When you create posts, upvote someone or comment on a blog within steem, You can earn rewards. These rewards come in the form of Steem Power or Steem Dollars.

You can then use your steem power to make your vote worth more and have a bigger stake in the network.
Your Steem Dollars are liquid and can be used to buy things that accept steem dollars as a payment, trade for another cryptocurrency, sell for STEEM or sell for a fiat.

For new people to the crypto/blockchain world. Buying and selling can be scary and confusing, and since platforms like steemit don't really require you to know much about either blockchain or crypto, it can be hard to understand how you would use the market of this amazing platform.

Steem Market

Just before we jump into how the Steem market works, If you don't know what an exchange is, I recommend you read this link first.

https://www.learningblockchains.com/lessons/exchanging_coins/

This link will take you to my website, where I explain what an exchange is and how to use one. This is extremely important for the info I will be providing in this blog.

How to get to the steem market?

If you're using steemit, in your wallet, click on the drop-down arrow on either Steem or Steem dollars (SBD), then click on market.

For anybody not familiar with cryptocurrency trading, the Steem market can be a scary place. There's lots happing on the screen and it can just be so confusing.

buying STEEM with SBD

I'm going to start with how to use your SBD to buy STEEM.

Once you're on the marketplace screen. You will see an area that says BUY STEEM and an area that says SELL STEEM. In order to get STEEM you will need to buy it with your SBD.

Under BUY STEEM you are shown three fields.

• Price:

  • Price is the value that you want to buy your STEEM at. Typically you want to buy at a lower price in order to get the most out of your money. But If you just want to get it done quickly, you would just put in the last price which is located at the top of the market page.

• Amount:
  - The amount is the amount of STEEM you will receive based on the amount of SBD you have.

• Total:
  - Total is the amount of SBD you are willing to spend in order to buy STEEM.

In the above photo, you can see below the labels there are two green words, Available and Lowest ask.

• Available:
  - Is the amount of SBD you have in your wallet.

• Lowest ask
  - Is the lowest ask someone has placed on the market place in to buy at.

If you click on Lowest ask it will place the lowest ask price into the price label and if you click available it will place all of your SBD into the TOTAL label. This will then show you the amount of STEEM that you will get upon purchase in the Amount label.

Once you are happy with the details, Click Buy STEEM this will exchange your SBD for STEEM and place the STEEM into your wallet! YAY now you know how to buy STEEM.

Selling STEEM

Selling STEEM in the marketplace works exactly the same way as buying STEEM.

However, in this step, you will be selling STEEM and buying SBD.
Once again once you have sold the STEEM for SBD it will appear in your wallet.

Selling SBD for Crypto or Fiat

Only SBD can be sold for another currency, Steem and STEEM power are specifically for the steem blockchain and as such can only be used within steem its self. SBD however, can be sold for other cryptos or FIat.

To do this you will need to go to your wallet and click the drop-down arrow and click sell.

This will then take you to blockTraders.

Once you are here you can select Steem or SBD by clicking on the drop-down box.

From here you can then trade it for a cryptocurrency of choice, Then send that to your exchange of choice. Once you have done that you will have exchanged your STEEM or SBD for a new crypto.

In order to get Fiat, for now at least, you will need to exchange your STEEM or SBD for a crypto of choice and then sell that crypto for Fiat.

A few extra things about the marketplace

Below BUY STEEM and SELL STEEM you will see three boxes, Buy Orders, Sell orders and Trade history.
Below those you will see Open Orders. Here is a quick explanation of what they are.

• Buy Orders:
  - Buy orders show you the most recent buy orders people have placed on the market.

• Sell Orders:
  - Sell orders will show the most recent Sell orders people have placed on the market.

• Trade history:
  - Trade history will show the most recent trades people have done on the market.

• Open Orders:
  - Open orders are your orders that you have placed. Either Buy or Sell. From here you can actually cancel your order if you're quick enough.

Summary

In this blog, I showed how to buy and sell STEEM and SBD using the marketplace. I went over what the different labels are and what they do. I then explained a few extra things about the marketplace, such as buy orders, sell orders, trade history and open orders.

As always thanks for reading!