BlockTrades has re-enabled purchase of ETH

You can sell Steem/Steem Dollars for bitcoin or ether on our site. I recommend sales of 20 or more Steem when selling Steem for Bitcoin, because we have to charge a fixed fee for the bitcoin transaction where we send you the bitcoin.

SBD is only worth around $1.56 last time I checked: I suspect you are looking at coinmarketcap, which includes erroneous pricing from Poloniex (Poloniex has currently disabled SBD/Steem deposit/withdrawal). We also have to pay a fixed price of $1-$2 to pay the bitcoin transaction fee. If you'll read above, you see I strongly recommend against sending small quantities of SBD due to this fixed transaction cost.

Even small amounts like 1 SBD isn't too bad for buying ltc, because the ltc transaction fee is not too high right now.
Glad you like it, and actually not completely off-topic for this particular post I guess :-) I never formally announced it, but we recently did some work on the backend to speed up price estimates on the site (price estimates that could take a couple of seconds now resolve in a few hundred millseconds or less), which has made the site a little snappier to use (and should allow us to handle a pretty large volume of customers).

Hi, it wasn't enough to pay the bitcoin transaction fee. I'll refund your SBD, but please use a higher amount. Because bitcoin fees are high now, I recommend using at least 10 SBD or more so that the fixed cost of the bitcoin transaction doesn't have as much impact on your final rate.

When we send a bitcoin output, we currently charge a fixed fee for the output of .001 BTC, but we charge it on the input side, based on estimates by our system of what .001 BTC is worth in the input coin. This fixed fee is separate from our "rate fee" which is based on current prices we see on the markets we check.The fixed fee is subject to change though, based on our costs sending the bitcoin transactions. For other output coins, the fixed cost of sending a transaction is much cheaper.

Ethereum developors will need to improve the transaction speed of the blockchain. I'm sure this was a big wake up call for them and I don't doubt this is now a major focus for their future development. Fortunately, Steem has already been shown to be able to handle many more transactions than the amount that choked Ethereum.

Too many people were sending Ethereum over the past few days (partly because a lot of people were trying to send ETH to buy into an initial coin offering for Status). The Ethereum nodes were overwhelmed by the amount of transactions and couldn't process them all, so a lot of transactions expired without ever making it to their destination. It got to the point the day after yesterday that our Ethereum wallet sent out 6 Ether transactions and all 6 failed to make it to their destinations, so we temporarily disabled sending of Eth from our system until the transaction congestion subsided to the point that we were reasonably certain our transactions would get included into the Ethereum blockchain. Now things are back to normal, and we've re-enabled purchasing of ETH on our site.

It wasn't the drop of ETH on GDAX that was the cause, that was a side-effect of the problem. Eth couldn't handle all the network traffic, so it started losing transactions. This caused the exchanges to temporarily disable ETH deposit/withdrawal until transactions could reliably be sent. It also caused someone on GDAX to lose confidence in ETH and dump all the ETH they held there, temporarily driving down the price on that exchange.