Can Steem Dollars become real cash? - Part 1
A simple question at first sight. But nonetheless not easy to answer for a cryptocurrency newbie.
For those of you who don't know me: I'm very new to this whole cryptocurrency/blockchain technology. Only a couple of weeks of scratching the surface. I started mining gridcoin as you can read in my other stories and by doing so and reading around I ended up on steemit.
My surprise was great to have made over 70$ with my first two stories (a big thanks to @blocktrades and @vortac for supporting my initial steps and feeding the pig). I never intended to make any money and I thought this would only happen slowly, certainly not that soon. I have no need for the money but it got me interested to know how the link between cryptocurrencies and 'real' currencies works. So time to break the piggy bank and do some more cryptocurrency discoveries.
My local currency is Euro. How can I go from SBD to Euro? A bit reading around learned that a few steps are involved. First I will need to go from SBD to Bitcoin and then from Bitcoin to Euro. I also learned is that exchanges are a way to do it but also prone. A good intro as to why is given by @dutch here https://steemit.com/bitshares/@dutch/why-i-prefer-the-bitshares-dex-over-poloniex-bittrex-etc. This has become so much fun that by now I want to turn this into a 'big' experiment for the crypto newbie. I will try to convert part of my savings to Bitcoin, and then apart of that Bitcoin to Euro cash. I also want to convert a part of it to Gridcoin, which is currently my favorite coin. Either directly or with a Bitcoin step in-between.
I will be taking screenshots along the way and try to describe as good as possible how my journey goes. So if you are a newcomer just like me or are just interested in this experiment and what steps I take feel free to follow along
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STOPI exchanged some Steem the other day, needed some cash, and I used https://changelly.com/, their fee is good with only 0.5% and they had a good rate at the time. And its less steps.
But that is just to convert to Bitcoins. I use Localnitcoins to trade of my coins to local currency.
The biggest fee in that transfer (for 125 Steem) was actually the Bitcoin network, taking a massive 3.5% chunk, while Localbitcoins took another 1%.
I would like to find a good way to transfer steem to another altcoin to minimize the network fees, but there is difficult to find good places that take them with a quick and low fee transfer.
I used https://changelly.com/ because OpenLedger had disabled Steem deposits.
I read in a recent post of @blocktrades here that converting to ETH instead of to BTC is more efficient. For the exact reason you are mentioning.