Crypto 101 for DIY HRT
Cryptocurrency. To many people, the word is associated with scams, criminals, and poor investments. But when purchasing DIY HRT, it also is your friend! Cryptocurrency is an anonymous and borderless way to conduct transactions, so it is quite popular as a way to receive payments for hormones and the like.
Here, I aim to give you what you need to comfortably and safely use them for purchasing HRT.
The terminology section is very much skippable, but is here just so that you can feel more comfortable in seeing all the crypto-related words thrown around during the process.
Terminology
Wallet
A wallet is one of two kinds of places you can keep your cryptocurrency. It is a piece of software (or occasionally hardware) that stores your money using, like, math and stuff, and is connected to the wider network to send it to other places.
A wallet generally keeps your money stored within itself and so, if you drop your phone with your wallet down the drain, and don’t have a backup, your money is just gone — like cash in a wallet.
Wallet Seed
A wallet seed is a random collection of words that encodes (using some fancy math) the keys to your wallet. Your wallet software will store lots of data, such as the list of transactions, your balance, and so on, that strictly actually aren’t at all necessary to get to your money, but are necessary to provide a good user experience. If you drop your phone down the toilet, you can use the wallet seed to re-build your wallet and get all your money back (and transaction history).
You should write your wallet seed down somewhere safe, and not share it with anyone.
Exchange
An exchange is a company that allows you to hold cryptocurrency in an account with them, to buy and sell crypto for cash, and to swap between cryptocurrencies. Imagine it kind of like a bank account, in that you can log in to manage, deposit, and withdraw, and they will swap digital money for cash for you.
Depending on your jurisdiction, they often have lots of regulation applied, generally under the umbrella of “KYC” — “know your customer”.
You are somewhat likely to have heard of some of these! Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Crypto.com, FTX (lol), and OKX are all exchanges.
Some also blur the line a bit - services like Moonpay allow you to buy and sell crypto but don’t really intend for you to store your cryptocurrency on their service.
Address
Your wallet or account with an exchange will have an address, which is essentially the cryptocurrency equivalent of the details you’d usually give someone to receive a bank transfer.
It’s like an American’s routing number, a Brit’s sort code, or a European’s IBAN.
You can often (but not always) have multiple addresses for one wallet, so you can give each person you receive from a new address, to improve privacy.
Blockchain
A blockchain, or just “chain” is essentially the network over which the transactions are sent and recorded. These usually just correspond with the cryptocurrency — Bitcoin is both a cryptocurrency and a blockchain, similar for Litecoin, Monero, et cetera.
Sometimes, though, there are chains that host other cryptocurrencies. Most notable are Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and Tron. Most of these were designed with the goal of being faster and cheaper than Etherum.
Older and busier blockchains tend to be slower, and busier chains generally have higher gas fees.
Transaction Fee
A transaction fee, also called a gas fee, is a small payment you make to the network to facilitate your payment. These make up the incentive for those running the network to do so.
For some large cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, transaction fees can be relatively high — at the time of writing Bitcoin’s fee is about $0.10~$0.20. Ethereum only costs about $0.02 at the minute, but infamously could cost as high as $30 during the NFT craze.
Most mid-sized blockchains like Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Polygon, and Solana charge a fraction of a cent as a transaction fee.
Confirmations
When you send a transaction, it doesn’t immediately get settled. Similar to how bank transfers can take a few days for both ends to agree that the transaction definitely happened and was definitely for the right amount of money, cryptocurrencies can take up to 15 minutes to confirm that your transaction definitely went through.
The simplest way to think of it is that transactions get put into groups (called blocks), and each time a new group is added to the network, the older groups become more trustworthy — they gain a confirmation — and once a certain number of confirmations have been reached, the transaction is considered complete.
Once a transaction is submitted it generally cannot be recalled, even with 0 confirmations, and in many cases the recipient will see the money on their end even before any confirmations have occurred, but will not be able to actually spend the money they received until it has been confirmed 1~10 times.
Confirmations can be really fast (Solana will confirm in literal seconds), or rather slower (Monero can take 10 minutes or so to reach 10 confirmations).
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is not the first cryptocurrency, but it was the first one to achieve widespread success, and is the oldest cryptocurrency people still use today. It is very widely accepted, and for that reason you may be forced to use it for some vendors.
This is unfortunate as it is slow and expensive, relatively.
Litecoin
Bitcoin’s little brother. It’s cheap and still relatively common, but still not overly fast. The combination of cheap and relatively common makes it one of the most useful for purchasing HRT.
Monero
The cryptocurrency of choice for people who actually use this shit, rather than treating it as a dubious investment. Monero, unlike most other cryptocurrencies, is fully 100% anonymous. It’s also cheap.
