A few days back I posted here about the inability to use Steem for payment of bills using livingroomofsatoshi.com
Update
I've since received some more information from their support. There is currently no ETA for the resumption of Steem transactions on LROS. I asked whether the temporary withdrawal of Steem support had anything to do with the prices rises of late (and this was asked before yesterday's Steem spike) and was told that it's an unrelated issue.
Just to be sure (and in a desire to see how much more powerful my Steem is since the last time I tried) I had one more crack this morning and sure enough, it's still disabled. To recap, here's the amount of Steem that would have been required to pay my bill 4 days ago (32.45) as pictured below (please excuse the dimensions as it was a screen shot taken on my phone).
... and here's my attempt this morning which would have required 18.25 Steem ...
Blocktrades
An alternative of course is to use an alternative coin. This requires a conversion from Steem. Interestingly, I've never actually sold any Steem since I started with Steemit. Sure there have been transfers to other users to and fro but I've never used it for any utility. Why not now when the price is high? So I went over to https://blocktrades.us and selected Litecoin as it's fairly cheap to transact in and is fast.
The UI is very easy to use as you can see pictured above. I like blocktrades. I decided to use my KeepKey as a LTC wallet intermediary to hold the converted Steem prior to paying . I generated an LTC address on the hardware wallet as pictured.
... and away we go with blocktrades. Note the helpful information regarding fees.
Here I am sending the steem for the conversion...
... which was processed by blocktrades nearly instantly and arrived in my KeepKey wallet within 2 minutes.
Now came the simple step of sending that LTC from my wallet to LROS. It's easy to select a new coin on the LROS payment screen as pictured.
Selecting to send LTC from the KeepKey wallet produced the following. Note the convenient tip on the fee. I didn't increase the send amount by the fee. KeepKey does that for you as we'll see subsequently.
Through the beauty that is hardware wallets, I was prompted to confirm the transaction on the device itself and confirm that the transaction fee is to be added to the amount sent. I really liked this as it means I don't need to fret about whether I should have manually added the fee amount to the amount being sent...
... and in the time it took me to alt-tab over to my browser, this happened ...
I opted to email myself a receipt and all is done. A very smooth process. It would have been more convenient to directly use Steem but this is a way around it. All in all, I'm very happy and I'll let you all know if I hear anything more. Thanks guys!