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 Ethereum extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain.
	This is ENS, the same way we have like.com and.org and so on.
	So in the Ethereum network, you're going to need to know these ENS names, and you'll need to have yours registered for your business or personal use.
	You'll notice on our sales page that we've got you can send us EtherCoin ETH at cliffhigh.eth.
	And so that's one of the functionalities of these.
	And this is a video to show you how to do this without getting the orders sniped away from you.
	They're somewhat wild west at the moment.
	There's all kinds of activity going on relative to ENS names.
	And we're going to jump into this.
	You'll need to do some things, though.
	If you're not running Chrome, or even if you are running Chrome or you're running Firefox, you're going to need to get the MetaMask Ethereum plug-in.
	And that is a little fellow up here in the corner, upper right, it says MetaMask.
	When you click into it, it brings up your account and it shows you all of the activity you've had on that account.
	You load that into your browser, and then as you do things relative to the Ethereum blockchain, this allows you to connect to that protocol the same way that the browser allows you to connect to the HTML protocol.
	So you get MetaMask, you put it in place.
	It's kind of a wallet because it has to have some Ether in it because the Ethereum network takes gas to run on.
	It actually consumes Ethereum coins.
	And so you burn up Ethereum in gas.
	In order to get gas, the Ethereum wallets get a little bit of Ether, ETH coin, and 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.
	I can't go through the entire process today, but this will get you started.
	Let me state that once you've got your browser set up with MetaMask in place, you then take your Ethereum wallet and you send the MetaMask wallet some Ether so it'll have a little bit of gas for doing things.
	And then you have to be parsimonious, very eke it out as to how you use your gas.
	And I'll make out a few or point out a few things as we go along in doing this.
	And you can get 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 do a couple of things.
	You're going to need to set up three items here.
	You're going to need to set up a browser that looks at the registrar, which is a smart contract manager for doing the registration of these Ethereum domain names, you can call them.
	And you'll need another browser that holds your, or you'll need your Ethereum wallet open because you'll have to bid in on these names once you've started this process.
	And then you're going to need a spreadsheet or a database or a 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.
	It's a strange kind of an auction.
	You can read about it at the registrar's page.
	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 after the auction is initiated.
	At the reveal date, everybody reveals their coins or their bids.
	And the auction closes, I think, 72 hours after the reveal date.
	The person that wins is the person that has revealed they had the highest bid, and they pay the second highest bid.
	So this is okay in that regard.
	There's a couple of things to know about doing these Ethereum name service registrations now.
	And that is that if you use MyEtherWallet or some of these other Ether wallets to both initiate the bid or initiate 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 monitoring the Ethereum blockchain, watching things.
	They want to see who's interested in what name, and then they'll try and snipe it out from underneath you 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.
	But do that with your wallet.
	So you don't want to bid and initiate the auction at the registrar.
	You can, but you 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 Ethereum wallet.
	And this is by separating the transaction, this way it won't show up 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.
	So we're going to go through the process here real quick.
	The first thing we're going to do is to go on over and look at the registrars page.
	And you can actually use either your Ethereum wallet if you're using MyEtherWallet, or you can use the registrars page to find out if a name is 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 subdomains ahead of these because they use what's known as big Indian, little Indian resolution.
	So I had the ENS name cliffhigh.eth.
	I could put on there halfpasthuman.cliffhigh.eth, or I could put on there Fred Flintstone.cliffhigh.eth.
	It doesn't matter.
	And it's infinite.
	So a very powerful subdomain, so to speak, naming capability from these Ethereum name structures.
	So that's why they're very worth a lot of money if you do this correctly.
	And also they'll be used, they can be used for resolving down to actual distributed applications instead of simply your wallet address or whatever.
	So there's that aspect of the ENS system.
	You really should understand what it is.
	But at the moment, if you're in a business and people, and you're fairly high-name business, people are out there trying to get your name and make you pay money for it.
	So I don't have halfpast human because somebody purchased it.
	So I've got halfpasthuman.com, but I don't have halfpasthuman.eth.
