After following the steps outlined in this chapter, you will have succeeded in exchanging your Steem Dollars for fiat money, without using a centralized bitcoin exchange.

Introduction

If you have been following along, you will have installed #bitsquare, funded your #bitsquare wallet after converting your Steem Dollars to Bitcoin using #blocktrades, and you are now very close to the goal of having your bank account credited.

If you have not been following along, then I would invite you to read the other articles in this series before reading this one - or, chances are, it will not make much sense.

You can find all the relevant links in the .. well, links section, near the end.

For demonstration purposes I actually went ahead and sold some bitcoin for euros (sadness).

Here is how the process looks like.

Step one - create an offer

We start at the obvious step.

Since we are trying to sell bitcoin for fiat money (let's assume Euros in this guide), we first need to create an order to SELL bitcoin.

Click the Sell BTC icon on the top left corner.

You can get an idea of how the market looks like by adjusting your currency and payment method preferences, but this is not necessary (your order can sit there waiting even if at this moment there are no matching takers).

Finally, click the Create new offer for selling bitcoin button, bottom right.

Doing so will take you to..

Begin by selecting the payment account (which you should have created by following the earlier posts in this series).

This is where your fiat money will end up.

Then, fill an amount in "Amount of bitcoin to sell".

I recommend that your order is based on a distance/percentage from the market value (the "Percentage" button), instead of Fixed (*).

Finally, fill "Distance in % from market price" -- anything from 1% to 5% are good choices (in my opinion).

Click Next Step, which will take you to ...

(*) As long as you have your #bitsquare software open (by the way, a necessity, until your order is taken), the software will continuously adjust your order to stay within the percentage you chose.

(simply click the button as shown ..)

A popup will appear, with all the details of your offer.

Carefully review all the information to make sure it matches what you'd expect.

When you are sure, click "Confirm order for selling bitcoin", which will publish your offer in the network!

You can confirm the status of your open order by clicking Portfolio (top left). It will look something like this:

Step two - wait for order to be filled

Eventually (one would hope), or immediately if there was already a matching order in the book, someone will take your trade.

Remember, until your order is taken, you need to leave the #bitsquare software online.

Failure to do so will remove your order from the orderbook! (It will be added again once you come back online)
The software will notify you of this event.

(since this is your first trade using #bitsquare, it is fair to say that this is the most interesting trade in the world - for you)

Step three - confirm payment

Once your trading partner has sent the funds to the bank account you specified earlier in the tutorial, he will come back to the #bitsquare software and update the status of the trade, letting you know that the payment has been initiated on his side.

Once again, the software will notify you of this event:

Depending on the day of the week, the banks involved, and who knows what else, it could be a few days (assuming SEPA here) until you actually receive the money.

When you do, make sure that the following match what was shown to you in #bitsquare:

• Trading partner's name
• Reason for payment / reference

Then, click the Portfolio icon, and the Open trades tab found within.

Finally, click Confirm payment receipt -- the following popup will show.

Step four - cleanup

At this stage, you have your fiat currency in the bank, and your trading partner will have received the bitcoins that were being held until you confirmed receipt of the payment.

You want to move the security deposit back to your bitsquare wallet.

Simply click the button, as shown below:

For future reference, you can check the status of past trades, by clicking Portfolio, and then clicking the history tab.

Conclusions

We did it! Without recourse to a third party centralized exchange, you managed to transform your Steem Dollars into Bitcoin, and finally into fiat money sitting in your bank account.

All of this without giving away your privacy by having to submit your proof of residence and personal id, incidentally everything someone else needs to steal your identity..

And when the next #bitfinexit comes (and it will), you will be safe in the knowledge that you could not be further from the blast radius!

Coming up next

There will be a minority of users who is interested in assuring fiat-denominated profits and who realizes that keeping all of their eggs in one basket is a bad idea.

They also are not necessarily interested in moving back and forth between the legacy banking system and the cryptospace.

In the next article in this series, I will teach you how to use #bitsquare and #bitshares to park your profits in CHF, SGD, NZD, AUD, USD, and so on, without touching the banking system.

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Links

Decentralized Trading Guide

• Part 1: An introduction to Bitsquare
• Part 2: Installation and Configuration
• Part 3: Funding Your Wallet