What is "Ether"?
- Mike Tango Bravo
...why do I need it, and how can I get some?
What is ether?
Ether is the primary currency, or token, used on the Ethereum blockhain. If Bitcoin is the world's first, and most popular cryptocurrency, ether is clearly the second. MTB* wine tokens are based on the ethereum blockchain, and the viniswap token exchange uses ether as a primary token for trading and transferring MTB* tokens.
Why do I need ether?
You need ether to buy MTB* tokens. And you need some ether to pay for "gas" for transactions out of your wallet.
Gas...what is gas?
Once you have MTB* tokens in your cryptowallet, you will also want to have a small amount of ether in your wallet to pay for "gas". Gas is the small fee you pay for transactions, for moving MTB* wine tokens from your wallet to another person's wallet.
The price of gas for transactions can vary considerably, but usually is somewhere relative to $0.02 - $0.30 cents of US dollars. You pay for gas every time you move MTB* tokens out of your wallet, but the amount you pay is independent of the amount of tokens you send. For example, you would pay the same amount of gas (in ether) for sending 1 x MTB20 to a friend, as you would for sending 100 x MTB20 tokens.
So, when you are calculating how much ether to acquire to buy MTB* tokens, we recommend that you buy a little extra (a couple of dollars worth) to pay the gas for your future crypto transactions.
Where can I get ether?
There are many ways to get ether!
If you have friends who holds cryptocurrencies, they can probably sell you some ether for cash. This is what is called a P2P (person-to-person) transaction.
You can buy ether on almost any public crypto exchange. Think about crypto exchanges as the on-ramp from the old financial systems (banks) to the new world of cryptoeconomics. There are many many exchanges in the world, but here are just a few.
Once you have cryptocurrencies in your wallet (like ether, bitcoin, MTB20, etc.) it is very quick and easy to send tokens to other people and interact with the crypto world. But creating an account with a crypto exchange, to build this on-ramp between your bank and crypto can be more complicated and take a few days. The exchange you choose will most likely need to follow a regulatory process known as KYC ("know-your-customer"). Though this process can be done completely online, it does usually require that you provide some personal information, photos of your ID, create an account and password, and provide information about your existing bank account.
Here is a humorous description of today's process.
Can I buy MTB* with other methods?
For the MTB18 and MTB19 token ICO's, we accepted credit cards, bank transfers, PayPal and bitcoin. Today, we want to incentivize our token holders to buy with ether. One of the reasons for this is because ether purchases allow new token holders a way to interact with the viniswap exchange (you need some ether for gas to use viniswap). But if you really want to buy tokens with these other methods, please contact us at info@costaflores.com an we will accommodate you.