	I do have halfpasthuman.
	Or I do have cliffhigh.eth thanks to somebody that was kind enough to grab it when they when they saw it go buy so to speak um and then pass it on to me uh so that's what we're going to do here is give you a heads up about 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 going to have to 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 process in order to prove that you're you and it's quite extensive so we're going to hop right over to our ethereum registrar page and we're going to look up a name here see if it exists and we're going to look up love and light And see if it dot eth and see if it exists.
	come on there there we go The recording is hanging everything up.
	Okay, so here's the process.
	It shows that loveandlight.eth is available.
	So you're going to want to scroll down to the 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.
	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.
	And 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 how much gas are we willing to spend.
	This is from MetaMask.
	And I'm going to drop down and decrease the gigaway way.
	WEI is a Chinese word meaning energy.
	And gigaway is the amount of gas price, so to speak, we're willing to pay.
	So I'm going to have this be a very slow auction.
	So I'm putting it down to four gigaway because I don't really care whether it's effectively created or not.
	And so we'll accept that.
	And so the auction is officially launched now onto the Ethereum blockchain.
	And so what we'll do is to go over to, give it a second here, to our spreadsheet.
	And while we're filling in our spreadsheet to start us off, we'll let it get on the Ethereum blockchain.
	Usually only takes a few minutes.
	We're going to put in the name we're getting here, Lova and Light.
	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.
	The name could be owned, in which case you can buy it from them if you want.
	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 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 going to put in today's date 617017 is the date we opened up the auction.
	And then we're going to go on over into our bidding process here.
	So we'll save this.
	And then we'll go on over to our bidding process.
	And so we're going to go over to the Ethereum wallet.
	I'm using my Ether wallet.
	It's pretty cool this way.
	I like it.
	It's browser-based, very well done, tightly built.
	It has issues, of course, everything does.
	I'm in the ENS section.
	That's the Ethereum namespace or name service.
	And so I'm going to check over here to see if the auction is available.
	And I'm going to type in exactly as I typed it over on the registrar, love and light.
	And say, is it available?
	Aha, it is available.
	And you'll notice it says, do you want the loveandlight.eth?
	Unlock your wallet to start an auction.
	And so I would do that.
	I would go and select my wallet file, which I'm going to do now, but off camera so that I don't show them the secret codes and all of that business.
	Hang on a second.
	Passwords, passwords everywhere.
	Make them complex.
	Okay, so now we have our wallet ready.
	We're going to go ahead and bid on loveandlight.eth.
	We don't care so much about it.
	We're not going to bid a whole lot.
	It comes on pre-filled at 0.01.
	That's ether.
	That's about $3 now, I think, something along those lines.
	We'll accept those.
	And you'll notice down at the bottom here, you see a couple of things.
	First off, go all the way down to the bottom of your browser of the window.
	It says gas price is 5 gigaway.
	That's not so fast.
	That's pretty good.
	Just set it to 4 gigaway just so that the whole thing is low cost to you.
	Or, you know, you don't need them fast.
	You also don't want to raise a red flag on them.
	You'll notice that there's three Words down here.
	These three words are your secret phrase that you're going to have to remember.
	And you'll want to come on over and paste them into your spreadsheet.
	You're going to want to paste a lot of stuff in here in just a minute as we go through.
	And so let's see where we are.
	There we go.
	Okay, so now we're going to do the actual initiation of the auction.
	We're going to say start the auction.
	A page comes up here, and it has a bunch of information in it about which you need to record.
	So the first thing to do is come down to the large box in the bottom, do a CtrlA, Ctrl-C, and copy all of that and take it back over to the spreadsheet.
	Okay, so spreadsheet.
	Come back to the spreadsheet and paste in what I'm calling our total blob.
	And that's this entire mass of material.
	And then you want to put in your bid amount.
	You need to know that when you reveal.
	Oops, the date bid is today 617 bid amount.01 ether.
	And then here's our thing.
	We need to know our reveal date and the end date of the auction for a couple of reasons.
