How To Get EOS And Start Using Dapps And Earning a Passive Income – A comprehensive guide to the EOS ecosystem.

I am not sure if I could make a more tabloid headline, but the purpose of this post is to help people from outside crypto learn how to onboard EOS. Ever so often you see some confused soul stumble into the EOS telegram or some dapp’s telegram and ask what is EOS and how do I get a hold of it? To be able to get EOS and use it, is in fact a very complicated process for someone who has never used it. And until we have more seamless onboarding we should just do our best in explaining it to those who are interested.

Now keep in mind – once you are able to navigate on EOS, you are using a blockchain based protocol. It is not some distant dream in the future like Ethereum. You can use your EOS on a gambling site or in a game. Or you can invest in exciting projects. This is happening NOW.

This is a tutorial on how to get an EOS account, get EOS and how to use Dapps on EOS.

Let’s start with some definitions first

EOS.io is a blockchain protocol

and EOS can be used to stake resources in this distributed network. In simple terms, you own pieces of the network by staking CPU, RAM and NET. You can rent our or lease these resources as you please. They are also a way to keep your EOS safe, as unstaking from for example CPU to liquid EOS takes three days. If someone hacks you and then starts to unstake, you have three days to figure out how to change your keys. Liquid EOS tokens can be used to purchase tokens issued by EOS based Dapps, throw it away on gambling or spending it on in game resources in games that run on EOS or trade it on decentralised EOS exchanges.

Private keys. This is confusing at first, but it makes sense. Your private keys are very important – and this is where blockchain is different from traditional financial systems. If you lose your private keys – it is over. So never lose them. There are two kinds of private keys – ranked in a hierarchy. Active and Owners key. Both are important and both can do the same things – except one important thing – the owners key can CHANGE the active key.

The rule is NEVER give out your private owners key, to anyone ever – and ideally even keep it offline. The owners key should only be used in the event of a hack. You can use something called EOSauthority where you can put an alarm on your account. If anything happens on the account you will be notified by mail. And if someone managed to unstake your staked CPU or NET you can go and change your active key and stop the unstaking process.

So how about the Active key – do you give that out to anyone? General rule is NO, never. But you need a way to connect to different dapps – and instead of logging in with your active key on each individual dapp, there is something called Scatter which is like Metamask for Ethereum. It is basically a tool, a wallet and a secure way to interact with different dapps. It is generally safe, although you should always act carefully when logging into websites and dapps and connecting through Scatter. But Scatter is the one tool that you have to trust and use in order to get something out of EOS. And Scatter is bulletproof. These are real public people and they have basically held EOS on their shoulders the past almost year now. They are our biggest heroes in EOS. And you can trust them with your Active key. Active and Owners keys starts with something like 5Kldh….

Account names. Accounts also have names. The name is public and just works as an easier way than to use public addresses. So instead of sending to EOS343dnsduid3uihu34 you can just send to hihihihihihi

Public addresses. These however are public and is where the public information is stored. A public address is searchable on for example eosflare. A public address starts with EOS4jfuehi….and is not dangerous to give out in the same way a private key is. Although you might want to think twice who you share it with. Everything is traceable and recordable on blockchain.

Here you see the account name, and the account that created this account. Unstaked means liquid EOS. Staked means amount that is being staked for resources and refunding means amount that is being UNstaked. You can see that this person has a little bit of RAM (which can be useful if that account is storing a lot of digital assets like in game items), it has almost zero CPU which means that this account could probably hardly do any operations at all. In order to send free transactions and do free actions on the network you need to stake a certain amount of EOS in CPU. NET should have somewhat similar properties, but no one really knows what NET is needed for yet, so don’t worry too much about NET.

Underneath that you see the tokens that this account holds. And underneath that again you see the active and owner PUBLIC keys. So if I wanted to donate some EOS or any other EOS based token to this account I would send it to one of those addresses.

Wallets. There are two wallets – Scatter and eosvoter that I use daily. You can also use Scatter to connect with sites like bloks.io and use that site as a wallet. Keep in mind, that wallets does not mean that your tokens are stored in that wallet. The wallet is a way to interact with your EOS account. Your private key is where the tokens are. But you need a user interface to interact – and that is what the wallets do. So if you install Scatter or eosvoter and you uninstall them after a week, your tokens are not gone. They are always “in” your private key. This concept is kind of hard to wrap your mind around.

So now we have at least some concept of what is what. Let’s do this practically and as simple as possible. You are my grandmother, and I am going to try and explain to you how you go ahead and have fun with EOS

1. Purchase Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum or Bitcoincash through Coinbase or any other fiat(normal money) to crypto exchange like Coinbase. Keep in mind that this is not an anonymous way to do it. There might be anonymous ways to do it as well, but I am not going to go into that in detail here.

2. Exchange Bitcoin for EOS on an exchange. So let’s say you have 1 Bitcoin on Coinbase. EOS is not on Coinbase, so you need to move your Bitcoin to an exchange that supports EOS. Binance is a good option. You can create an account there and chose yourself how much information you want to give out. You can sign up anonymously with a dedicated email.

