"Can you help me buy some #STEEM?"

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I am @ecoinstant, and I came to #steem two years ago from the webhosting side. My wife and I were attempting to do something interesting and important with our lives, and I had just spent several years of hobby time learning how to work with wordpress blogs.

I found in #STEEM more than just a simpler place to host my content, but a community of different, weird and wonderful people. There were several major niches, including homesteaders, and I fit right in.

There were a lot of devs, but also a lot of normies. I brought my mom and great fun was had.

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From a web hosting perspective - look what STEEM has helped us create.


A big part of the culture of #STEEM was helping other people out. But offering what we could, and thankfully receiving what was offered, pockets of brilliant, loving community sprouted and flourished.

My mom's special skill is making people smile. It often seems like my skills are explaining complicated #STEEM jargon and concepts and helping people buy #STEEM.

I have done it from the beginning because buying #STEEM is hard, has always been hard, for normies. So I helped. I came from a more technical side and was learning about cryptocurrencies, wallets and exchanges.

I also learned how to help. There are things that brokers do to insure that they don't lose money. I now do these things, even though this isn't a job for me, I just can't help people if I lose money myself everytime.


THE PROCESS

In order to turn US dollars, ideally in the digital paypal form, into #STEEM, I go through a very circuitous route. Coinbase allows me to sell cryptocurrency to paypal, but hasn't re-enabled buying from paypal, so first I must transfer the money to my bank account. This takes 1-3 business days and is free.

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With Paypal I learned how user language settings get overridden by regional language settings

Once the money shows up in my bank, I can load it up to Coinbase since I have connected my bank account. I needed more information to do that than I had, but after 2 quick emails with my banker I was able to get this verified last year after Coinbase changed its PayPal treatment.

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BUT! Never actually do it this way, its a trap for noobies, thanks coinbase. What you really should do is buy USDC, a coin pegged to the dollar, and then trade that against BTC on coinbasePro, which actually lets you set buys and sells, or take the market price without a GIANT 3-6% bite from coinbase.

Transfering between coinbase and coinbasePRO is something you actually have to manually do, but it takes just 10 seconds and doesn't cost anything.

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So now you can ladder or direct buy into bitcoin, and you have your BTC! All you have to do now is....wait 5 days.

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Need to send instantly? Sign your soul over to us!


We are surely over 1 week in at this point, and its time to send our BTC over to an exchange to trade for steem. I currently use Bittrex, and Binance is another popular one. You'll need to have created an account, sent in your personal information and selfies and waited for verification.

Now we can trade....again!

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As you can see on the two week chart, STEEM-BTC is volatile, and I never like taking the daily price unless its in the lower end of the current range. As we all know, cryptocurrency is a volatile asset, and you can almost always get a better price by making a buy order instead of taking the spread.

Once your buys hit, you can withdraw to any STEEM account by selecting doesn't require memo on bittrex, and confirming through email and the 2FA you have set up. Once the exchange gets to processing your order (bittrex has usually been really fast) you now have #STEEM in your account!


Since this process can take up to 2 weeks, and more if you don't already have all of the accounts in place, I generally consider this onerous. In that way, I normally do not think twice when people ask me for help....this is hard!

What I cannot do is take your money and give you my #STEEM. By the time I turn that money back into STEEM, who knows what price I might get or how many STEEM I might manage to get back?

So what I do is keep little pockets of money along the way, ready to pass the baton. If you give me 50 dollars, I'll give you 50 dollars of steem, buy 50 dollars of steem with bitcoin and buy 50 dollars of bitcoin with dollars, all in the same hour. At the end of all the various waiting periods, I am right back where I started.

It works very well, for small amounts.


Yesterday a friend asked me about getting 3000 steem to take his tribe to the next level. Its under $500 US dollars, but its too much for me to handle. I thought I would ask some people for help. I didn't get the response I expected.

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Of course this attitude is not all that surprising, to a certain extent techie people have always had a bit of this for normies, and I am no exception. Its hard to conceptualize someone not knowing what you actively know, its very psychological.

Part of the reason I outlined the process above was to remember if it was easy or not. I think not.


So, I went over to a DeFi community project, @spinvest - who organize a monthly paypal group buyin for SPI, one step further than STEEM, but basically the same process. I figured, since they did MORE work, once a month, maybe they could help this guy and just stop at STEEM, not turn the STEEM into SPI.

