Welcome to Part 4 of The Beginner's Guide to Steemit, a project seeking to demystify Steemit to brand new users and make joining the platform a seamless experience. If this is your first encounter with the Beginner's Guide, be sure to read previous installments:

Introduction
Part 1: Steemit Quick-Start Guide
Part 2: Logging In and Keeping Your Account Safe
Part 3: Steemit Currencies: STEEM, STEEM Power, and STEEM Dollars

This lesson will focus on how to manage your digital currencies within your Steemit account. Every Steemit account has a Wallet, which is where your digital currencies reside that you earn on Steemit. This lesson will help you to learn about all of the things that are possible from your Wallet page! Let's get started.

_{Image created by @ethandsmith using CC0 resources and Nexa Bold and Alegreya Sans fonts. Released under a CC0 1.0 Universal License.}

What You'll Learn:

How to Access Your Wallet
How to Perform Operations with STEEM, SP, and SBDs
- Transfer
- Buy and Sell
- Powering Up and Down
How to Convert other Digital Currencies to STEEM using Blocktrades

Your Wallet on Steemit

_{Image created by Goumbik. Used under a CC0 1.0 Universal License.}

As previously mentioned in this guide, your Steemit account is also a digital currency wallet. Similar to how we store our cash and credit cards in a physical wallet, digital currencies must be stored somewhere. This is one of the many reasons that it is important to keep your account safe. All of your earnings on Steemit will be stored in your Wallet on Steemit.com. If someone were to gain access to your account, they also gain access to your currencies. Note that any currencies stored in your account's Wallet are always as safe as your account keys. Without your account keys, no one can break into your Wallet.

Therefore, the Wallet is one of the most important pages within your Steemit account. From it, you can claim rewards, transfer currencies, exchange currencies, and many more operations. Once you begin earning rewards from your posts, you'll want to know everything that is possible from the Wallet page. This lesson seeks to unlock the secrets of your Wallet so you'll become an expert!

There are so many things you can do from the Wallet page of your account, so let's get right to it:

Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the wallet page on Steemit by going to

steemit.com/@yourusername/transfers

or by using the "Wallet" link in the drop down menu when you click your user avatar in the top right corner:

If you're brand new, you won't see much there at the moment except a small amount beside STEEM Power, and another amount below that in parentheses. The smaller amount is the amount of STEEM Power you own! We'll discuss STEEM Power in just a moment, but it ultimately determines how much your votes are worth! The amount in parentheses has been delegated to you in order to get your account off the ground. Delegations of STEEM Power will be covered in a later installment of this series. For now, just know that the amount in parentheses is yours to use at the moment, but cannot be directly converted into value by your account, and may be revoked later once your account grows.

You also have sections of your wallet dedicated to STEEM and STEEM Blockchain dollars. We discussed each of these currencies in the last installment, so be sure to review these if you need a refresher.

Wallet Operations

From your wallet page, you have the options to do all sorts of things. If you click around, you'll see options to send, power up, power down, exchange on the market, buy, sell, and transfer to savings. We'll talk about all of these functions in more detail in the following sections.

Claiming Post Rewards

However, you can't do any of these unless you have funds present in the wallet! Therefore, the first thing you need to know how to do is claim your rewards. We'll talk specifically about rewards, voting, and

Remember that rewards are paid out 7 days after your posts or comments are originally shared. When the time is up, the rewards do not automatically deposit into your Wallet, so you'll have to browse to your Wallet and claim your rewards. At the end of 7 days, head to your wallet page using the methods listed above, and if you have pending rewards, you'll see something like this:

Rewards are most commonly paid out as SBD and SP. If you selected the 50%/50% split for rewards when sharing a post, you'll receive both when your posts pay out. If you selected "Power Up 100%," the rewards will be entirely in SP. Click the "Redeem Rewards (Transfer to Balance)" button, and you'll notice that the rewards add to your current balance numbers below in the Wallet.

Now that you've got some tokens to work with, you can do many things with them from the Wallet page.

