Testing Payouts
I have dabbled in converting my Steem Dollar payout just to see how it works. And so that you don't have to.
Test with small amounts first!
First of all, you'll need to convert your Steem Dollars (SD) to STEEM.
I'm told that the "Convert to STEEM" button will take a week to convert.
To convert instantly, you can use the internal exchange.
In your Steemit wallet, click on your Steem Dollars balance, then "Buy or Sell" to open the internal exchange.
Enter amount and price under "Buy STEEM". If you want the order to complete instantly, pick a maximum amount and price from one of the sell orders on the right side.
Click "Buy Steem" and go back to your wallet. You should now have a balance of STEEM.
Next we need to transfer our STEEM to an external exchange. Available exchanges (to my knowledge) are Bittrex, Blocktrades and OpenLedger.
Right now Bittrex appears to have the best exchange rate, but is still in maintenance. We will have to wait for them to re-enable their STEEM wallet. In the meantime, you can use Blocktrades or OpenLedger.
Blocktrades
Blocktrades is the easiest way to trade your STEEM. You don't need to register an account. Just select Steem -> Bitcoin, enter your bitcoin receival address, and click on Get Deposit Address.
Now open your wallet in Steemit.com, click on your STEEM balance, select "Transfer". Enter the address shown on blocktrades in the "To" field and the memo in the "Memo" field, and the amount you want to send of course. Hit Transfer, and that's it! Blocktrades will send you your bitcoins shortly.
OpenLedger
On OpenLedger, you can sell your STEEM for a number of other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Bitshares. Right now the Bitshares market appears to have the better liquidity.
NOTE: There appears to be a delay in the OPEN.STEEM gateway at the moment. My first deposit showed up instantly, the second one has not showed up yet after 30 minutes. Can anyone confirm this?
Register on openledger.info if you don't already have an account. Make sure to back up your keys.
In OpenLedger's Deposit/Withdraw section request a deposit for OPEN.STEEM. Note down the address and memo there ("openledger" and "open.steam-<YOUR_OPENLEDGER_ACCOUNT_NAME>".
Now go to your wallet on Steemit.com and transfer your STEEM to that address and memo.
Once your OPEN.STEEM has arrived on OpenLedger (should only take a minute or so), you can trade it for OPEN.BTC or BTS.
Open.BTC can be withdrawn to your Bitcoin address on the deposit/withdraw section. For some reason it wouldn't let me withdraw everything, you have to leave a small amount (0.00005 BTC or so) for future transaction fees or something like that. Not entirely sure why that is.
I have not found a way to withdraw BTS from OpenLedger, maybe there is a way to do that. In any case, you can convert your BTS to OPEN.BTC through a second trade and then withdraw the OPEN.BTC.
Success?
In this transaction, I converted 24.65 SD into 112.046 STEEM, then got 0.02370977 BTC (~15.65 USD) for that through Blocktrades.
Not quite close to the "1 SD = 1 $" that is advertised.
OpenLedger gave a much better rate, but their OPEN.STEEM gateway stopped working on my second test transaction.
For now I think It's best to wait until more exchanges become available (Bittrex, and perhaps some SD/BTC markets).
I love Blocktrades but their fees can really be huge.
Yeah I was shocked when I threw my first transaction through.
Upvoted you
Around 4 hours ago I sent some STEEM to openledger for OPEN.STEEM on the BTS DEX and it's still not arrived. =/
Update : OL support replied that they had wallet issues and it should be working within an hour.
I've been waiting for 40 minutes so probably the issues are still not over :(
Thanks for bearing our pain ;P.
I also try to transfer to openLedger now. I will come to update this reply when the open.steem arrives.
hello, I am back. My steem transferring cost 10 hours. You can refer to this information.
This was a very helpful post! Thank you so much for explaining it in easy to understand words for noobs like me :p
Note that these other markets are providing liquidity for SD at their own market rates as opposed to Steem's internal system.
The 'Convert to STEEM' button, which as you say takes a week, will convert SD to Steem at the internal market rate at the time of the conversion based on some aggregate price feed of the witnesses.
Perhaps this is a silly question, but does the internal rate better match $1 per SD?
It uses the weighted median of the week between the request and the conversion to calculate the amount of Steem you get. Doesn't help when you sell those at a loss.
Thanks! I was going to edit this post once I found out that it was the median price for the entire week! I'll leave it as is for the sake of readability since all the edits can be seen on the blockchain, but the Steemit UI doesn't show them.
Seems like blocktrades is a very bad deal right now. You lost some on selling for 0.22$ on the internal exchange, but the blocktrades deal only gave you 0.00021 BTC per Steem.
Do you remember what the estimation was?
Thanks for doing this for us! 1 SD = 0.64$ isn't that bad no? If we think about all the fees..