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Again, I was surprised by the response. How will he run a community without being able to buy bitcoin? He'll find a broker. I have helped several community leaders power up through 2018 and 2019 - that's what brokers do.


Along with a general discontent around free downvotes, auto-downvotes, bent curves and blockchain policing, I am starting to notice that #steem is not so full of the same helpful, friendly community as it once was. Have we become just become jaded? Or have we run the good ones out of town?


I'll leave you all with a quote from @mykos:

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I hope this information was helpful to someone; feel free to share or contact me on discord @ecoinstant#9078.



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24 comments
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Hi @ecoinstant, a free $trendotoken from the TULIP Mania Game!
Round 3 will start soon and full details will follow. Thanks for playing!

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Hi @ecoinstant, a modest tip of appreciation:
$trendotoken
Thanks!

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A bonus $trendotoken tip from ONECENT!
Also consider MAPR fund and MAXUV vote bonds too.
MAP Steem FinTech: growing your STEEM without SP.

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Try Lykke, Swiss exchange but they do usd, I wire a bit every month, buy Btc and send to binace for steem, takes as long as the first wire transfer and 1 hour on top

Posted using Partiko iOS

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we are google worthy LOLLL

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We totally are! STEEM is very powerful with google in general.

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(Edited)

Excellent post: People on steem need to learn what Over-the-counter trading and brokering is.

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Hey @ecoinstant!
Wow, I didn't know you did all this brokerage thing. Awesome of you to help people out.
As for myself, I got fed up with exchanges, especially coinbase. They were never particularly user friendly, but ever since they started asking for your passport, selfie, etc. (which lots of times didn't even pass, for whatever reason), AND make you wait, AND take a chunk out your transactions, I decided to screw them. There is a Bitcoin ATM not too far from here, and even though they take somewhere around 5% the peso bills I feed into it arrive instantly in my wallet as BTC. Then I just use Blocktrades to buy Steem. I used to like the idea of what you're describing: using the market's volatility to make buy orders and wait for the dip... but all this rigmarole takes all the fun out of it.

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As a member of the @Council - Community Curator Service, this post has received a 100.00% upvote.

Members of the community can all chip in to Power UP. Become a member, delegate 10 or more Steem Power (SP) to @Council to receive upvote and resteem. Here's the link to delegate https://on.king.net/council10sp it will redirect to Steem Connect for a secure connection. We share the Steem Power of all members that delegate to Community Curator Service, sharing our SP for a stronger upvote.

Thank you.
Project Powered by Steemians

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The responses are kind of sad honestly. Would expect people to be more helpful.

Can't personally help out, but completely understand why someone would want to purchase directly vs messing with the exchanges. I know that @fitinfun sells some steem sometimes to cover bills. Not sure if she is looking to sell any right now, but might be someone to chat with.

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Hi @pifc and @ecoinstant. Yes I do sell steem for fiat and have that sent to my paypal or my friend's bank here in Malaysia. I cannot have an account in this country due to my visa type.

You sent the discord connection, but for some reason it does not work. My suggestion is that the person needing steem do a post of their situation so everyone can see who they are and their need etc. As soon as I did a post like that a couple of years ago, I got all kinds of help.

In the teammalaysia discord we have a room for transactions like this. So everyone knows everyone and we don't get ripped off, But in absence of that, somehow you need to prove you are on the up and up.

Like you, I agree we can all help each other for no fees inside of STEEM. But if you are asking the average American to help individually, the answer will be no. They have no trust of anyone regardless of the situation because - fear. So glad I left the place :)

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a) that's awesome of you to help people. It can be very overwhelming for the normies (hi, I'm a normie!)!
b) I have sold Steem for cash directly through Paypal with a couple of other Steemians who wanted to power up when I needed money for bills. This exchange is of course dependent on me knowing/trusting them somewhat, and that it's never a large amount of Steem from my end. I'd like to power up too but kitties gotta eat and I'm poor, so I only sell when I really need the cash.
If you'd like to be one of the people I message when I need to do this, I'd be happy to sell it to you rather than lose a few bucks in fees. Just let me know and I'll message you on Discord to see if you're buying when I need to sell a bit. :)

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I think we have run a lot of the good ones out of town...

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