Am I back?

Well I can hope!

But I don't want to make empty promises.

The truth is that I wanted to come back for a long time. I kept hive open for months in a tab, meaning to start posting again. But there's a lot about the world and my life right now that I don't want to put "on the chain", even if it's just a "shit post".

I even sent hive back into my account in preparation.

I just didn't actually post for whatever reason.

So why not start with a simple post about how this place is still a nightmare of lack of ease of use!

My Adventures in Trying to Withdraw!

Because Bills!

Sadly we all have bills we have to pay. Or they'll send threatening letters and red ink may be involved.

I would rather just keep my crypto if I could. But these last few years have not been kind.

So, first I gotta find my keys, which was far easier than I feared thankfully.

Oop...most of the sites have changed and the authentication methods have changed. Which of these do I use? Well, I used to use PeakD, so I use that. I know HiveSigner, so I use that.

I have no idea what's going on.

It would be a lot simpler if more exchanges supported Hive.

I think Coinbase does, but I don't use them anymore after they turned off my ability to withdraw, WITH NO NOTICE, suddenly, until I submitted all my documents again. So that was a fun day, when I had to suddenly panic submit all my documents after my account was already supposed to be verified, to withdraw crypto to pay a bill.

Don't come at me talking about "HODL". Some of us aren't that rich.

So I start "googling" and googling and googling. What's the best way to convert something I can easily transfer out? (Not the actual search string I used.)

I should have probably just used Blocktrades, it would have been easier but I found this Reddit post talking about the fees. It would have been so much easier, but I decided to do it through the swap coins.

Sounds easy enough. Just swap for LTC and withdraw. But how do I do that again?

Honestly, I completely fucking forgot about Hive Engine and all of that. I don't think it had even been around that long when I left. A few months maybe? It was still new and fresh. I bought lots of useless tokens and then sold most of them back into Hive when I left. The ones that were worth anything anyway.

Every search result I found was so vague! They didn't really explain the process. Just withdraw it!

Most used Coinbase, which I no longer trust.

It would be so much easier if I just used Coinbase! But then I'd have to worry about if they just locked my account for no reason and I don't even know if my bank withdraw is still working there. So I might have to set it up again, which is a hassle. So I decided to use my usual exchange these days, which is Kraken.

Feel free to talk about other exchanges and which ones you like in the comments!

So I just have to convert the hive I still have on here into swap.LTC, then send it to Kraken, right?

But how do I do that?

The thing is, when dealing with crypto especially, you have to be explicit. You have to explain the process. Preferably with pictures.

It should have been easy.

Should have. The process is easy. (Well, now I know that.)

The main problem was finding some sort of guide or tutorial that explained the process. First I started by trying to look into BeeSwap and how to use it. That got me to realize I needed to install Hive Keychain. I'm pretty sure I had used that before, but I just didn't remember and when I first was trying to figure everything out I didn't want to mess with browser extensions yet.

So I'm trying to figure out BeeSwap and saw mention of other swap sites and then after multiple times where I looked into it and then went to do other things I finally found mention somewhere that you can just use Hive Keychain to swap tokens.

_{GIF from The Wedding Singer - Source from Tenor}

I suppose I should have remembered, but I didn't. I didn't even remember using Hive Keychain at first. I seem to remember it wasn't necessarily that old when I was here, and the feature to add tokens was fairly new as well. It seems pretty well polished now though.

So I figured out that I can just swap the tokens via Hive Keychain. But now I needed to figure out how exactly to withdraw them. Every search result I found was either not relative to what I needed to do, or wasn't explicit.

It took me multiple days of searching just to find out that I could withdraw it via Hive Engine. See, the thing is, none of the results were explicit on how you get the swap.LTC to be converted into LTC to send to a wallet. So I kept looking into it and not figuring it out and then going to do something else.

It should have been simple. It should have. All they had to say was that you can click "Withdraw" on Hive-Engine to send a pegged token to a corresponding wallet. But for whatever reason, most results I found were not that explicit, or I simply missed it. Part of the problem was that a lot of them assumed you could just withdraw Hive directly to Coinbase, so you just had to swap a token to Hive. That's not an option for MANY people.

When you click that magic little button it takes you to a page that lets you withdraw pegged tokens to the corresponding crypto.

That might seem obvious, but it's really not. I'd have to actually know that feature was even available on that site for one thing. But a pegged token and the corresponding crypto are not the same thing, so assuming they would just allow you to withdraw a token to a corresponding wallet might be a mistake. But surprisingly or not, it is that easy.

In fact, it was pretty fast. Next thing I knew, it was pending on Kraken.

The transaction said it would be about 30 minutes but I think it took a bit longer.

Now I'm just waiting for it to actually withdraw to my bank, after way too many days trying to figure out something that should have been simple.

I hope you'll welcome me back and don't hate my long winded ramblings too much. I hope this is the first of many posts now that I'm back on the chain. I have a lot to figure out now that I'm back in regards to how this place works now.