My First Crypto Purchase! - Tales of a Downmarket Contrarian

One Week In

So, my Steemit account is barely one week old, but I've been diving in trying to learn as much as possible. One thing I'm pretty well convinced of is that I need to build my Steem Power and the most obvious way to do that is to just buy some!

Unfortunately, Amazon isn't selling crypto yet so these transactions are anything but straightforward. From what I've read, the path to buying Steem Power is to create an account at coinbase and buy some bitcoin (or a handful of others) then go to BlockTrades to convert the BTC to Steem Power.

The entire crypto market is correcting today so I thought I'd take advantage of the downturn and learn about this process. I knew I was walking blindly so I started with just $50 so I could get a feel for the process. A few minutes later, and my first buy was complete!

Normally I'd bite off much more than fifty bucks, but I had a feeling I didn't have the whole story and it turns out I was right. After the transactions is all wrapped up and everything is done, it was then that I finally learned my BTC won't be available for 7 days.

Now, this really surprised me because I've probably read at least a dozen posts talking about this process and not one mentioned this delay. Is this so obvious that nobody mentions it? Or did I take a wrong turn in the matrix? Beyond that, is my coinbase/BlockTrades approach the right process to follow?

Regardless, I'm just getting started and will be back for more!