Now sell your BTC for EOS (keep some BTC, around 7$ worth as you will need this to set up the EOS account). Now you HOLD some EOS on an exchange. This does not do much. First of all, if you don’t hold it, you don’t own it. So you need to get that EOS off the exchange. And in order to do that you need a public address that YOU hold the private key to. So let’s set up that.

3. Creating account. I suggest that before you set up your account that you download Scatter desktop. Generate keypairs using the Scatter tool and once you have your public addresses and private keys stored safely you can go ahead and purchase an account. eosaccountcreator is a really neat way to do that.

Here you insert the two keypairs that you created in Scatter. Remember to insert PUBLIC keys, not private.

Send this amount of BTC to the Bitcoin adress (1K1rm…) and you have your EOS account.

Now you have owners keys, active keys, public addresses AND Scatter. This is basically all you need to operate on a basic level in the EOS space. Congratulations. Not THAT hard right? I know it is difficult to concentrate on something for more than 2 minutes, but look at in a positive way – your brain probably enjoys being used for other things than just mindlessly browse through social media.

I suggest that you watch some videos and read some tutorials on Scatter so that you get really familiar. Reach out to nsjames or rami james on their Telegram. Also check out my interview with nsjames (the creator of Scatter) so that you can get to know them a little better. Great team, very approachable.

Now you can interact with dapps. Let’s say you want to gamble your EOS away, try Betdice or Endless or any of the other Dapps that are our there. Look out for new dapps and how many users and daily volume here on Dappradar . Log in with Scatter and off you go. What might happen after a while is that you run into some CPU issues. And this CAN be problematic as you won’t be able to do anything at all with your account until your CPU “refills”. It does this for free, but it takes some time. EOS has free transactions, but you need to stake your own network resources. So you are basically lending resources to yourself. If you find yourself in the very likely event of running out of CPU, you can try lending CPU for free at CPUemergency (Read my interview with them as well, here) OR..which I prefer to do, is to create multiple accounts – each with it’s own dedicated purpose. You know how to create an EOS account now, so just repeat that process at least one more time. One of the great reasons to do this is that you can have an account that interacts with dapps like gambling dapps and games, and you wont have to take all the relative risk with your main account. So what I do is that I have 60-70% of all my EOS staked in CPU and NET in one account. This account delegates some CPU to other accounts. You can access delegation tools in the different wallets (Scatter, bloks.io, eosvoter) So now I can kid around with my gambling account with a few EOS available without risking my main account. Another big advantage other than security and spreading risk around on different accounts is that if my gambling account is low on CPU and I am not able to interact with a dapp or an exchange, I can either A) delegate from my main account if I have liquid EOS available, or B) use Chintai or ZKS to rent CPU. I really like ZKS. You buy ZKS tokens on Newdex or Dexeos (log in with Scatter) with your master account, or your delegation account or whatever you want to call that account, and you make sure you have plenty of ZKS available. Now use the simple interface of ZKS website to give CPU to your gambling-account for 3 hours or 24h. Very simple.

I realise that grandma could probably never do this. But then again, crypto is not for grandma. At least not yet. At this point it is quite difficult to be in this space – but that also means that being here gives you an advantage. IF EOS or some other protocol really becomes the platform(s) that all websites and services are built on in the future, you are now something of a wizz and an early investor. At some point not very far from now, I would guess almost regardless of the success of EOS there will be almost seamless onboarding. The question is however, where is the price of EOS then. What is the price of some of these tokens that are being bought at very very low prices inside the EOS ecosystem right now? What if Patreos or Betdice becomes the next Patreon or Pokerstars? Just to compare, you can now buy PATR (patreos) token at a market cap of around 250,000USD. Imagine if Patreon blows it due to their censorship and Patreos wins due to their censorship resistance? What if it is Patreos that will have a market cap of USD500M$ like Patreon has. That’s a 2000x from now. 100 bucks invested could be 200,000USD. Same with Betdice. What if Betdice took on Pokerstars, a 2B market cap company. I’m not saying they will, or that it is even very likely. But, you cannot escape the fact that this is a unique opportunity never before seen. That’s all I’m saying.

Yeah, and I mentioned a passive income. Perhaps that’s why you clicked in the first place. Passive income in EOS is generated through staking. There are several projects in EOS in which you can stake your tokens to get more tokens. Staking is simply locking up your tokens with a 24-72hour lock up period (the amount of time it takes to unstake and reclaim your tokens if you want to sell) For example, right here on Trybe you can lock up your TRYBE tokens and stake them to earn big bonuses. The lock up period is longer (90 and 180 days) but your rewards are also greater. Other projects you can stake and claim dividends are all the gambling dapps, prospectors.io, parsl, patreos, worbli and a variety of other projects being built on EOS. Even by just holding EOS tokens you will get the occational airdrop right into your lap.

And for all you gamers out there – crypto mining in games and tokenisation of digital items is right around the corner. First game to truly explore this is coming out in late Feb or early March 2019! Check out Prospectors.io

Add this to bookmarks, so that even if it feels too difficult right now, you are able to look it up when you finally decide to pull the trigger.

All content is created for free early mornings and late evenings as a hobby. Donations are always appreciated to EOS account: eosmaster1ng

Follow me on Steemit and Whaleshares as well (same name)