Decentraland. Genesis City. The Terraform Auction.
The Terraform auction started on December 15, at 10 pm GMT. And, right on time, I tried logging in. Uh-oh. That’s not only what I felt… it was exactly what I read on the screen:
“Uh-oh. We couldn’t retrieve your account information.
We couldn’t retrieve any account information associated with
your current address.
Are you using the correct address?
Remember that to participate in the auction you need to have
MANA staked on the Terraform Registration”
No!!! But I had a signed smart contract! I had all the notifications! I had jumped through all the hoops, spending hours trying to figure out how to stake MANA… installing MetaMask, using EtherScan… this can’t be happening!
It was disappointing. I went to the Decentraland (DCL) chat site, and… I wasn’t the only one who was unable to access the auction. The hours ticked by. People became more angry on the chat site. It got ugly.
Ten hours later, one of the developers announced something that sounded like a promising fix. I closed my browser, reopened it, made sure MetaMask was signed in (just as I had done about 50 previous times), and lo and behold, the auction site loaded.
I was able to see the grid, with all the parcels of Land. Virtual real estate.
I’m not rich. I had purchased two parcels in the Arena District prior to the auction even beginning. At 1000 MANA apiece, I had spent 2000 for the District land. And that left me with only 1263 MANA for the actual auction. There are people with 100k MANA getting ready to bid!
Just so you can understand the difficulties I’d be facing in procuring another parcel: the minimum bid is 1000 MANA. To increase a bid on a property, you must put in a bid that’s 25% higher than the current bid. In other words, if I bid on property for 1000 MANA, and someone outbid me at 1250 (25% more), then I’d be out. I couldn’t afford another 25% increase. Maybe I could start my bid at 1250, or even 1263… just to throw someone off.
Or, I could simply bid on land in the middle of absolute nowhere on the grid, where it would be unlikely anyone would try to outbid me. That was pretty much the limit of my strategizing. Let the games begin.
Am I obsessive? I’ve been scrolling through the auction map for hours. I jump across coordinates. I’m looking at yellow, red, blue and grey grids. It’s awesome. The auction runs for seven days, with a few extra hours added for last-minute bids on parcels.
Here’s a link to a map of Genesis City, with the Districts in blue: https://steemit.com/decentraland/@foundation/much-needed-decentraland-map-with-districts
(Please upvote Steemit member @foundation if the above link is helpful for you.)
The price of MANA has gone down over the past few days. I just bought some more today. I don’t care about the price. I just want to participate in this creative world.
Hopefully this blog is of interest. I’m a beginner with all of this. I simply decided to take a chance with blogging, hoping that I’ll have something to write about, something of value to contribute, in this world of crypto and VR.
And, with any luck, I’ll soon have addresses within the DCL map -- and actual buildings -- for you all to visit, as well.
Thank you for reading! Hope to see you in Genesis City one day!
If nothing else, it's a way to have fun while actually using cryptocurrencies and learning more about smart contracts. I ended up winning three parcels, plus two District lands... for a total of around 5250 MANA. I've decided to teach myself programming this year, and am really hoping to learn Virtual Reality development. So, if nothing else, this project has inspired me to create something new and learn new skills. I will be writing a new blog this week. Thank you for your comment, take care!