Making My First Investment in Crypto...
...and it's STEEM for the win! I sat out from buying into Bitcoin because I don't see the fundamental value of it, as much as I wish now obviously I had bought it when I first heard about it at $20 (no way I would have gone HODL all the way to here anyway) I still feel the same way. But I got to thinking about possible uses of the technology in the future, and a blockchain based social media site seemed like a brilliant idea. After a bit of research I found Steemit and after about a month here I am sold on the potential of this place to tokenize the internet. We create billions of dollars worth of data, interactions, and content every day, why should Mark Zuckerberg get all of the value created there? A decentralized platform where people are rewarded for their contributions and can directly contribute to the people creating the content they love? Sounds wonderful and it's about time this existed. Revolutionary things are happening here and I feel like one of the way I can contribute beyond just participating is actually buying into the system, so here I am!
Luckily I was looking over my Scottrade account and saw I still held two positions in some stocks I thought had great potential and still do (Mannkind and Organovo), but they have been flat or slowly losing value for a long time. STEEM is something that is early and has a ton of potential, so instead of just letting my money languish in those two stocks I sold them and used the proceeds to buy 2 LTC on Coinbase, and then used Blocktrades to convert to STEEM.
The process for someone entirely new to crypto is a bit daunting. There's no real direct way from what I have seen to directly buy STEEM for USD, so I opened an account on Coinbase first, mostly because they are well established at this point and ease of use. Was meh about the fees but since this isn't going to be a regular thing I'm ok with it and just wanted to get it done. The other massive pain in the ass was after buying my 2 LTC, I thought I was all set to go but it wouldn't let me complete the transaction without verifying my ID. So I installed the mobile app to do that and it just didn't seem to work, and gave no indication if it sent, if there was an error, or what. I ended up having to take pictures and then manually uploaded them to the website, the link to which is actually really hard to find on their website. It took something like 45 minutes to work out, so my overall experience with them was it was all nice and simple, until is wasn't. Overall it was a pretty meh experience, would love to hear if there are other exchanges that make it easier to exchange crypto for USD. Conversely Blocktrades was great and I would definitely use them to buy STEEM with other crypto again!
Thank you @cygon for making a transfer to me for an upvote of 1.34% on this post! Half of your bid goes to @budgets which funds growth projects for Steem like our top 25 posts on Steem! The other half helps holders of Steem power earn about 60% APR on a delegation to me! For help, will you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because I check my discord server daily? To learn more about Steem, will you please use http://steem.guide/ because this URL forwards to my most recently updated complete Steem tutorial?
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