Everything before this was the argument. This chapter is the part you can act on.
It is deliberately procedural, because the failures in this space are almost never philosophical. People lose coins to a missing memo field, a mistyped address, a seed phrase photographed into a phone that was later replaced, and an exchange that closed while the balance was still on it. None of those require an adversary. They require an ordinary Tuesday.
Four things, in order: buying it, getting it off the exchange, keeping it, and spending it.
Epic is listed on a small number of exchanges. NonKYC is the deepest market and the one this book uses for its worked examples, because it lists Epic against both a stablecoin (USDT) and Monero (XMR).
The two pairs are not the same trade.
EPIC/USDT prices the coin in dollars, which makes the arithmetic simple and the mental accounting easy. It puts a stablecoin in the path, which means an issuer sits between you and the coin for the duration of the trade.
EPIC/XMR keeps the stablecoin out entirely, which is the coherent choice if the reason you want Epic is that no one can freeze it. It costs you a conversion in your head, because every price is quoted in Monero, and it typically carries a wider spread.
Neither is wrong. Pick the one that matches why you are buying.
Three practical rules apply to both.
Use limit orders. The order books are thin — the best ask has held single-digit coins on both pairs — and a market order walks up through several levels paying progressively worse prices. A limit order at or near the touch fills quickly and never surprises you.
Price from the book, not from the chart. Click the row you want and let the exchange fill in the number. It removes a whole category of rejected orders and mispriced fills.
Keep fee headroom. The trading fee is charged on top of the order value. If you spend your entire balance, the ticket can reject for insufficient funds. Keep a few percent back.
This is the single most common way a beginner loses access to their coins, and it deserves its own section rather than a bullet.
Because Epic has no addresses, an exchange cannot look at the chain and see that a payment was sent to it. It settles the question one of two ways. The first runs through a relay: the exchange gives you a number — an onchain note — and asks you to include that number in the payment, then matches the note to your account and credits you. The second puts your account number inside the deposit URL itself, so the exchange knows whose payment it is from the string you paste.
Where both are offered, use the URL. There is no note to leave out and no relay to be down, which removes both failure modes at once.
If you are on a deposit page that only does the relay method, the note is required, whatever your wallet says. The wallet labels that field optional; the exchange's page labels it required. The wallet is describing the protocol field; the exchange is describing its own need. Both are telling the truth, and only one of them will get your money credited.
If you leave it blank, the funds arrive and cannot be attributed to anybody. The exchange holds money it cannot give to you, and recovering it depends on a support process you do not want to rely on.
Write the note down when you first generate a deposit address. It stays the same for that address. Keep it with the address, not in a screenshot folder.
The only coins that are yours are the ones you control the keys to. Everything on an exchange is a promise, and chapter two is about what promises are worth.
First, set up the wallet. BT Wallet, from BT LABS at epiccash.btlabs.uk/releases or from the app store on your phone. Check a downloaded file against the SHA-256 on that page before you run it. Write the twenty-four words on paper — not in a note, not in a password manager you have not tested, not as a photograph. Verify the backup by restoring it before you put anything in it. If this wallet received coins before 2025, choose "Scan from the start" when restoring, or the wallet will restore an empty balance.
Second, send a test amount. Ten dollars, or the smallest amount that clears the withdrawal minimum. Confirm it arrives, confirm you can see it, confirm the note was credited if it went to an exchange.
Third, send the rest. Withdraw to the wallet's identifier. Wait for confirmations. Then, if the amount matters, point your wallet at your own node, so the balance it shows comes from a chain you checked yourself.
Withdrawal fees are small — around a dollar on most venues — but not zero. Consolidating several small buys into one transfer is worth doing.
Six rules. They are not complicated and almost every loss in this space is a violation of one of them.
The words are the money. Anyone who has the twenty-four words has the coins, no matter what the wallet says. Anyone who does not, does not — no support desk, no developer, no court can restore them.
Never type them into anything except your wallet during a restore. Not a website, not a chat, not a support form, not a helpful person on Telegram who offers to check them for you.
Keep two copies, in two places, offline. Paper or stamped metal. A house fire should not be a total loss, and neither should a burglary.
Test the restore. A backup you have never restored is a hope. Restore it once, on a spare device, before the balance is large enough to hurt.
Do not keep the whole balance in one place. Two wallets with separate seeds is a meaningful improvement over one perfect wallet.
Remember that the wallet application is not the money. Wallets get abandoned and replaced; the words are the asset, and any compatible wallet restores them.
Sending is covered in chapter twelve at the level of principle. At the level of practice, three things.
The handshake. Your wallet and the recipient's have to exchange data for the payment to be built. The wallet handles this through the relay: you paste the recipient's identifier, the wallet does the rest, and the recipient collects it. If the recipient is online and using the same wallet, this is nearly as fast as any payment app.
The confirmations. One block is about a minute. For a coffee, that is enough. For a car, wait for several, and for anything between strangers, treat it like any settlement: time is the collateral.
The receipt problem. Every payment leaves a kernel in a public block, and explorers exist — but they show that a payment's kernel was confirmed, not who paid or how much. To show a merchant the amount, share the transaction from your wallet. Your wallet's history is the record, and the merchant's node is theirs. For a business, this means the point-of-sale process has to record the transaction on both sides rather than pointing at a URL. It is a real integration cost and the ecosystem is still building for it.
A deposit never arrives. Open a support ticket with the transaction ID, the amount, the time and the onchain note if there was one. On a privacy chain, the exchange genuinely cannot find your money without your help.
You forgot the onchain note. Contact the exchange immediately with the transaction ID. Recovery is possible — the funds are in their custody and identifiable from their side — but it depends on their process and goodwill.
You sent to the wrong identifier. There is no reversal and no recovery. This error has no remedy, and it is the reason the test transaction rule exists.
You lost the seed. Nothing can be done. This is not a support failure; it is the design working as intended.
If you remember nothing else from this book, remember these five sentences.
Buy with a limit order, priced from the book, and keep a few percent back for the fee.
Write the onchain note down with the deposit address, because the wallet says optional and the exchange says required.
Send a small test before you send anything that matters.
The twenty-four words are the money; two copies, offline, in two places, tested once.
And the only coins that are yours are the ones you can move without asking anyone.
Everything else — the scorecard, the mining, the Mimblewimble, the entire argument of this book — is worth exactly as much as your ability to do those five things correctly.
On the second of November, three million people opened an app and were told that their balance could not be displayed.
Nothing in this book can change what happened to them. But everything in this book exists because of the question they must have asked themselves that morning: what did I actually own?
The answer, for almost everyone reading this, is a claim — on an institution, denominated in a supply that someone else controls, reachable only through permissions someone else grants. That is true on the good days too. It is a description of the instrument, not a prediction about the bank.
Epic Cash is an attempt to answer that question differently, and this book has tried to show its work rather than assert its conclusion: thirty-two attributes defined before anything was scored, six assets judged against them, a design opened up and examined, a list of failures stated in full, and a gap named plainly rather than explained away.
What you do with that is not something a book can decide. It can only try to leave you with something more useful than an opinion — a test you can run yourself, on any asset, without asking anyone's permission.
That is the whole of it. The rest is patience.