Currencies like Bitcoin can be traced if you can figure out who owns which wallet — the blockchain is public and inspectable, its just that instead of names its wallet addresses.
Monero does not make transactions public by contrast — you can see how much money moves but not where from and where to. This makes it the coin of choice for cybercriminals of all ilks, and also means that most jurisdictions will not allow you to just buy it on an exchange, you’ll have to swap some other cryptocurrency for it.
Generally, this level of privacy is not really necessary for HRT, and you’ll have a more annoying process to actually obtain it. I don’t recommend it for this reason.
How to buy crypto
The best way to get crypto depends on where you live, and which coin you want to obtain. Either way, the first step is always to start checkout on the site you wish to buy from — usually once they present you with a price and a wallet address to send to, that price is locked in for a good half hour or so, which is plenty of time to make the transaction and even setup a wallet during the process!
I would suggest you round up the cost of whatever you’re buying enough to cover any transaction fees or other losses in the process. For example, the first time I bought estrogen, I needed to pay 0.9256… Litecoin, but I bought 0.933 Litecoin, which was roughly £1 extra. This means I have a buffer in my wallet to avoid having to track everything down to the 6th decimal place.
If you’re purchasing something like Litecoin or Bitcoin, shop around and find yourself a good deal in terms of fees!
If you’re purchasing Monero, you’ll need to just find the cheapest cryptocurrency of any kind that you can obtain — I am a fan of buying USDC on Coinbase, as they charge 0 fees for that (at least in the UK). Then, you can swap it for Monero on a swap site like Trocador.
For my readers in the UK, you should also know that when you create an account on an exchange, there will be a mandatory 24 hour “cooling off period” after signing up, where you are not allowed to buy anything. The laws make them do this, sorry. The only real ways to circumvent this are to buy crypto off a friend, or to use some of the same anonymous purchasing methods used by the seedier parts of the internet. I won’t go into how to do that here.
Once you put your money into an exchange and use it to buy cryptocurrency, you should generally not send from the exchange directly to the HRT vendor. This is because exchanges will usually require you to specify who you are sending to, and provide their address, as part of their KYC rules.
So, you should create your own offline wallet to move the money through on the way. This also is good as you aren’t storing all your cryptocurrency with a company, but keeping it safely under your own watch.
Setting up a wallet
Assuming you want to store your money on your phone, the best option generally is Cake Wallet. It can hold many types of cryptocurrency, and is pretty stable.
Open the Cake Wallet app, and create a wallet for the cryptocurrency you intend to use. If you are using a currency that lives on a modern blockchain such as USDC or Dai, you may have to pick the chain you’re using such as Solana or Polygon. Save your seed somewhere safe — I suggest a password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password!
Click “receive” and copy the address given into your exchange, to send the money to your wallet. Double check it carefully and wait for the transaction to complete, and you should see your balance appear in Cake Wallet! 🎉
Making the payment
Now, you can send the money to the vendor! Usually, you should have a QR code that encodes the address and sometimes also the amount. I recommend you use the QR code if you can, it avoids the chance of making any mistakes.
It is really important that you send exactly the amount they quote you, with all decimal places of accuracy, and don’t round up or down as you send the cryptocurrency. Cake Wallet works such that the sender pays gas fees, which is exactly what you want for making transactions.
Once you’ve hit “check out” and once you’ve sent the money from the exchange to your wallet, the payment process looks something like this (Cake Wallet has had a UI update since then but its not far off):
Which cryptocurrency should I use?
It depends on the vendor. I’ll put my recommendation for each case in italics.
Astrovials accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and Dogecoin
Estrapen accept just Monero, but will make you pay via Trocador so you can pay in whatever cryptocurrency you want. I suggest USDC.
Hera HRT accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, and Ethereum.
Open Gate Labs accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero.
Otokonoko Pharmaceuticals accept Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Aipctshop accept Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Tether USDT, and USDC. Apparently they also accept card and bank transfer but this seems to not be available for the first order.
DashPCT accepts Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Solana, and Ripple (XRP). They claim to take any other cryptocurrency if you email them beforehand. They also accept TransferWise.
Dragon Ordnance is the same as DashPCT.Silhouette Beauty accepts Bitcoin. They also accept SEPA, Western Union, and Moneygram.
United Pharmacies accepts Bitcoin. They also accept wire transfers, and Visa (not for your first order).
For what its worth, there’s nothing wrong with just using Wise for DashPCT, or a wire transfer for United Pharmacies, and so on. It’s easier. Bitcoin would probably be faster than a wire though, it takes like a week for those to confirm :/
Plus, it gets more people to use Wise, and I wish more people used it. It’s like if PayPal was good :p
Conclusion
Hopefully this has made the world of cryptocurrency a little less scary for you. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have or send any feedback my way. Contact details are at the bottom of the injection guide
— Hazel