Now that it takes only three months to completely power down an account, it'll be much quicker to switch over everything. As to buying Bitcoin, there are tons of options available to you in the US. I can't attest which service is the best, so some research about it would be great.
Bitcoin has been breaking tons of records as of late, so it's a very steep entry. $9805/BTC last I checked. But, what you can do is to use your STEEM to buy other altcoins and hope that they shoot up. I use Bittrex as a centralized exchange and Bitshares as my decentralized one. The difference between them is that I own all my wallets for the latter, but the former has tons more volume. It's free to sign up an account for both, so if you have time to spare, you could read up on them.
Clearly I will need to read up on them since I don't even know what your talking about when you speak of centralized and decentralized :)
I was told that I could buy even just a share of a bitcoin, so that was my thought. But, if I have to powerdown for 3 months before I can use my steem to buy a bitcoin then I'm not sure there is much of a point in going that direction :/ Hmm, lots to think about and read up on.
Haha! The TLDR version of it is what I stated. Think of centralized as you're leaving your money in a bank, as opposed to decentralized where you're leaving your money in a piggy bank. Wait, that's not a great example, but it brings home the point about ownership. If the bank is closed, you won't have access to your money, right? But, you still have access to your piggy bank anytime. That is, as long as you have the private key to it.
Steemit itself is decentralized, spread across different servers. So, even if some servers are down, Steemit would still function because there are different servers located elsewhere in the world still functioning.
You could buy BTC directly with your USD though, so if you want to get in now, that's the only option. 1 BTC is too much now. Heck, I'm only trading 0.0X BTC at this point haha!
yeah that all makes sense. That .0X you own might blossom quite handsomely though....
Sadly, it doesn't last that long because once I had it I immediately bought different altcoins with it >.< One of my biggest regret when BTC was still below 2k
ahhh :( that is unfortunate, but you can't really blame yourself, you don't know the future!