I'm A Crypto Noob - And I Just Paid My First Bill With Steem (ish)!

And I'm here to tell you that it is EASY!

Today I capitalised on the pumped price of SBD/STEEM to pay my overdue phone bill ($225) that I realistically wouldn't have been able to pay if it weren't for the steem blockchain. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've hit the wall and my phone/internet would have been cut off for good within a month or so. But thanks to the steem blockchain, steemit, chainbb etc, I've just completed my first ever cryptocurrency to fiat conversion. This is all very exciting. :)

As a total cryptocurrency noob, I've been putting off dealing with what I thought was the scary problem of getting fiat money out of the steem platform. It's been sitting in the 'too hard' basket for months now. But with the rising price of steem/sbd and my impending internet-less existence, I thought I really need to capitalise on the high prices to pay that bill.

After doing a few searches, I thought I'd ask some Aussies at #teamaustralia what my options were. The Aussie witness @ausbitbank pointed me to an awesome site that some of my fellow noobs might not have heard of. It's called livingroomofsatoshi, named after my mate Bruce who is actually the creator of bitcoin*. This site allows you to send your Steem (or a host of other cryptos) to them and they can either pay fiat into your bank account, or the option that I used - BPay your bill.

They don't nominally charge you a fee or commission. They state that they make their profit via "currency spread". I don't actually know what that is, but I suspect it's utilising differential currency rates between groups of currencies and/or exchanges to make a lot of small trades for good profit. Either that or they just give you a slightly lower rate than if you go via the exchanges yourself. In any case, it's the simplicity of ease that is the great attraction of this site.

When I tried to pay my bill with STEEM, they stated that it was not possible at this moment to use STEEM. No further explanation was given, but I suspect it's due to the volatility and high price of STEEM at the moment (over US$3 at the exchanges).

So my next option was to use an exchange and crypto wallet. Ausbitbank suggested Bittrex exchange and Jaxx wallet. Unfortunately Bittrex isn't accepting new accounts at the moment, due to too much demand on their servers. So the helpful folks at #teamaustralia suggested I try Blocktrades. @Blocktrades is a witness here on the steem blockchain, and is an active member of the community. The process via Blocktrades couldn't be simpler.

Just select the currency you want to send to it (STEEM, in my case), and the currency you'd like it converted into (Litecoin, in my case). Then just add your receive address.... HOLD ON! What's a "receive address?", the noobs are shouting. That's just the address of your cryptocurrency wallet. In my case, I chose Jaxx on the recommendation of ausbitbank, and it couldn't have been simpler. It's essentially a two click install and that's it. All I have to do is click on 'Litecoin' in my wallet software and it tells me my receive address. It's just a string of letters and numbers. Cut and paste that, and then Blocktrades gives you clear and precise instructions on how to send your STEEM to the site for conversion. No need to log in or have an account. It couldn't be simpler.

Less than a minute later Blocktrades had converted my STEEM into Litecoin. Now all I had to do was pop back over to livingroomofsatoshi and select Litecoin as the currency and then enter my phone bill details. Literally a couple of seconds later the Litecoin had been transferred out of my wallet and my bill had been paid.

I'M NO LONGER A CRYPTO NOOB!! And verily did'th they rejoice in #teamaustralia that ye olde revo would stop asking so many questions!

And that, my friends, is it. Actually, there's one more thing to say... I'm now a HODLER of about a hundred bucks of Litecoin. Sources have told me this coin is going to the moon, nay, Uranus! So I'm hodling to see what happens. Because, why not? If I ever need to offload them, the process couldn't be simpler.

So fear not, noobs. If you feel the need to take a bit of crypto out of steem and convert it to fiat, it's not such a scary process after all. Just don't buy bitcoin with it. In my extensive 15 minutes of cryptocurrency trading experience, I can say definitively that it's heading for a downturn. You heard it hear first! (Actually, you've probably heard it non-stop for the last 8 years in the mainstream media...)

^{* - Bruce may or may not be the creator of bitcoin...}