Clif High - How to safely register your ENS name! Yes, bad sound!

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June 17, 2017 - Clif High

24:16

How to safely register your ENS name! Yes, bad sound!

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	Okay, a quick video on how to do your own registration for your um Ethereum extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.
	This is ENS, the same way we have dot uh like uh dot com and dot org and so on.
	So in the Ethereum network, you're gonna need to know these ENS number uh names, and you'll need to have yours registered for your business or personal use.
	You'll notice on our um uh sales page that uh we've got uh uh you can send us uh the ethercoin eth at uh cliffhigh.eth.
	And so uh that's one of the functionalities of these.
	And this is a video to show you how to do this without getting the orders uh sniped away from you.
	They're somewhat um uh wild west at the moment, and there's all kinds of activity going on relative to ENS names.
	And we're gonna jump into this.
	You'll need to do some things though.
	If you're not running Chrome, uh, or even if you are running Chrome or you're running Firefox, you're gonna need to get the um MetaMask um Ethereum plugin, and that is a um little fellow up here in the corner, uh upper right, it says MetaMask.
	Uh when you click into it, it brings up your account and it shows you all of the um activity you've had on that account.
	You load that into your browser, and then as you uh do things relative to the Ethereum uh blockchain, this allows you to connect to that protocol the same way that the browser allows you to connect to the HTML protocol.
	Uh so uh you get MetaMask, you uh put it in place.
	It's kind of a wallet because it has to have some ether in it because the uh Ethereum network takes gas to run on.
	Uh it actually consumes Ethereum coins.
	And so you um uh burn up Ethereum in gas in order to get gas.
	Uh the uh Ethereum wallets get a little bit of Ether, ETH coin, and uh then you feed it out as it is required, and we'll show you that in the process of doing this process, which is the registration of a name.
	Can't go I can't go through the entire process today, but this will get you started.
	Let me state that uh once you've got your browser set up with uh MetaMask in place, uh you then take your Ethereum wallet and you send uh the MetaMask wallet some Ether so it'll have a little bit of gas for doing things, and then you have to be parsimonious and very you know, eke it out as to how you use your gas, and I'll make out a few uh point out a few things as we go along in doing this.
	And uh you can get uh uh an idea of how this process goes.
	So there's that, you load MetaMask, you've got it on your browser, and then you need to uh do a couple of things.
	You're gonna need to set up three items here.
	You're gonna need to set up a browser that looks at the registrar, which is a smart contract manager uh for doing the registration of these um Ethereum domain names, you can call them.
	And uh you'll need another browser that uh holds your or or you'll need your Ethereum wallet open uh because you'll have to bid in on these names once you've started this process, and then you're gonna need a spreadsheet or a database or a um notepad open to record all this information.
	These are not simple auctions.
	Let me state that these names are put out in an auction format.
	Uh it's a strange kind of an auction.
	You can read about it at the registrar's uh page.
	Uh basically it is a kind of an auction plus poker.
	You make a bid, all bids are blind until the reveal date, and then the reveal date some days on on after the auction is initiated.
	Uh that the reveal date, everybody reveals their coins and uh or their bids, and uh the auction closes, I think 72 hours after the um reveal date, the person that wins is the person that uh has revealed they had the highest bid, and they pay the second highest bid.
	So this is uh okay in that regard.
	Um there's a couple of things to know about doing these uh Ethereum name uh service registrations now, and that is that if you use uh my ether wallet or some of these um uh other ether wallets to both initiate the bid uh initiate the the auction and do your bidding, you'll set yourself up for what's known as sniping.
	There are people that are sitting out there right now on the um monitoring the Ethereum blockchain, watching things.
	They want to see who's interested in uh what name, and then they'll try and snipe it out from underneath you and uh and charge you more money to buy it from them later on.
	So to avoid that, what you want to do is be very quiet about this and just initialize the auction on the registrar's page, let it get into the blockchain at a very low gas rate so it's slow moving, like you don't really care about it much, and then put in a small little tiny bit of a bid that you're pretty sure will win it if nobody else screws around and bids on it.
	Um but do that with your wallet.
	So you don't want to bid and initiate the auction at the registrar, you can uh but you uh really are better off doing it where you create the bid there and then create or create the auction there and then create the bid from your uh Ethereum wallet.
	And this is by separating the transaction this way, it won't show up um in a particular fashion as the blocks are processed, so it won't have basically a big red flag about oh oh hey, I'm interested in this name, and I might be willing to pay money for it.
