I did not intend to get into cryptocurrency, but it has happened in a small way, and I can state that it is a mess. John Oliver recently gave a pretty decent overview of Crypto Currency on his show, Last Week Tonight. If you are a crypto novice, I suggest you watch the video which is both informative and funny.
My first dalliance began when I went to pay for advanced features on an anonymous email system. The service I was using only accepted Bitcoin as an anonymous form of payment. At that time I had zero Bitcoin (BTC), I did not have a bitcoin wallet, nor a way of purchasing bitcoin with U.S. Dollars ($). So I created a new account with Circle bank (who may or may not allow this anymore) which allowed me to exchange Fiat Currency (U.S. Dollars in this case) for Bitcoin. From there I could send the required amount of BTC to the email provider and unlock the advanced features. Then my use of BTC lay dormant for almost an entire year.
In December 2017 I decided to begin contributing to the Stanford University Folding@Home project as my family has some history of cancer and alzheimers, diseases the project aims to learn more about. I am not contributing by donating money, but by donating computer resources to the project. In fact I built a dedicated computer just for folding that sits in a corner in the basement. It runs a lightweight Ubuntu Server operationing system, has an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (6-core, 12-thread) CPU and an NVideo GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card. It’s a pretty modest build in terms of cost, but having 10-threads of the CPU and the entire GPU dedicated to folding has gotten me some good results. I am happy with my contributions to the cause, but while building my computer I discovered that there are two services that reimburse donors for their completed work units in cryptocurrency. Curecoin and Foldingcoin.
The idea here is to reward participants to help cover the electrical costs of the folding activities. The Folding@Home software can (and does in my case) run the CPU and GPU at 100% which consumes quite a bit of energy. It’s like leaving 2 or 3 100-watt light bulbs on all the time. Not a huge expense, but definitely some extra dollars on the monthly power bill. About a week ago I decided to check in on my accumulated donations and saw that I had just over $100 of Foldingcoin and Curecoin combined after 4-months, and decided to cash some of it out. This is where the fun began.
The underlying technology of Curecoin (CURE) and Foldingcoin(FLDC), which are considered Altcoins, are quite different so they are distributed to me in different wallets. To do anything with them, you need to trade the CURE and FLDC for another coin that you can then sell for fiat currency, only a handful of coins are commonly bought/sold for fiat currency, Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BTH), Litecoin (LTC), and Ethereum (ETH) are the most common. There is no direct path from CURE/FLDC to Fiat Currency. So I have to send my CURE/FLDC from their respective wallets to a Cryptocurrency Exchange that supports these Altcoins, of which there are only a handful, and only one I found that can handle both, Bittrex. When I first began I noticed that Bittrex valued Curecoin lower than another exchange, Livecoin, so I setup accounts with both, one for managing each Altcoin (Livecoin sucks by the way, and I suggest avoiding it, more on that later) and sent the coins from my wallets to the exchange (for a transmission fee, of course). Then I can trade my CURE/FLDC for Bitcoin (for a conversion fee, of course). Then I should be able to cash out right? Wrong.
The Bittrex and Livecoin exchanges do not allow you to link to a bank account to buy/sell coins. There are separate exchanges that allow that. So I setup yet another account at Coinbase, which linked to my debit card and allows me to buy/sell BTC, LTC, BCH, or ETH for fiat currency. Now I have to send my BTC from Bittrex/Livecoin to Coinbase (for a transmission fee, of course), where I can sell it and deposit the money into my bank account (for a conversion fee, of course). Along the way I learned that Litecoin (LTC) has lower fees, so I actually converted my BTC in Bittrex and Livecoin to LTC, then transferred to Coinbase, and sold them. Sadly, I also cannot exchange CURE/FLDC directly for LTC, everything seems designed to make you jump through a lot of conversions, all of which get their fee.
No matter how you slice it, you pay fees every time your cryptocurrency moves from once place to another, or changes from one currency to another, it gets annoying quickly. I am able to buy mutual funds, etfs, stocks, etc on several different brokerage sites, and transfer around the USD without nearly as many fees.
This is on top of the fact that you have to use at least four different pieces of software to convert those CURE/FLDC into something I can pay my electric bill with as ComEd isn’t yet accepting Bitcoin as payment, and even if they did, it would only eliminate one of the below tools. It would likely add another as I’d want to long-term store my BTC in an offline wallet.
- Curecoin wallet
- Foldingcoin wallet (Counterwallet)
- 1 Crypto Exchange that supports both CURE/FLDC (Bittrex)
- (or two separate exchanges)
- Crypto Exchange that allows the buy/sell of BTC/LTC for fiat currency (Coinbase)
The first time I tried to cash out my FLDC and CURe it took me about 2 weeks to get all of the accounts setup, perform all of the transfers and conversions performed. In the future this should only take a couple of days to complete.
A (long) note about Livecoin, and why I am no longer using it. (TLDR: Unable to transfer LTC to Coinbase for no apparent reason, their support staff is not helpful) After converting my CURE to BTC, and BTC to LTC, I attempted to send the LTC from Livecoin to Coinbase so I could cash it out. To send coins from wallet to wallet you need to put in a very long address that identifies the receiving wallet. You can only send LTC to another LTC wallet, if you try to send to the wallet of another coin, you could lose it. I popped the address of my Coinbase LTC wallet into Livecoin and it said “Invalid address”. So I opened a support ticket to Livecoin support and told them that the wallet address was marked ‘invalid’ even though it was copied/pasted exactly as listed on Coinbase. While waiting for a response I did some googling and found out there are multiple Wallet address formats, and some exchanges don’t support them all. So I found a tool to convert the Coinbase wallet address to another format, and tried again to transmit a small amount of LTC (just in case the converter was sending my coins to somebody else), and got ‘invalid address’ again. I received a reply from Livecoin support that said they were unable to assist me in the filling out of payment details. So I tried the transfer of LTC from Bittrex to Coinbase next, and it worked perfectly. So I replied to Livecoin support and said that the exact same LTC wallet address works fine from other exchanges, and I provided them both the native and converted address of the LTC wallet address I wanted to send to. They again replied with a snarky comment “as already mentioned… we can’t help with payment details”. So at this point I figure I’ve just been scammed out of $70 worth of Curecoin because I can’t get it out of Livecoin. Thankfully I was able to send my LTC from Livecoin over to Bittrex (for a transmission fee, of course) and then over to Coinbase (for a transmission fee, of course) to cash out.
The moral of this story is that the world of Crypto is still very convoluted and confusing, many of the people that use it do not communicate well to newbies, many of these Crypto Currency exchanges are poorly supported, and some of them just up and disappear. I would suggest you read up on reviews of others using the same coins you intend to use before committing to an exchange. Always test things out with a small amount of coins before committing a lot. And just like in gambling, don’t put more money into crypto than you can afford to lose because there are many opportunities to make a mistake and lose it, its value is very volatile, and the exchanges you rely on are not long-established businesses that you can walk over to if they screw up.
synapsethemole 
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