I'm going to walk you through all of the wallet operations for the three currencies. We'll start with STEEM, since it's the first on the list.

STEEM

Once you've accessed your wallet page, you can see small arrows beside each of the currencies. If you click on the one beside your STEEM balance,

Transfer

Clicking "Transfer" allows you to send STEEM to other users or to external exchanges.

Transferring to Another Steemit User

If you would like to send STEEM to another user on Steemit, the process is fairly straightforward. Simply click Transfer, and you'll see this appear:

Simply type the username you'd like to send the funds to in the "To:" field beside the @ symbol.

Next, type the amount you'd like to send to another user in the Amount field. There's a display that shows you your current balance of STEEM, and you are limited by that balance for how much you can send.

If you'd like to include a message to the recipient, place the message in the memo field. This will be a public memo that will appear on the recipient's wallet page (remember that the transfer amount will appear there also since the STEEM blockchain is transparent).

Finally, click "Submit." Sending STEEM will require you to enter your Private Active Key, so have it handy to complete the transfer.

That's all there is to it!

Transferring to an External Exchange

Once you've acquired some STEEM, you may desire to send the STEEM to another exchange to swap it for another digital currency or cash it out into your preferred fiat currency like USD or Euros.

This process will vary based on which exchange you use, and since exchanges might change their processes, this lesson will not seek to provide an exact guide for this process. However, if you are interested in learning more about specifically how to send funds to an exchange here are some other resources you may enjoy:

The process is fairly straightforward, but if you're new to digital currencies, you'll want to pay careful attention to these guides to ensure that you don't lose any of your STEEM.

Transfer to Savings

Every Steemit account has a savings account. Like typical bank savings accounts, when certain economic conditions are present, interest can be earned on savings. In your Wallet page, you can see the current interest rate listed beside "Savings." Transfers into savings are instant, while withdrawals take three days. Keep this in mind if you plan to move any STEEM (or SBD) to Savings.

If you decide to move some STEEM to Savings, select the "Transfer to Savings" option and you'll see:

Simply enter the amount you'd like to transfer and click "Submit."

Power Up

In the last lesson, we discussed how STEEM and STEEM Power are related. Converting STEEM into STEEM Power occurs via a process called "Powering Up." If you want to convert your STEEM to SP, select the "Power Up" option, and you'll see this:

Remember that while this process occurs instantaneously, it takes three months to convert SP back to STEEM, so be absolutely sure you want to power up before doing so.

Remember that powering up increases your SP value, which will increase the value of your votes on Steemit.

Buy

_{Image based on resources created by mohamed_hassan. Used under a CC0 1.0 Universal License.}

If you would like to buy STEEM and send it to your account to power up or otherwise, you may do so by clicking the "Buy" link. This will take you to Blocktrades, an exchange website that allows you to exchange other digital currencies like bitcoin or ethereum for STEEM very quickly and easily. If you already own some currencies and would like to convert them to STEEM, this is generally considered the easiest way.

If you want to be able to convert some of your US dollars or Euros or other fiat currencies to digital currencies, this requires using an exchange that accepts fiat currencies such as Coinbase (or GDAX), Changelly, or Bitstamp. These may not work for you depending on what region you are from, so we will address the fiat-to-STEEM conversions in

If you aren't planning to invest any of your money in STEEM, you won't need to concern yourself so much with this function, but if you are interested in converting other currencies into STEEM, here's a quick rundown of how to make it happen using Blocktrades:

Note: For those unfamiliar with digital currencies, it's worth noting that digital currencies are transferred using what are called addresses, which are generally alphanumeric strings of characters that identify unique wallets. On Steemit, your address is simply your username, but for Bitcoin and other tokens, addresses can look like this: 39WSorR1cZWa8Tyfnbp5uPQzP9hWRQB4F5. If you are unsure of how to send cryptocurrencies or generate or use addresses, check out this guide, consult the Help section of your exchange, or the documentation for other types of wallets.