	Uh so we're gonna go through the process here real quick.
	Uh the first thing we're gonna do is to go on over and look at the registrars page, and you can you can actually use either your um Ethereum wallet if you're using my Ether wallet, or you can use the registrars page to find out if a name is uh available.
	Now you have to understand that these are not like DNS names.
	These are very powerful names because you'll be able to put uh uh subdomains ahead of these because they use what's known as big indian little indian uh resolution.
	So I had the ENS name cliffhigh uh dot eth.
	I could put on their half past human dot cliffhigh.eth, or I could put on there uh Fred Flintstone dot cliffhigh dot eth.
	It doesn't matter, and it's infinite.
	So very powerful subdomain, so to speak, uh naming capability from these um Ethereum name structures.
	Uh so that's why they're very uh worth a lot of money if you do this uh correctly.
	And also they'll be used, uh they can be used for resolving down to uh actual distributed applications instead of simply your wallet address or whatever.
	Uh so there's there's that aspect of the uh ENS system.
	You really should uh understand what it is, but at the moment, if you're in a business and people in your fairly high name business, um people are out there trying to get your name and make you pay money for it.
	So I don't have half-past human because somebody purchased it.
	So I've got half pasthuman.com, but I don't have half past human.eth.
	Uh I do have half pasthuman.
	Or I do have clip high.eth thanks to somebody that was uh kind enough to grab it when they uh when they saw it go by, so to speak.
	Um and then pass it on to me.
	So that's what we're gonna do here is give you a heads up about uh what's happening and how to do this um pretty effectively.
	So the first thing to do is to set up a spreadsheet.
	The spreadsheet is going to record the information we're gonna have to uh record.
	Our auctions are such that we have to put our bid in, and then several days later we have to reveal that bid.
	In order to reveal the bid and later on, in order to claim that bid, should you win, you need to have all this information stored because you've got to give it back to the uh process in order to prove that you're you and it's quite extensive.
	So we're gonna hop right over to our uh Ethereum um registrar page, and we're gonna look up a name here, see if it exists, and we're gonna look up uh love and light and see if it uh dot eth and see if it exists.
	and go come on there There we go.
	The recording is hanging everything up.
	Okay, so here's the process.
	It shows that uh love and light uh dot eth is available.
	So you're gonna want to scroll down to the uh bottom of the page.
	You want to make sure that your MetaMask has Ether in it because you've got to pay your gas bill right now.
	And you'll notice that you can spend money on it.
	Um right now you could put in so many ether, you can see other options.
	You can say that you understand how the process works and your responsibilities involved.
	Uh and you can which opens up the ability to bid, but what we want to do is we want to open without bidding.
	And so this creates off to the side.
	We have our little um uh how much gas are we willing to spend.
	This is from MetaMask, and I'll I'm gonna drop down and decrease the um uh gigaway uh way.
	WAEI is a Chinese word meaning energy, and gigaway is the um amount of uh gas price, so to speak, we're willing to pay.
	So I'm gonna have this be a very slow auction.
	So I'm putting it down to four gigaway because I don't really care whether it gets uh whether it's effectively uh created or not.
	And so we'll accept that.
	And so the auction is officially launched now onto the Ethereum blockchain.
	And so um uh what we'll do is to go over to give it a second here to our um uh spreadsheet.
	And while we're filling in our spreadsheet uh to start us off, we'll uh let it get on the Ethereum blockchain.
	Usually only takes a few minutes.
	We're gonna put in the name we're getting here, Love and Light, uh put in the date that we opened up the auction.
	If you can't open the auction, so you might get one of three responses when you ask if a name is available.
	Uh the name could be owned, in which case you can buy it from them if you want.
	Uh the name could be available, in which case you go through the process that we're going through now, or the name might not yet be available, and it'll give you a date as to when you anybody can bid in on that.
	This is algorithmically controlled, and so you need to pay attention to this, especially all the dates.
	And so in our spreadsheet, we're gonna put in today's date uh 617 2017 is the date we opened up the auction, and then we're gonna go on over into our bidding process here.
	So we'll save this.
	Um, and then we'll go on over to do our bidding process.
	And so we're gonna go over to the Ethereum wallet.
	I'm using my ether wallet, it's pretty cool this way.
	I like it.
	It's uh browser-based, um uh very well done, tightly built.
	It has issues, of course, whereas everything does.
	I'm in the ENS section, that's the Ethereum namespace or name service.
