Guide for new investors - How to buy STEEM

Two of my colleagues are very interested to join Steemit and invest in STEEM. One of the first questions was how to actually purchase STEEM after an account on Steemit has been opened. While there are some posts out there that cover the purchasing process, I thought it would be helpful to create a short to the point guide that hopefully will help my colleagues and any new investor who are interested to purchase STEEM.

Before I outline the steps in more detail the following image might help to see the big picture.

1. Your Bank

Your Bank only accepts FIAT currency like EUR, USD and so on. In order to purchase digital currencies you need to find a trusted parter that accepts your FIAT funds and converts it for you into digital currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and so on.

On the flip side, if you want to cash in your profits you need to exchange the digital currencies to EUR or USD first in order to be able to send it to your Bank. That is when Coinbase and Anycoin come to play (There are others but I have good experience and can recommend those).

2. Exchange FIAT to Crypto

Anycoin-direct.eu and Coinbase.com are reliable platforms that are used to exchange FIAT money into Digital Money (Cryptocurrencies). For example you open an account with one of these two, send a EUR amount to them and in exchange you get the equivalent digital currency amount (e.g. Litecoin, bitcoin) in return.

Unfortunately, currently both platforms do not offer STEEM, that is why we need to add further steps as outlined in the picture. Hopefully one day STEEM will be available at those platforms and in that case can be sent directly to your account on Steemit.com. For now the best option is to exchange your FIAT money into Litecoin or Dash since those have relatively low transaction costs compared to Bitcoin and Ether.

3. Exchange Litecoin for STEEM

OK, so to recap. You opened an account with Anycoin or Coinbase. You are prepared to send some money from your Bank to either one of them in exchange for Litecoin (or DASH). Good, if you got so far than you are most likely see a text field that ask you to fill in the Litecoin address? where do I get that from?!

There are still many people who use exchanges like Poloniex.com to exchange one cryptocurrency into STEEM.

A more convenient way in my opinion however is to use Changelly.com or Blocktrades.us to get Litecoin (in this example) exchanged on the fly to STEEM and than send to your steemit account.

So to answer the question, you will get the Litecoin address from either Blocktrades (see example image), Changelly or the particular exchange you use (like Poloniex, Bittrex and so on).

These exchanges basically expect to receive a certain Litecoin amount (in this example from Anycoin direct) and once received will exchange that amount into STEEM and send it directly to your Steemit account.

Please note that your Steemit username is also your Steem receive address (tarekadam in my case)

I hope this guide is helpful. Please let me know in case of questions.