The world of exchanges, banks and cryptocurrency can be daunting at first, if only because of the huge amount of different groups that are offering services to exchange and trade currency into any of the long list of currencies that exist. Since I am currently putting a lot of my time into Steemit, I need to take out a percentage of my Steem payout and convert them into British currency - so it has been important for me to find a way of doing that without incurring huge fees... And now I have!
I wrote a few days ago about the problems I had at that time with the Exchanges 'Bittrex' and 'Poloniex', which are two of the biggest exchanges that handle STEEM and SBDs. In the comments I was given some tips from other Steemians as to better options for converting STEEM into GBP£ and having now tested some of them, I can confirm that they are indeed very good options. :)
Introducing Uphold
Big shout to @kkro who pointed me to Uphold which is an online service that allows me to pay in Cryptocurrency (Currently Bitcoing, Litecoin and Ethereum) and to then withdraw it directly into my local bank account for a fee that is very small. I first converted my Steem, via @Blocktrades into Litecoin and then transferred that to Uphold and the final amount that ended up in my bank account was almost the same as the value of the Steem was measured to be by SteemDollar when I started the conversion process!
So, in other words, the conversion cost me only a negligable sum - probably less than 1% of the total or even 0.5%!
Compare that to what I was previously charged by Coinsbank to do the same thing - I lost well over 10% of the transaction when I used them! Shocking!
So there we go - a great improvement and a top tip for anyone wanting to exchange their money for fiat currency.
Big thanks to everyone who helped and provided tips, including @barrydutton for mentioning blocktrades and @kkro for uphold. Also worth a mention is @crypto-trail for pointing out Payza, who may accept STEEM and SBD directly - providing a similar service, but I haven't used Payza yet - so maybe I'll use them next time.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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We can do the same here in Australia with LivingRoomOfSatoshi.com.
https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com
Aha ok, thanks for the link for all of the 'upside down' people :)
We're not upside down.😳
hehe - oh ok, maybe it's me that's upside down then.. hmm
You have to come to Australia and see for yourself some day.👌
Once you come here, you won't want to go back.
I did visit about 15 years ago for a month - strangely, no-one was upside down.. maybe the earth is flat after all.. :)
Well I hope you enjoyed your stay. If you do decide to come back, don't go calling people "upside down."👌
This is great info, @ura-soul. I kind of had to learn how to convert to USD on my own, but I think I'm going to try this to circumvent the fees as well.
I started out sending my SBD to Bittrex, but had problems connecting my bank account to them. I had to then transfer to Coinbase losing fees from both transactions.
I recently figured out that I could send directly to Coinbase using Blocktrades. I thought I was doing well to figure out that much, but I think this info will help even better. Resteemed!
Thanks! You are welcome!
My last transaction was to Bittrex and then on to Uphold. I don't know anyone with direct experience of using Uphold in the US region, but I think it should be just fine.
Welp, I'll give it a try and see what happens. shrug
Really convenient cheers!!
You are welcome!
Thanx! Upvoted, resteemed and followed :)
Greetings! Thanks!
Well, it depends on where you live. For Germans it is not exactly the same method. In fact, the laws and regulations make it a lot harder for German citizens. One of the easier methods is that you basically transfer your BTC to https://www.bitcoin.de and from there you put it into an online bank account like with https://www.fidor.de/. These two sites have a partnership, or contract so using them in tandem makes it a little bit easier. From that bank you can basically pay your bills or do your shopping like with any other bank. The only real differences are that you have lower fees and they do not mind that the money moves from or to a crypto-currency like many other traditional banks. I really envy the Australians for their site https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com which makes this whole process a lot easier and faster.
Oh, I have a friend in Germany who needs to do this very soon - I had not ever heard that laws in Germany make the process any different. I'm not sure why the situation in Germany is different to elsewhere though, it sounds like you are doing the same thing that I have described above, but using different websites. Do you have a link that I can read to better understand the legislation you are referring to?
Great info Ura, thx buddy
You are welcome!
This post has received a 4.76 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @ura-soul.
Thanks! I've bookmarked your post for later when I will want to do this. Right now I've just started and I'm wishing to build up steem power.
Do you have any tips with this? To save it up to an amount and then power up or just keep powering up as you earn?
You are welcome. Do you mean 'Power Down' as opposed to 'Power up'? Powering up is the process of investing into Steemit and increasing your power in the system - whereas Powering down is the process of withdrawing your power from the system to enable you to spend it somewhere else.
No I want to have more power so my votes earn more for people when I vote. Right now I can vote and it gives $0.00, sometimes $0.01, would be nice to make a bigger difference than this!
Oh ok, you can either invest your own money from outside of Steemit into Steem Power (which can be done via your wallet page), or you can just set your new posts to have a payout of 100% Steem Power instead of 50% SP and 50% Steem Backed Dollars - which is the default.
Oh! Thanks! I've just checked that out, it's when you post a new article, you can change it there. I didn't even think what the 50%/50% was.
Great I'll do that for a while. Thanks for you reply and help!
Very useful. Thank you