Our First Crypto Purchase

As steem is our first venture into Crypto, something that neither of us have taken any notice of since you can’t hold(or melt) it. Well we decided to see how it all worked, After lots of research we moved the amount we wanted to withdraw to our Steem Savings, where it had to be held for 3 days. While we were waiting, lots of research to see how to get the Steem into a metal!
After setting up a coinbase wallet and doing a small test run, we felt ready to withdraw. Now many of you are probably laughing or confused, after our 3 day wait, we realized that we did not have to withdraw the Steem that way and that we could trade it out without waiting and obvious Newbie move, but a good learning experience, education is not always easy.
https://blockchain.wtf/2017/05/blog/meme/kip-hip-bitcoin/

Now we transferred the Steem to Coinbase and turned it into Bitcoin, something we swore we would never own, but it was pretty cool to see the wallet with some money in it. Ok, after lots of research we had decided we could get the best deal on Apmex with our bitcoin. Apmex had a $100 min. And Canadian Predators and or Birds of Prey Random Coins at $2.00 over spot. A good deal for us, we could get some good coins for our stack or if they were scratched or had milk spots we could melt them. Made it to the end of the checkout process to learn we couldn’t pay from coinbase. How frustrating, but thanks to google a few minutes later we are connected to Bitpay and ready to go.

We hit purchase and waited to see what would happen, according to Apmex there was a 10 minute window to confirm the transaction or it would be canceled, also thanks to Google we learned Bitcoin can take an hour to process. This was a little nerve racking, finally the Apmex system timed out, now did it go through or did it bounce back? Well according to our Bitpay 40 mins later it was confirmed and our Money was at Apmex. According to our Apmex account there was no record of our order. Next step, try the chat helpline but apparently at 11pm EST on a Saturday night there is no live chat. So it is send and email and wait until Monday to find out what happened. Now we are only talking a $100 bucks but we didn’t know where the money was or if we would get it back and that on principle alone is frustrating.
https://blog.sprinklebit.com/mt-gox-filed-bankruptcy-will-bitcoin-survive/

Fast Forward to Monday morning, placed a call to Apmex where a nice rep told me that there was no record on our order and we did not know where our money was, a couple of deep breaths and then he asked “what wallet did you pay with?” when we answered Bitpay he suddenly had a solution. Often if the confirmation times out the accounting and tech team have to recreate it and then it will all be fine. We sent a screen shot of our bitpay with the invoice number and waited, and waited 3 hours later after a voicemail and an email to them, we finally got an email back saying they had found everything, apparently we paid when Bitpay system had a small issue and they had many orders to recreate. Before the end of the day Monday we had our order number and confirmation, by Friday we had our coins.

5 beautiful Cougars in 999 fine Canadian Silver, needless to say we were very happy with our package, We put them into some cases we had and here they are:

a close up:

And another for reading this long story with a happy ending:

Finally , We wanted to take a moment to say that we have not participated in the bot discussions as we have only been here a few weeks, don’t completely understand it all and have not real earned a say in it. We however, do Support #Steemsilvergold and feel that it is a great community and Bot or no Bot we will continue to grow and support each other. Let's focus on the shiny and the rest will work itself out.
Thanks for reading and Happy Stacking!