Some Cryptocurrency Things Are Still a PITA

After ZenCash suffered a 51% attack last week, I was impressed by their quick handling and proposed future solutions. And since there was a price drop, I wanted to "buy the dip" and convert my meager cryptocurrency holdings from (almost entirely) Bitcoin Cash to (almost entirely) ZenCash. I'm not much of a speculator, and certainly nothing like a day trader, but it looked like a decent bet that ZenCash would recover fast and continue rising versus other cryptocurrencies, and since I had been mildly interested in ZenCash anyway ...

Shapeshift doesn't handle ZenCash.

Neither does Changelly (even though there was a story online a couple of months ago saying they were going to start).

Oh, well ... until a friend mentioned to me that Binance doesn't have all the "Know Your Customer" crap for small balances/transactions.

All well and good. My Bitcoin Cash is now ZenCash, in an amount only slightly less by dollar value.

But it took me a good hour and a half to set up my Binance account, deposit my Bitcoin Cash (confirmation time wait, of course), trade that Bitcoin Cash for Ethereum, trade that Ethereum for ZenCash (because I simply couldn't find any way to go directly from Bitcoin Cash to ZenCash on the exchange). We're talking less than $100 USD here -- not the kind of transaction I am interested in spending all damn day on.

I like Shapeshift and Changelly because they don't require me to maintain a balance on an exchange -- I can just trade directly to and from my own wallet. The only time my crypto is exposed is during the brief period I'm actually trading it.

Why does that matter to me? Well, early on as crypto goes, I lost three Bitcoins in exchange hacks (MtGox and one before that that I can't even remember the name of anymore). If I had been the "hodl" type rather than the "use this as a medium of exchange" type, that loss would have, as of a few months ago, amounted to $60,000 (at the time, it came to more like $100).