	And so we're going to go back over to our page here, our wallet page.
	We're going to sweep the reveal date.
	Always sweep from left to right, otherwise, you'll get the carriage returned there, and it'll want to plop down in a 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're dealing with.
	We have the date we opened it, the date we bid, the amount we bid, the reveal date, the end date of the auction when we have to actually go and claim our one name.
	We've actually win the thing.
	We're going to need our three-word code, and we're going to need that total blob to put back to it.
	Now, it is true you can go over to the page here and look at the and do a screen capture on this entire 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.
	So what I'm going to do at the moment here on the screen is I'm going to hit the yes, go ahead button and create our auction.
	It'll duplicate this information and make damn sure that we've got it by 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 is actually taken out before the auction moves or while it's moving.
	So it's like you put your money on the table and the winner picks it all up when they're done kind of deal.
	So now I'm going to 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 test.
	And there we go.
	And it's saying, oh, you've got a bunch of this.
	We're going to send information here, there, and everywhere.
	And then here's our page again that shows us 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, 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.
	The 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 format is just that.
	That you create the auctions.
	The names won't necessarily come up on their own.
	So it's not like Fred Flimstone is going to come on up just automatically and create somebody to create an auction on that.
	This is done algorithmically.
	So if someone doesn't try and do Fred Flimstone, then it will just go through the algorithm and it's sort of like wait until someone tries to create this name and 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, even as a lower bidder, you can lose your money if you don't do this right.
	Because the ether is locked up in a smart contract that's continually being processed on the Ethereum blockchain.
	And as part of that process, it locks up this money because A, 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 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 material is lost.
	Your Ether is lost.
	So be smart about this.
	Don't do the creation of the auction and the 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 you might put a mask there.
	You have to have a bid mask that's higher or equal to your bid.
	You can make it massively higher.
	You can say, I'm bidding 1,000 Ether on this and only bid 0.01.
	But somebody will know you're bullshipping.
	And they'll bid maybe 0.09.
	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 large amount of Ether that's trapped in that contract.
	It's visible, so to speak, within that contract as it's being processed through the blockchain.
	Plus, you also don't want to tie up all that Ether there.
	Read about these names.
	You get the funds back.
	These are basically a one-year lease on that, and you need to renew annually.
	You can transfer them.
	You can do any number of things with these.
	It's not an issue.
	But be very smart about it, or you'll end up with no Ethereum name, 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.
	You pay for that gas to start the auction.
	You don't get that gas money back.
	That is consumed.
	That's why I only keep a little tiny bit of money in the MetaMask.
	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 an extension into the Firefox.
	It works very well.
	I like it a lot.
	Makes it a lot easier.
	So the Ethereum network is really coming along.
	Things are really kicking in.
	If I win the loveandlight.eth domain, I may go ahead and do a video on the reveal and the registration process just to be able to show it to people as well.
	This was the first half of it.
	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 has already outbid us.
	And there we go.
	Auction is done.
	And we would get it for 0.01 Ethereum, which, like I say, is around $3 or something like that at the moment.
	And that's it, I think.
	Good hunting.
	Be careful how you do this.
	This is 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 on the last few minutes of the auction and try and snipe the domain name from somebody.
	But ordinarily, like I say, you'd want to turn your gigaway down quite a bit just so that you're not A, attracting attention and then B, burning a lot of gas needlessly to try and get that processing done quickly.
	So your MyEther wallet, it's free, it's open source, it's reliable, it's trustworthy.
	They're upgrading all of the time.
	A good group of developers throwing on the bells and whistles now that they've got the thing really rock solid.
	And you'll need to have a spreadsheet open to record all of this stuff in so that you've got a record of it two or three days from now.
	You're not going to 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 Ethereum name.
	And you're going to need the Ethereum name.
	It's the registrar.
	I'm going to put all these links down at the bottom of the video, but this is the ENS registrar.
	So it's registrar.ens.domains.
	And then it'll check it out for you and find out if it exists.
	And you're good to go.

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