	And so I'm gonna check over here to see if the auction is available, and I'm gonna type in exactly as I typed it over on the registrar.
	Love and light, and uh say, is it available?
	Uh-oh it is available.
	And you'll notice it says do you want the love and light.eth, unlock your wallet to start an auction.
	And so I would do that.
	I would um uh go and select my wallet file.
	Um, which I'm going to do now, but off camera so that I uh don't show them the secret codes and all of that business.
	Hang on a second.
	Oops.
	Passwords, passwords everywhere, make them complex.
	Okay, so now um we have our um uh wallet ready.
	We're gonna go ahead and bid on love and light dot uh eth.
	Um we don't care so much about it.
	We're not gonna bid a whole lot.
	Um it comes on pre-filled at 0.01.
	That's about ether, that's about three dollars now, I think, something along those lines.
	We'll accept those.
	And you'll notice down at the bottom here you see um uh well a couple of things.
	First off, go all the way down to the bottom of your browser and uh of the window, and it says uh gas price is five uh gigaway.
	Uh That's not so fast, that's pretty good.
	Just set it to four gigaway just so that the whole thing is is low cost to you.
	Or you know, you don't need them fast.
	You also don't want to raise a uh a red flag on them.
	You'll notice that there's three uh words down here.
	These three words are your secret phrase that you're gonna have to remember, and you'll want to come on over and paste them into your uh spreadsheet.
	I want to paste a lot of stuff in here in just a minute as we go through.
	And so um let's see, where are we at?
	There we go.
	Okay, so now we're gonna do the actual initiation of the auction.
	We're gonna say start the auction, uh page comes up here, and it has a bunch of information in it about the uh which you need to record.
	Uh so the first thing to do is come down to the large box in the bottom, do a control A, control C and copy all of that and take it back over to the spreadsheet.
	Uh okay, so a spreadsheet.
	Come back to the spreadsheet and paste in what I'm calling our total blob, and that's this uh entire mass of material.
	And then you want to put in your bid amount.
	You need to know that when you uh reveal.
	Oops, date bid is today sixteen bid amount 0.01 ether.
	Um, and then here's our thing.
	We need to know our reveal date and the end date of the uh auction for a couple of reasons.
	And so we're gonna go back over to our page here, our wallet page.
	We're gonna sweep the reveal date.
	Always sweep from left to right, otherwise you'll get the carriage returned there, and it'll want to um uh uh part of your spreadsheet you don't want it to.
	And so there we go.
	There's our reveal date, and then the end date of the auction.
	Now these auctions are interesting because if you don't do anything with it at the end of the year, you get your Ethereum back, minus the gas price involved in the process.
	And so you'll see that we end up with a lot of stuff pasted in there.
	We have the name we button we're we're dealing with, we have the date we opened it, the date we bid, the amount we did, the reveal date, the end date of the auction when we have to actually go and claim our uh one name if we've actually uh win the thing.
	We're gonna need our three-word code, and we're gonna need that total blob to put back to it.
	Now it is true you can go over to uh the page here and uh uh look at the um uh and do a screen capture on this entire uh area here and save that.
	However, that won't get you this information down at the bottom back in a format that you can easily cut and paste.
	Uh so what I'm gonna do at the moment here on the screen is I'm gonna hit the um uh yes go ahead button and create our auction.
	It'll duplicate this information and make damn sure that we've got it by uh bringing it back up to us again.
	And you'll notice the red banner at the top.
	You've got to read all of the instructions here just so that you don't screw up because if you screw up, you lose the name and any money you bid in on it because this is real adult stuff.
	The money's actually taken out before uh the auction moves or while it's moving.
	So it's like you put your money on the table and the uh winner picks it all up when they're done kind of a deal.
	So now I'm gonna press the yes, I'm sure I want to do this button.
	I'm not an idiot.
	I actually am an idiot because I don't want the name, but we'll do this just as a um as a test.
	And there we go.
	And it's saying, oh, you've got a bunch of this.
	We're gonna send information here, there, and everywhere.
	And then here's our page again that shows us the um uh the same information we just all copied to the spreadsheet.
	We go and we double check, and then we save this spreadsheet because you need this information.
	You can save it any way you want, databases, um, uh notepads, it doesn't matter, just have it so that you can cut and paste the stuff back when you need it again.
	And at this stage, that's really our process.
	Um the uh domain name will be available to us at some point in the future, and you can then go on and create another auction and so on.
