If a Solana smart contract creator wants to they can publish an IDL for the contract, which will tell things about the various functions in a smart contract. If you then viewed that contract in an explorer you could view the IDL.

AFAIK functions are only called by name in Solana (at least using Anchor), and I have never seen a method ID beyond a function name (could be wrong though).

I have never seen anything than what appears to be utter randomness from Solana transaction signatures. Given that the signatures are generated from from the ED25519 curve, it doesn’t really seem likely that they would ever fit a pattern.

What you WILL find are vanity addresses for addresses users can generate. These will have the first several characters be human readable and can be used to categorize addresses. But I’ve never seen a vanity transaction signature.

I think you are right. It’s the only possible explanation.

You can just buy Sol on any exchange practically instantly and send it to your Phantom wallet. But I didn’t realize you are asking for a swap and not charity. So my mistake. Also there are so many conversion companies.

You are literally on Reddit asking for people to send you money and Reddit is ok with this? Go find a penny on the ground and buy Sol.

It’s all answered here:

https://solana.com/staking#overview/what-is-staking

In the future, use one of the instant methods if possible? Whenever I’ve used Coinbase, the instant deposit availability options seemed to work well.

You’re thinking about account to account Sol transactions, for which such a low price is deminimis and even 10x price increase is meaningless. But there is a whole other aspect of the blockchain that involves smart contracts and the price per transaction is the same there too. So to call any function in a particular smart contract will cost at a minimum .000005 Sol, and depending on what other functions that function calls, those calls will also be .000005 Sol. And sometimes you need to make many changes over time and you keep incurring these fees. At current levels, it is mostly painless. But it will start adding up if this goes 10X. In short, the impact I am talking about from increased transaction costs doesn’t affect the “money” side, only the smart contract side. The reason I know this is because I build on chain applications and deal with this on the daily.

Yes. Although as a developer in the space, I am massively concerned that if it gets a high level of adoption the cost to operate software on it will become prohibitive. As it is, transaction costs in dollar terms have tripled in the last few months.