appendix-b.md
This is the practical appendix: how to actually acquire EPIC without a bank, a broker, or a form that asks for your employer. It condenses two longer guides — one for the EPIC/XMR pair, one for EPIC/USDT — which are available separately.
Nothing here is advice. It is a description of what the screens ask for, and where people lose money using them.
NonKYC is a small exchange that runs on the premise that it does not want to know who you are. That premise is worth exactly as much as the operator's honesty, and no more: an exchange that does not collect identity documents still holds your coins while they are on the exchange. Custodial until you withdraw is the rule; "no KYC" is not the same as "no risk.
The two pairs that matter:
EPIC/XMR — Epic priced in Monero. For someone arriving from Monero, this is the cleanest path: no stablecoin, no bank rail, no identity.
EPIC/USDT — Epic priced in Tether. Easier if you already hold dollars on-chain, and it introduces the issuer risk that chapter two describes: a balance that can be frozen by an administrative decision.
Both books are thin. Sizes that would be a rounding error on a major exchange move the price here, which is a fact about the asset and worth knowing before you place an order.
An email address, a password, and two-factor authentication. Turn on the authenticator before you deposit anything; an account without it is an account someone else can empty. Withdrawals additionally require an eight-digit PIN sent to your email, which is a second factor and also a second thing to lose access to.
NonKYC offers two deposit methods for EPIC, and the choice matters.
Epicbox gives you a deposit address and an onchain note number. The note is how the exchange attributes an incoming payment to your account, because on a ledger with no addresses it has no other way to know who sent what. The payment travels through the exchange's relay, and if the relay is unreachable or your wallet cannot reach a node, the send fails.
HTTP gives you a custom URL with your account number already inside it. Paste that as the destination and there is no note to forget and no relay in the path. Use this one. It removes the failure mode the next paragraph is about.
If you use epicbox anyway, the note is not optional. Your wallet may label that field (optional) — that is the protocol's description of it, not the exchange's. Leave it out and the coins arrive, cannot be attributed, and become a support ticket — the privacy design working exactly as designed.
Write the note down when you create the account. If you lose it, you can retrieve it from the deposit page, but not from the blockchain.
The market is an order book, not a swap box. Two columns of resting orders — bids on one side, asks on the other — and a form that either takes the best available price (market) or waits at a price you name (limit).
Three things trip people up:
Decimals. Prices are quoted to eight places, quantities to three. 0.00128652 is a price, not a typo, and a limit order at the wrong decimal is a gift to whoever takes it.
Market orders on a thin book. A market buy for a size the book cannot absorb walks up through every ask, and you pay the worst price on the way through. On EPIC/XMR, check the depth before you send anything larger than a few hundred dollars.
The spread. The gap between the best bid and the best ask is your cost of entering and leaving. On a quiet day it is around half a percent, which is cheap for a privacy coin and expensive compared with a major pair.
Trading is 0.2 percent at the base tier, falling toward 0.06 percent at the top, with a further 25 percent discount for holding the exchange's own token. A maker order — one that rests in the book — is cheaper than a taker order that removes liquidity. Withdrawal of EPIC costs 1.4 EPIC, which is a flat fee and therefore proportionally cruel on small amounts.
Withdraw to a wallet you control. Paste the address from your wallet, not from a chat message, and confirm the first characters and the last on both screens. There is no chargeback and no support line that can reverse a payment on a chain designed to make reversal impossible.
The onchain note, omitted. Described above. It is the most common, and it is silent — the transaction succeeds, the balance does not appear.
The wrong network. USDT exists on a dozen chains. A deposit sent on the wrong one is usually gone.
The seized exchange. A custodial balance is a promise. Promises are not coins.
The panic sale. Thin books fall faster than thick ones. If you cannot name the price at which you would be wrong, you will find it during a bad hour.
Buying 500 EPIC at 0.76551 USDT costs 382.76, plus 0.77 in fees: 383.53. Selling the same 500 straight back at the bid, 0.76170, returns 380.85, less 0.76 in fees: 380.09. The round trip loses 3.44, about 0.9 percent — roughly what the spread and two fees cost, and the reason a thin market punishes people who trade rather than hold.