Open and login to the exchange or wallet where your other digital currency resides. For example, if you want to convert Bitcoin to STEEM, open the location of your Bitcoin and have it ready.
Click "Buy" from your Steemit wallet.

You'll see something like this:

Note that your account will appear automatically populated in the "Address" field beside your Steemit avatar. Mine appears in the above screenshot.

Select the currency you want to exchange for STEEM.

Below the "Send" field, you'll see a drop down box that has various currencies you can choose from. In the above screenshot, it defaulted to ETH. Select this drop-down menu and select what currency you want to exchange. At the time of this lesson, Blocktrades supports exchanging Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitshares, Dogecoin, and DASH.

Type the amount of the currency you want to exchange below the "Send" field. You'll immediately see the amount of STEEM change below "Receive (estimated amount)." This is calculated based on the current prices, but may be different than what you see on other exchanges. From my personal experiences, this exchange rate is generally fair and at least comparable to using other exchanges.
Click "Get Deposit Address." An address will appear below the button.

Follow the instructions by returning to the wallet or exchange where your currency currently resides. Send the desired amount of currency to the address that was just generated. Send that amount to the address, and blocktrades will take care of the rest.

The time it takes to complete will depend on what currency you are using, but you can check on the status of the trade by registering for a Blocktrades account and looking at the Pending Transactions section.

Once the transaction has gone through, you'll see the funds appear in your Wallet on Steemit! You may now perform other wallet actions on those funds!

Sell

Clicking "Sell" opens Blocktrades just like "Buy," however STEEM will be selected on the right, and you'll have the option of selecting what currency you want to convert it to.

The key difference between Selling and Buying is that you'll need a deposit address for your wallet or exchange that you want to send the converted STEEM to instead of having Blocktrades generate an address for you.

Market

The last option you'll see when you click on your STEEM balance is "Market." This links you to Steemit's internal exchange where you can swap STEEM for SBD and vice versa. I'm going to explain this in detail in the next section under SBD because the process is similar, and it's more likely that new users will be using the market to exchanged SBD for STEEM instead of the other way around. That said, let's move down the wallet page.

STEEM Power

Unlike STEEM, there are only two options you'll see when you click on the small arrow beside your STEEM Power balance.

Power Down

As we discussed in the previous lesson, STEEM and STEEM Power are related through processes of Powering Up and Powering Down. We mentioned above that powering up STEEM is an instant process. Powering Down STEEM Power, however, takes significantly longer. When you choose "Power Down" from the options list, you'll see this:

Moving the slider will change the amount you wish to power down. The box below "Amount" will change based on the slider movement. Remember that powering down takes 13 weeks, over which you'll receive a payment each week equal to the total amount you select divided by 13. This amount will be added to your STEEM balance and you can use any of the options we talked about above to move your STEEM.

On the Power Down window, you'll also see an estimate of how much your weekly payout will be. You'll also notice a warning message stating "Leaving less than 5 STEEM POWER in your account is not recommended and can leave your account in an unusable state." Be sure to keep this in mind. We've not yet discussed the concept of bandwidth (we'll talk about it in the Voting lesson), but if your account has a very low STEEM Power balance, you won't be able to make posts, vote, or leave comments.

As a new user, you probably don't have to worry about powering down any time soon. It's generally best to try to grow your STEEM Power balance in order to increase your vote value.

Buy

You also have the option to directly buy STEEM Power. Clicking this link will take you to Blocktrades, where you'll see a screen that is very similar to what happens when you click "Buy" beneath your STEEM balance:

Note that instead of STEEM appearing below "Receive (estimated amount)," you'll see STEEM Power. If you wish to purchase STEEM Power directly, you may do so using this method. Follow the steps listed above in the Buy section below STEEM. The process is very similar and Blocktrades makes purchasing STEEM Power with other digital currencies very quick and easy.

Remember that purchasing STEEM Power directly will make it so that you cannot access the liquid value of your purchased STEEM Power without powering down. It might be advisable to just buy STEEM instead so you'll have more versatile options.