledger Live feeling excited to make my first payment.

Disappointment soon hit me when I was greeted with a warning message just before the transaction that said something like, “The SUN doesn’t have enough energy! This transaction may cost up to an extra 50TRX”.

I looked into this and found out that transactions cost… energy… the you can also rent or something… which sounds like BS. Look, I know there’s a reason behind it, but all I could do was make comparisons to end-stage 2020 Angry Birds where after playing for a few levels, the game would stop you from playing with a message like, “Your birds are tired and have no energy, you need to wait 24 hours for them to rest… or you can wake them up with an ENERGY BOOST for 50 Bird Bucks, which you can purchase in the AB store for $5”.

I ended up just not buying the server with crypto out of sheer annoyance.

My Thoughts So Far

I see why crypto still isn’t really a mainstream thing that every Joe on the street is using, but I kind of like it so far. It makes me feel like a proper outlaw, if you know what I mean. 

Overall, it’s definitely something I’ll keep learning more about, I’m just wondering what other sun energy type of things I’ll run into.

Alistair Kavalt
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