Blocktrades.us is a fast and convenient (and only) way to get money in and out of your Steemit account without signing up to anything. However, with convenience you often pay for it in some way. This is as true with crytocurrencies as it is in life in general.

So I will attempt to make some sense of their fees by roughly calculating how much you can expect to pay. Please note, prices are changing rapidly as I'm doing this and some blockchains are more congested than others so fees change too.

Bitcoin

The current price of Steem in BTC is 0.00079576

On Poloniex 1 Btc gets you 1256 Steem, including the tiny transaction fee.

For the same 1 Btc you get 1212 Steem through blocktrade.us

This is a 3.63% difference

This is not to be unexpected as one is an exchange where no crypto has to be sent anywhere, the other is a transaction where fees need to be paid to the blockchain. So the fee is roughly 3.48% (including the - 0.15% Poloniex fee).

Then I start wondering if I can find the cheapest way to send 1 BTC worth of different altcoins to Steemit.

Doge

1 BTC gets you 909090 of everyone's favourite shitcoin Dogecoin which is priced at 110 Satoshi.

909090 Doge gets you 1189 Steem, even more expensive than Bitcoin. Roughly a 5.6% - 6% fee

With the price of all 3 currencies moving (though slowly), it's difficult to tell how accurate this is. However, it's more expensive than BTC, which surprised me.

Ethereum

Priced at 0.11886000 BTC, you get 8.41325929 Ethereum for your single Bitcoin.

BlockTrades.us gives us 1216, this is less than BTC which changed to 1231 Steem via BlockTrades.us while typing this.

Do you see why this is difficult do work out? But the percentage difference between 1216 and 1231 is 1.23%. So I guess you can add the 1.23% to the 3.48% we got earlier to give us a rough fee of 4.71%.

Dash

Dash is priced at 0.06756800 BTC, you get 14.799 Dash for 1 BTC

Through BlockTrades you get 1216, 1 BTC is still now 1231 Steem via BlockTrades, giving you the same percentage fee as Ethereum.

Let's recap...

Bitcoin = 3.48%

Doge = 5.6%

Dash/Ethereum = 4.71%

These are rough calculations done in a moving market, so my results should be taken with a pinch of salt. If anyone has an issue with my working out, please comment below. Please note I was constantly monitoring price changes throughout but it's not easy to do mathematics quickly while typing a blog post. There also could be rounding errors and things I haven't thought of.

It seems from the coins I tried, it may be beneficial to exchange your alts to Bitcoin before transferring money into your Steemit account.

-Edited to take away the Poloniex fee rather than add it.