How to Convert Numeraire Tokens into US Dollars - The Long Story
3700 Numeraire Tokens
So I found these in my Numerai account months after they were deposited there. At the time, the price in dollars for each token was bouncing between $12 and $13. At the time they were first traded on an exchange 4 to 5 months before that, they were selling for $140. So at some time in the past, I had close to half a million in cryptocurrency. But it wasn't going back up. Since then it had slowly trended downward. (As I write this post, the price for Numeraire actually more than doubled from the time I sold it, but that is a story for another blog post).
So that's what I knew at the time. I had never dealt with wallets, exchanges, mining or anything else to do with cryptocurrency. But somehow I had about $45,000 invested in it.
Things Change Fast in Cryptocurrency
So the purpose of Numeraire tokens is so data scientists can stake their models in the Numerai stock market contest. I had stopped competing after the third tournament when I could no longer get cash for winning, only Bitcoin, which I had no clue how to use. So I was out of practice in machine learning and I couldn't use Numeraire for the purpose they were intended without a few weeks of creating and testing a few models.
Well, no time for that. So the best thing was to exchange the Numeraire for a currency that was going up in value or at least holds it's value. Keeping the value in Numeraire was sort of like keeping the value in US dollars. Come back next year and it was worth less. At least, from what I could tell by looking at the charts.
By that time in my research, I had discovered that Numeraire was a token not actually a coin that was using the Ethereum blockchain. Yup, didn't even know that at first. So I figured, covert it all to Ether since in my head, Numeraire could only have value if Ether had value. So I might as well invest in the source and not the child currency.
So I search Google for "how to convert numeraire into Ether". Good luck with that. The one post I found said to use Bittrex. Well, I signed up and then proceeded to have my account locked with no response from any sort of customer service…for a couple of weeks.
Sidebar: If you are going to deal with a lot of my money and treat customers like this, it doesn't matter if you eventually will unlock my account. Do you think I will ever use you to handle my money? Would you trust you? I get that Google can get away with treating customers like assholes because their service is free. Well, not so much if you have my money. So I haven't yet used my Bittrex account which is unlocked now and probably never will. The same goes for a few other exchanges that treated me the same way. I will write a whole post on this eventually.
Keep Moving Forward
Since Bittrex was treating me like a redheaded stepchild, I just decided to move forward with things. I downloaded the official Mist Ethereum Wallet and set up my wallet. I played around with it a few hours and then discovered the ShapeShift.io feature to convert Bitcoin into Ether to add to the wallet. So I went to the ShapeShift site and discovered that I convert Numeraire into Ether there. Jackpot!
So first I sent about 30 Numeraire through Shapeshift. For some reason, I am now used to entering my credit card numbers into random sites, but this kind of scared the shit out of me. In less than a minute, though, I had about 1 Ether in my Mist wallet.
Ok, good enough test. Over the next couple of days, I exchanged all of my Numeraire into about 140 Ether. Shapeshift will set an exchange limit, which at the time was around 300 for Numeraire because that was all the market could handle. After I exchanged the maximum of 300, the maximum when then drop down to 70 and after that much less. Also, my seeming small exchanges somehow had an effect on the Numeraire exchange rate, giving me a little bit less the second exchange in a row. So it took about 12 exchanges spaced every few hours to move it all.
The More You Know
So, at the same time, I am telling my story how it happened, I also want to highlight where I could have done better. Initially, when I found the currency, I wanted to convert it to cash and get it out. So my search in Google was more along the lines of "how to convert Numeraire into US dollars". There is currently no way to do this directly. It's going to take at least one hop to another cryptocurrency first, the easiest being Ether or Bitcoin. This led me to one lonely post on using Bittrex to do this and then a coin to cash exchange to finish the job.
Since finding Shapeshift, I also found Changelly and Simply Coin. Here is the current exchange rate of each for 1 Numeraire to Ether:
- Changelly: 0.070048 Ether
- Simply Coin: 0.06598619 Ether
- Shapeshift: 0.064904 Ether
It doesn't seem like much of a difference if you have like 10 Numeraire. But if I had the 3700 Numeraire today and was exchanging them all into Ether, I would get 19.6312 more Ether from Changelly than from Shapeshift which translates to about $8944.76. I can vouch for Changelly. I have used it for a few exchanges now. I haven't tried Simply Coin.
As far as turning the Ether into cash goes, both Gemini and Coinbase were quick to verify my credentials in a few days so I could do withdrawals and then I could get cash deposited in my bank account usually overnight. Coinbase is more user-friendly to exchange newbies and currently has a better Ether exchange rate, but that can change. Now I compare the Ether to US dollar rate of each to determine which I will use. But I plan on writing more about exchanges in other posts. This will get you what you need for today.