You Cannot Send Bitcoin to Metamask Ethereum Wallet
LESSON LEARNED: Did you know a crypto wallet is not a wallet that can catch all currency including Bitcoin? I didn't know this as I was trying to send Bitcoin money from Earn.com to Metamask. BTW Earn.com was purchased by Coinbase for $100M recently.
I have been playing in the space trying to learn about the crypto and token phenomenon. I have made several small currency transactions using Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin and have even purchased my first Token. I used the IDEX exchange to purchase my first token which is where the problem started.
I set up a Metamask wallet in my browser and then transferred money from Earn to Coinbase exchanging Bitcoin for dollars. Then I sent the dollars to my Metamask wallet. Then I linked my IDEX account with my Metamask wallet in the browser and transferred the money in. The only complicated part of this is the gas and GWEI component which is essentially the fee you pay to miners for confirming the transaction.
There is a steep learning curve currently and the biggest problem is with sending and receiving currency to different accounts. A few days ago I made the mistake of sending a small amount of Bitcoin from Earn to the address in my IDEX account. Wasn't very clear if this was my Metamask wallet or my IDEX wallet which is a separate issue of clarity.
It was my understanding that any wallet could take any cryptocurrency. That is not the case and I didn't know I couldn't send Bitcoin to a Metamask wallet. Metamask is apparently only an Ethereum wallet.
It was also my understanding that wallet addresses are checked by the sending party. Earn.com was the sender in this case and they failed to warn me that I was sending Bitcoin to an Ethereum wallet.
What I did is a huge problem with the industry and will be the biggest problem getting the whole token and cryptocurrency adopted by the masses and trusted. In order to "cross the chasm" and get adopted the sender needs to take more responsibility of verifying payment can be sent.
The transaction is in the cloud and even verified by Etherscan.io. Where did it go? Did a bitcoin minor steal it? Please comment below if you know how to resolve this issue.