My First Experience buying Steem outside of the Internal Market. My background is Corporate America, not Crypto. So, when I made a decision to purchase some Bitcoin, I asked how to go about it on SteemIt, but the advice wasn’t very clear to those of us who have never owned Steem before. (or at least me)
Being a hands on learner, I took the tiniest amount of money to learn the ropes. I decided on $100 dollars. I wasn’t excited to give out my Credit Card numbers, so I searched for a site that would accept paypal. Google led me to Paxful.com after doing a bit of due dilegence I put in an amount of money I wanted to spend. The site sorts for people who are selling and will accept your form of payment.
A seller contacted me via a chat on the Paxful site. He/She (pictures showed a woman) wanted a very specific picture of me, holding a sign.. With a date, and some verbiage she gave me. I took the selfie. She also wanted me to message her using a Facebook account with the same name. There seemed to be a middleman (brokerage account holding the money in escrow until we both agreed.) So, this seller sent me through some hoops to confirm my identity. Within a half an hour, I owned shiney new bitcoin. My $100 bid cost, $104 dollars, and resulted in $80 dollars worth of bitcoin.
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I then moved the coins to Bittrex and paid a fee to do so. I was able to trade my bitcoin for Steem on Bittrex. Now, how to import it into my Steem wallet? I looked up all my keys, and tried to withdraw… worried all of the time my money would be lost in Bitcoin wasteland. When I tried to create a transfer transaction I used my key. My transactions just sat, and sat … Turns out. I didn’t need my key Rather just my account name… whatsup. Once, I got that straightened out I was able to easily move my new Steem into my Steem account and power up. Mission accomplished.
I know those of you who have been using and trading bitcoin are laughing at me now, and I realize I made a lot of mistakes. I used a small amount of money, and went through the process to “learn” and I was okay with making some mistakes in order to learn. I wonder if there isn’t a way to make the process easier for those of us with little bitcoin experience in order to let smaller mainstream users “Power Up” more easily.
Please share your first experience with purchasing Bitcoin in the comments. Also, feel free to give advice to others in the comments!
