ShapeShift: the thrill of technology that works the way it's supposed to

Before I explain the breakthrough, I first have to recap the hassle of my odyssey through the trading exchanges over the last two weeks on a quest first to buy and then to sell ICN. You can skip to the TLDR.

But first, a shoutout to ShapeShift: you big beautiful thing! (No I'm not paid by them.)
This is true:

So anyone who read my earlier rants about not being able to ShapeShift my ICN back to BTC on the Jaxx wallet earlier here is an update. Recap: I had initially wanted to convert some BTC to ICN for a long term hold as I believe in the future of Iconomi. I think its ability to index and track the value of the entire portfolio of cryptocoins is going to make it very popular for those who don't trust themselves to pick coins, and I think their non-blockchain index fund ICNX will have broad appeal with traders and investors outside crypto who are wary of buying cryptocurrencies directly and would like a fund to track the value of their favorites. Lastly, ICN will allow people to create their own cryptocurrency funds (like a hedge fund) where they can create a fund within ICN that is tied to the value of a specific portfolio of cryptocurrencies that they choose. I believe at $3.44 ICN is still way undervalued.

However, at this point I realized that I am not ready to go long anything until I have established a certain size of Bitcoin holdings first. I just want to maximize my BTC as much as possible right now. Once I feel satisfied with my holdings I'll branch back out into the alts.

So I when I first wanted to buy ICN I found my options were severely limited. The main exchange where you can buy ICN is Kraken and after going through the full registration I was finally told that as a resident of New York I was not allowed to make any trade. I had heard that you could use the ShapeShift technology embedded in the Jaxx wallet to instantly trade your BTC for ICN so I got a Jaxx wallet and got ready to do that. I tried it and it wouldn't work. I went on forums and everyone was saying they couldn't do it either and the glitch had lasted for days. Someone else suggested I didn't have enough ETH as "gas" to power the conversion. So I moved .18 ETH into my ICN wallet on Jaxx and tried again. Nothing. Finally got it to go through after a week. Later I changed my mind and wanted to shift ICN back to BTC. I waited till ICN was up 14% against BTC and tried it - nothing! This went on several days and I've been getting more and more frustrated with Jaxx, adding to the fact I also haven't managed to collect my pre-fork BCH from there either. So finally today I went to use ShapeShift directly and was immediately told that they won't let me trade with them because I am in New York and New York requires all sorts of onerous disclosures of personal data that ShapeShift doesn't believe in. You know what? F$ck it! I'm cranking up my VPN and "moving to the UK." Which I did, and about ten minutes later the most beautiful and smooth transaction occurred. I sent my ICN from my Jaxx wallet to ShapeShift and ten minutes later ShapeShift sent BTC back, at an excellent exchange rate. Phew! If everything had been this easy from the beginning I'd be a day trader by now! Okay, not really, but it's the most amazing thing I've seen so far in my crypto-journey.

TLDR; I finally took everyone's advice to move my ICN off of Jaxx directly onto ShapeShift and convert ICN to BTC there. It worked like a dream come true in about 10 minutes and sent the newly transformed BTC back to my Jaxx wallet.