So you want to buy Steem but don't know where to start? No problem! Simply access your wallet and click "Buy"! This will send you to Blocktrades where you'll get totally ripped off and might not even notice! Isn't that neat?

This is exactly what I did when I first got here and it's taken me 6 months to research a better method. I tried to write about this in my last post but that just turned into a wall of Origin Story text.

Fear is the mind killer.

Like so many others, when I started this journey I was afraid to leave Coinbase. What happens if I get hacked?! I'll lose all my money! What happens if I send my coins to the wrong address? GONE FOREVER!

Sometimes it's very nerve wracking just waiting for money to transfer from one place to another. Just yesterday I bought some Litecoin on Coinbase. I came back to my account after the limit-buy had executed and my money was gone! I was about to flip my shit until I realized a few seconds later that I probably just had to refresh the browser tab... yep there's my money... lol. That's not the first time that's happened, and it won't be the last.

I play competitive video games sometimes and I play poker. I can tell you first hand that dealing with crypto gives you the same feeling as what people describe as "ladder anxiety". Basically, just the thought of having to perform with maximum effort is enough to turn a lot of people away because they are afraid of fucking up. No one likes to look incompetent so the go-to Beta play is to just avoid situations like that.

I guarantee that this is one of the biggest barriers to entry to the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency. People want it but they are also afraid of it. Crypto-Anxiety is a real thing. The people I convince to invest in cryptocurrency would rather hand me cash, and trust me not to fuck them over, rather than figure it out themselves. This is a big reason why I have high hopes for the ERC-20 brokering shitcoin Genesis Vision.

Steem to the Rescue!

I didn't even know Steem was a cryptocurrency until like the 5th time I came here. I kept getting directed to Steemit from the Google searches I was doing on crypto research. Steem provided me a smooth transition from Coinbase. With three different private keys and account recovery I felt very safe using Steem to store my assets.

At first, I thought what other people thought when they came to Steemit. Just look at the whitepaper:

The actual distribution will depend upon the voting patterns of users, but we suspect that the vast majority of the rewards will be distributed to the most popular content.

Really? Do you really suspect? LOL our white paper is an embarrassing insult to intelligence. Lot's of people are sucked into the ridiculous pipe dream of proof-of-brain because of the lies of Steem marketing. Once I wrapped my head around Proof-of-stake I realized I would have to buy stake.

It didn't matter how much better my posts were than the ones on trending. I am not a social person. I'm not friendly and I'm not one to network. The only way I will be able to get a real share of the rewards pool is if I design useful apps alongside of the rest of the antisocial developers.

I knew Steem would crash so I waited till it hit $4.60. I forget how many coins I bought, but it wasn't much. I was still sure the price would go down farther but there is always that little FOMO voice in the back of your head telling you, you might miss out.

I bought the biggest chunks of my Steem at $2.60 and $1.60. $1.60 was that "hilarious" time that everyone was complaining about bots every other post and people were leaving the site in droves because reasons. I knew it was a great time to buy. Always buy when the tech is solid and morale is at an all time low.

It was during this time that I noticed Blocktrades wasn't giving me as much as I thought it should. And finally we made it to the Blocktrades coversation! This must be Origin Story Part 2.

Blocktrades is a Black Box

When you buy Steem from Blocktrades, you send them crypto and they send you Steem. Simple. I assumed that the fee for this service was negligible because they don't even tell you how much of a fee they are taking. Boy was I wrong. The fee is incredibly variable, but from my personal experience it's around 5%. I also looked at what other people on Steemit have experienced and 5% sounds about right. Five percent is a wholly unacceptable tax to charge to buy a cryptocurrency that touts zero transaction fees.

These are the main selling points of Steem:

1. No transaction fees
2. Fast
3. Scalable
4. Secure

When we direct our new user base to a site that charges them 5% we look like hypocritical jackass scammers. Does no one else see this?

Coinbase

At first I thought I was losing money from a combination of negative events. Maybe Coinbase was charging me a fee. Maybe the value of Litecoin had lost money in comparison to Steem in the time it took me to make the transaction. NOPE! It was pretty much just Blocktrades taking everything. Well fuck that.

Coinbase charges 0 fees. They don't charge you a fee to buy in. They don't charge you a fee to cash out. They don't even charge you a fee if you limit-buy. In other situations, the fee is 0.25% which is more than reasonable and 20 times less than the Blocktrades fee. Also, when I say Coinbase I mean GDAX, because they are linked, and Coinbase actually does gouge the new users that don't know any better. Unfortunately, Coinbase does not list Steem. This raises the question: "Ok, how should I actually buy Steem?"

Binance to the rescue!

So I've had a Binance account for a while because there were all those stories at one point talking about people paying for accounts. So many people were signing up at the same time not all of them were getting accounts so there was actually a demand to pay for free accounts at one point. Capitalism is amazing. Anyway, I've had this Binance account for a while but I've never used it because, not only was I afraid to branch out, but also I felt like I didn't really have enough money to diversify my holdings.

The first time I used Binance was to buy Golem coins. The second time I used it was to buy EOS. These were fairly painless experiences. Binance has even better trading fees than Coinbase.

https://support.binance.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000583311

Binance charges only 0.1% fee compared to GDAX's 0.25% fee. If you hold Binance ERC-20 coins that 0.1% fee gets cut in half for a year to 0.05%, making it five times better than GDAX. However, when you try to remove coins from the Binance platform they gouge you pretty hard. For my Golem and EOS withdrawals I got charged a flat fee of around $3.50.

Obviously, if you're dealing with big numbers a flat fee of $3.50 is a very small percentage. For me personally that was not the case but it was still much better than the 5% Blocktrades ninja tax.

I assumed that all the flat fees to take crypto off of Binance would be about $3.50, but I was very happily surprised to see that every coin has it's own custom fee.

https://www.binance.com/fees.html

Coin	Fee	$
Binance	1 BNB	$14
NEO	0 NEO	$0
Litecoin	0.01 LTC	$1.20
Tether	3.7 USDT	$3.70
EOS	0.3 EOS	$3.76
Golem	5.3 GNT	$3.29
Bitcoin	0.0005 BTC	$3.75
Ethereum	0.01 ETH	$5.79
IOTA	0.5 IOTA	$0.89
Nano	0.01 Nano	$0.04
Steem	0.01 Steem	$0.02

(LOL @ charging $14 to take Binance off of Binance)

INCREDIBLE! You can transfer Steem off of Binance for a flat fee of less than 3 cents! Not only that, but you can purchase Steem for only a 0.05% trading fee. I had to buy some Steem just to see if I wasn't losing my mind.

I bought 10 Steem on Binance and received 9.99 Steem. Success!

The trading fee for buying 10 Steem was only a penny's worth of Binance coin. Also, you can get crypto onto Binance with zero fees with Coinbase if you purchase that crypto with a limit order instead of "at market value" on GDAX.

When you're trading at a high enough volume (very low for Steem) the flat fee of 2 cents rounds down to 0%. This leaves the 0.05% Binance trading fee versus a 5% blocktrades fee. It costs 100 times more money to buy Steem with blocktrades than it does with Binance.

Seriously, boycott Blocktrades, because that is some predatory bull shit that makes this entire community look bad. I've paid over $100 in fees to Blocktrades. It would have been less than $2 with Binance.