News, Rants and Thoughts
First
Still here. Not planning to stop any time soon. Some of you have commented, thinking that I was givign up. No. I am still here. I actually love posting and hosting contests. Every day I think of something I want to share, set it up in my mind. Then comes one emergency after another.
Distractions keep getting me. One call after another. One problem after another. Chasing freshdesk tickets for bumblings on exchanges keeps me from getting a post started. That is the main reason I have not been posting. I have to find new options for moving Steem and Ether from point A to point B.
open to suggestions
Second
Poloniex has lost me as a customer. They took over $10,000 worth of Steem from me recently (not the first time), and I have been writing them about it for a week. When I got no response, I started urging people I know to pull their money out as well. I have always had an eye for these kinds of things. Think about getting out while the getting is good.
Some reasons I see @poloniex failing:
- Malfunctions on one in twenty transfers
- They stopped answering helpdesk requests
- Liquidity issues
- Disabling transfers for Steem, SBD and Ethereum
- Delisting of coins with no warning
Many of the above kinds of things were noted back in the days of MtGox and BitInstant. They fell and I had gotten out before hand. I am pretty good at being able to tell if a company is hiring enough help to maintain their customer base or not. I also can see when hot wallets are not topped off often enough, which is what causes any coin to be "disabled temporarily".
Then there is the disabling of certain coins, Steem being one of them. When @poloniex leaves Steem disabled, it forces people like me to sell the thousands of Steem I have on deposit at Poloniex, when I was planning to transfer it. In that case they are forcing investment out of Steem and Steemit. Did you notice the price of Steem? Up when Poloniex enabled transfers, and down when they "temporarily disable" it for 6 to 8 weeks. Yeah, No manipulation there.
It doesn't matter what business you own. If your customers cannot obtain the product they came for, at a reasonable price, and rely on that product being in stock every time they come... You are done! You may as well hang a sign on your door or website saying "Go somewhere else!"
A good analogy : 
If you went to the store for pick up coffee and that store was out of stock, or simply had not stocked the shelf, no big deal.
If the same store again and again, and your brand of coffee is out of stock every time, you would likely start shopping elsewhere. Don't you think?
I vote with my feet. Do you?
Third
Shapeshift may as well drop Steem and SBD
How about a square that shows coins when they are temporarily available? Most are unavailable, and @shapeshiftio has really dropped the ball for all of us who use Steem or SBD.
It has been months since I have seen Steem as an option. As of now, I have stopped even checking to see if it's available to transfer to/from on the site. Shapeshift is just another site that doesn't seem to care if they will stay in business.
What's up Eric Voorhees? How about we talk again on skype?
Shapeshift has always had a good exchange rate and reasonable fees. They have lost 500 transactions this year JUST FROM ME unable to use their services. What does that say? IDK, maybe Eric is happy with 40 users per day being able to change out coins, and the other 10,000 walking away disappointed. If a pizza place had those kinds of stats, they would spend more on toilet bowl freshener than flour.
Fourth
Blocktrades.us which I recently found as a site is reliable and has a fairly deep hot wallet. But they tend to take advantage in a huge way related to current coin prices. There may be a low fee but changing out $1000.00 worth of one coin to another, in reality, will cost you between $22 and $45 due to inaccurate quotes.
I had used them heavily when I started here because they are integrated in the wallet section of Steemit. I was able to send 10btc at one time and the quoted SP amount would always arrive. But again, a 10btc transfer back then still cost me $450-$600 more than if I had sold the btc on an exchange, bought Steem at a good price and then transferred it here.
Here is one reference to limits at blocktrades when I sent 10btc at once
Fifth
Bitcoins seems to be working again!
Yes, it was broken since December of 2016 and I did vote with my feet. I stopped using it completely and would not transfer bitcoin to anyone. I am personally responsible for over 80 new downloads of a wallet called coinomi which hosts many coins in one place. People needed it because I would not sell them anything but Dash, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Spitcoin, Dimplecoin, Boobcoin, or any other that would actually show the first confirmation within a five-minute period.
Bitcoin had a 400,000 to 500,000 backlog of transactions waiting on a first confirmation. That lasted for a half year and fees were high. Everyone kept setting higher fees in order to get your transaction noticed within the first two hours after sending (sickening). Now the backlog is holding steady around 40,000 waiting in the queue. So I have some btc again. Yes. Buying.
I am not sure what they did to fix it. I sold all mine so I didn't care. Now I am buying Bitcoins and transferring them into my main savings account for which I have my private key - that way I can double up when/if the fork happens.
I usually cover a variety of rants in my #bitsandpieces posts.
Sorry, I have been concentrated on avoiding the failing entities out there and thought I would put out a heads up on what I am finding.
Thanks for taking time to read and resteem! 👍
Twitter: @at_htooms
Long time 🐟 turned 🐋 to have a voice.
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