My experience of attempting to use Ether to participate in the BasicAttentionToken ICO

Edit after posting -
RATHER THAN HAVING ANY ISSUES WITH THEIR ICO, IT SEEMS THAT BASICATTENTIONTOKEN MAY HAVE SOLD OUT TO A HANDFUL OF INVESTORS.....CONGRATULATIONS! I will leave my experiences below as I found them. Big money really is in crypto now and personally, I think wide distribution matters a great deal. However, best of luck to them!

Original post -
Today I attempted to participate in a new ico called BasicAttentionToken. Their goal was to radically improve the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain. The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.

The attention economy is clearly experiencing a revolution and I thought their offering sounded very interesting. They were only accepting Ether so I sent some Steem to Poloniex, exchanged the Steem for Ether in the Steem/Ether market. Created an Ether wallet at myetherwallet.com and sent the Ether to my new wallet. There are several steps here but it all went pretty smoothly. The fastest part of the process was sending the Steem to Poloniex.

It is at this point that I started to have issues....

I waited until the ICO had begun and then followed the instructions from https://basicattentiontoken.org in order to correctly construct my transaction. I must admit that I don't fully understand Ethereum's use of GAS. I thought I understood it to be the means of acquiring network resource, what I was not prepared for was the number of times my transaction failed to appear in the block explorer https://etherscan.io

I had set the GAS Limit and GAS Price as instructed, by to no avail. At this point I started to doubt that I understood what was going on, especially as I'm not familiar with Ethereum wallets and the transaction mechanism......a state true of many people attempting to use Ether for the first time. So then I set about altering the GAS Limit and GAS Price....setting them higher until a transaction was finally registered on the block explorer. "Great" I thought. There we go then. This was good because despite the fact that I wasn't overly desperate to participate in the ICO, the feeling that things were rushing ahead of me brought on some feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out.) Ultimately I didn't want all the mucking about to be in vain simply because I was experiencing user interface issues. I was getting frustrated.

Anyway, the status of the transaction started off as pending and then changed to Cancelled. Here is an example....

Naturally, I thought it was something I had done, 'Bad Instruction' sounded like it was something I had done. So I set about putting together another transaction. Of course, when I attempted to generate a new transaction after checking all the details, I got a message telling me a transaction with the same hash had already been used, so for want of a better alternative, I closed down the wallet and logged back in. I would be doing that a lot over the next half an hour or so.

After a while of trying all kinds of different things, it finally occured to me to check some of the other transactions that were flooding into the ICO address and heightening my annoying FOMO. It is then that I discovered that the majority of the transactions seemed to be cancelled...

Ahhh! Perhaps it wasn't me after all! That was some relief but I had still wasted a lot of transaction fees and time. Still, it was clear that someone somewhere was experiencing bigger problems.

My purpose in relaying this experience to you is to try to highlight to Steemians, many of which will be new to crypto, new to blockchains and new to ICO's and such that there are still many hurdles and difficulties in using these new technologies. No doubt, if basicattentiontoken has experienced some technical difficulties or there is an issue with the execution of their smart contract, they will be working hard to put it right and I wish them luck. I found Ethereum's GAS mechanism to be very awkward and frustrating, that is no fault of basicattentiontoken's but it does highlight that the choice of platform to build within, the choice of tokens a project chooses to accept for an ICO or such have big implications. Just be prepared for challenges, for disappointment perhaps and to have your head completely scrambled from time to time. There is a very long way to go before any of this blockchain/crypto stuff is truly user friendly.

On a positive note, I honestly think Steemit and Steem are among the best and easiest to use platforms around. There is still a way to go, but we're on the right track.

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Happy Steeming