	Now basically the uh format is just that uh you create the auctions, these are the names won't necessarily come up on their own, so it's not like um uh Fred Flintstone is gonna come on up uh just automatically and create somebody said create an auction on that.
	This is done algorithmically, so if someone doesn't try and do Fred Flintstone, then it will just go through the algorithm and to sort of like wait until someone tries to create this this name, and then they then you go through the auction process.
	These auctions take a number of days, you have to pay attention to what you're doing.
	You can lose both the um even as a as a uh lower bidder, you can lose your money if you don't do this right because the the ether is locked up in a smart contract that's continually being processed on the Ethereum blockchain.
	And as a process, as part of that process, it locks up this money because it's got to be paid for with the gas, but also because it's a contract, and until the terms of the contract are met, basically every all the funds are held in escrow.
	And as part of that escrow, you've got to be an adult and know when to claim if you didn't win, and you've got to do the reveal.
	If you don't do the reveal, your your material is lost, your ether is lost.
	So uh be smart about this.
	Don't do the um creation of the auction and the um bid from the same wallet that sets up a real red flag to the people that run node processing and are just watching the stuff, trying to snipe names.
	There's a lot of that going on at the moment.
	Also be very aware of your bid and your masks.
	These are two elements that you have to be aware of in these bids.
	So you might bid 0.01 ether.
	And uh you might put a mask there.
	You have to have a bid mask because that's higher uh or equal to your bid.
	Uh you can make it massively higher.
	You can say I'm built bidding a thousand ether on this and only bid 0.01.
	But but somebody will know your bullshipping, and uh the they'll go to bid maybe 0.09 and they'll get it, and then you'll have to pay it.
	And the reason that you don't want to do that is because you attract attention to it by the the uh large amount of ether that's trapped in that contract that's visible, so to speak, within that contract as it's being processed through the um blockchain.
	Plus, you also don't want to tie up all that uh ether there.
	Uh read about these names, you get uh the funds back.
	These are basically a one-year lease on that, and you need to renew annually.
	Uh you can transfer them, you can do any number of things with these.
	Uh it's not an issue, but uh be very smart about it, or you'll end up with no Ethereum name, uh name service name, and no ether coins because you used them up.
	And you'll have paid the gas for the auction that someone else will have benefited from.
	So bear that in mind.
	When you pay for that gas to start the auction, uh you don't get that gas money back that is consumed.
	That's why uh I only keep a little tiny bit of money in the MetaMask.
	Uh and I think it's only been out available for Firefox, like maybe a week or so that we've been able to run MetaMask as a as an extension into the Firefox.
	It works very well.
	I like it a lot.
	Makes it a lot easier.
	So uh the Ethereum network is really coming along, things are really kicking in.
	Uh if I win the love and light dot ETH domain, I may go ahead and do a video on the um uh reveal and registration process just to be able to show it to people as well.
	This was the first half of it.
	Uh in a couple of days, this auction would reach its reveal time, in which case we would then reveal our bid and basically wait two days to see if anybody is already outbid us, and there we go.
	Uh auction is done, and we would get it for.01 Ethereum, which like I say is around three dollars or something like that at the moment.
	And that's it, I think.
	Uh uh good hunting.
	Uh be careful how you do this.
	Uh, this is uh a very serious world, and you can easily lose lots of Ethereum if you're not paying attention to this.
	And also be sure, remember, always set your gas prices and stuff way down.
	Unless you want to do it very fast to try and win an auction very quickly.
	So if you were going to be sniping, set your gas price very high, come in in the last few minutes of the auction and try and uh snipe the uh domain name from somebody.
	Uh but ordinarily, like I say, you'd want to turn your gigaway uh down quite a bit just so that you're not uh attracting attention and then B burning a lot of gas needlessly uh to try and get that processing done quickly.
	So your um my ether wallet, it's free, it's open source, it's reliable, it's trustworthy, they're upgrading all of the time.
	Uh good group of developers uh throwing on the bells and whistles now that they've got the thing really rock solid.
	And you'll need to uh have a spreadsheet open to record all of this stuff in so that um uh you've got a record of it two or three days from now, you're not gonna remember any of this, and you'll need to know it exactly, not close, exactly, in order to get this machine to cough up your um Ethereum name.
	And uh you're gonna need the Ethereum name.
	Uh it's the registrar.
	Uh I'm gonna put all these links down at the bottom of the video.
	But this is the ENS registrar.
	Uh so it's registrar.ens uh domains.
	And then it'll check it out for you and find out if it exists.
	And uh you're good to go.

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