This is an original post by me that I wrote for my Leo Finance blog. All words and experiences are my own.
If you can see the annoyance in my dog Jovi's face over me taking yet another picture of her, you might have an idea of what I was dealing with this weekend.
I wasn't having my picture taken. That might have been more desirable than having to deal with Bittrex and their tech support.
I wrote this post last Friday about some issues I was having with Bittrex. Ever since the whole STEEM/HIVE thing, I have stopped using Binance. I don't like they way they handled the situation by locking up people's tokens. It was a crappy move, they got called out on it and eventually they made it right, but I don't know as though they would have if the public outcry hadn't been so great.
Plus, BINANCE recently made the decision to not allow people in the States to use the exchange. Fine by me, that just gives me even more reason to avoid them now. I know there are a million other options out there, but in the past, Bittrex seemed like the best bet.
It is fairly easy to use and the fees seemed relatively low.
I have been powering down the last of my Steem on one of my alt account so that I can buy some Leo to send over to the @lbi-token account so I could take part in that awesome new initiative.
I sent my Steem to Bittrex, sold it to BTC and then used that BTC to purchase Hive.
That's where the issues began. As I was getting ready to move the Hive into my account so I could then move it to the Hive-Engine to sell it, I noticed that withdraws of Hive from Bittrex were disabled due to "wallet maintenance".
I was annoyed, but I figured I would give it a day and see how things went on Saturday. Since I didn't actually need the Leo until today, I wasn't too worried.
Saturday came, and withdraws were still disabled from the Hive wallet on Bittrex. By now I was starting to get little annoyed and worried because this is actually the second time they have done this in the past two months or so specifically with the Hive wallet.
I decided to do a chat with support, but they had disabled their chat feature due to a "high volume of calls". Instead, I submitted a support ticket the old fashioned way.
By the end of the day, I had a reply from them stating that I could view the status of the wallet maintenance on their status page. I went there and found that it basically told you nothing. They have labels for what is going on with each wallet, but the descriptions for those labels are so vague that it basically tells you nothing.
I replied back and told them that I just needed to know when withdraws would be allowed again from the Hive wallet.
Sunday morning I woke up and had this message in my mailbox:
*"The HIVE wallet is currently disabled without a timeline for the repair unfortunately deposits and withdrawals will be delayed."*
That seemed pretty unreasonable to me, and not wanting to take the chance of coverting my LEO to LBI, I ended up biting the bullet and moving backwards through the conversions back to STEEM. I hate to think of how much I lost in fees with all of the moving to BTC that I had to do.
Once the STEEM was back in my wallet, I ended up using https://beeswap.dcity.io/. It was so easy to get my Steem into my Hive-Engine wallet. I wish I had heard about this service a long time ago.
I know I got some suggestions from other people about some of the other swap sites and I appreciate that! I think moving forward, Beeswap will be my go-to site for moving the rest of my Steem to Hive.
I am not giving up completely on Bittrex (Unless I need Hive), but this whole ordeal really makes me appreciate the decentralized exchanges out there and should really be a reminder to folks that keeping your tokens on a centralized exchange, even for a short amount of time, is never a good idea.
There is a happy ending. I am not sure how, but I eventually ended up with more Hive in my Hive-Engine wallet that I would have if I had been able to pull it out of Bittrex. I am guessing the stars aligned and the prices moved in the directions I needed them to for me to get a small gain.
I sent my LEO over to @lbi-token this morning and I am now waiting for the LBI to show up my wallet. With that task taken care of, I can now start focusing on staking Leo again to build my account.
