Address Owner Homework

I wanted to provide a bit of a homework study guide to direct your efforts if you are keen to learn something.

Here are the must know questions you should research the answers to if you plan to control your own address:

1) What is a public key and a private key? How do you safely store a private key? What does it mean to sign a transaction? What is actually stored in a ledger?

2) How do you do a basic send from metamask? When a website asks you to connect your metamask wallet what does that mean? When you sign in what information are you providing to the website code and what can it do?

3) What is gas? How do miners decide which transactions are mined? When they say the network is congested, what does that mean? What is the throughput of the Ethereum network? What is the mempool and can you use it to figure out what gas to set your transaction at? Do you know how to speed up or cancel a transaction? What is a nonce?

4) What is an ERC-20 token? On what address are they stored? Can more be made? Why do you need to approve a token before you can deposit it to a contract? What exactly does this allow the contract to do?

5) What is an ERC-721 token? Are all NFT’s transferable? Can someone delete your NFT or can it expire? If it’s non-fungible how can there be multiple copies? If you are buying art, does the image itself exist on the blockchain, if not where is it?

Getting into deeper stuff that will stop you from getting scammed:

5) If you wanted to, can you verify that the transaction you are about to sign is for the contract you mean to and that the parameters are correct? Can you view contract source code? Can you tell if a contract keys are burned? Can contracts be patched?

6) As a thought exercise, try listing out all the risk layers of farming LUSD3CRV-f on yearn.finance. What things conceivably could go wrong? What things provably cannot go wrong?