Yesterday I received a pretty nice payment thanks to everyone here on #steemit. I have to admit I was getting a little bit skeptical about if this thing was actually real or not. But then I wrote something I am passionate about and BAM! I received a nice compensation for my effort. So since that was my first really nice payment I ended up telling my brother about steemit and tried to convince him to sign up. He works for a conservation group in Nova Scotia, Canada and is always posting cool things to Facebook. I told him he had the potential to make a bit of money through steemit instead of just getting the "likes" through Facebook with no real compensation.
So far he has been a little skeptical with his response. He says he was reading that you can't actually spend crypto-currency on anything unless it's online or unless the store takes that as a payment and wasn't quite sure where the money came from. Like most people in this world, he didn't think it was real money.
So I set out to prove him wrong.
I first started by trying to find out how to transfer my money to Bittrex. This wasn't really that hard at all. Probably the easiest part of the whole experience. Just transfer what you want from your Steem Dollars using the memo given to you on the Bittrex site. After that it took me a little while to figure out how to convert the Steem into Bitcoin. It wasn't a hair pulling experience like some of the steps after, but I had to do some searching to find a Steemit post to guide me through it. I up-voted that of course.
Then next challenge was to find a way to convert the bitcoin into fiat money.
It was a little frustrating for me to get this next part done. I had to find a site that would work in Canada. At first I found a good post about getting a debit card from Wirex. They have what seems to be a half descent app that I could order either a virtual debit card or a physical one and top that up whenever I wanted. After a few minutes of playing with the site I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it work in Canada. It was only saying USD, EUR, and GPB so I wasn't sure about CAD. I ended up looking at a few other sites but they all wanted to do direct deposit and they wanted a lot of information about my bank. Not something I have readily available anymore since everything is paperless now.
So eventually I ended up back on Wirex. I did some digging and found that they do indeed deal with Canada, just not in Canadian funds. I went back to the steemit post about Wirex and followed the instructions. I had almost made it through but was stuck waiting for the transfer from Bittrex to Wirex for a little while. I ended up checking my email while I was waiting and to my surprise there was a transfer verification email waiting for me from Bittrex. Once that was finished it went through within a minute or two. After that is was a breeze.
I ended up putting $75 USD on the debit card which, right now works out to $97.84 CAD. Pretty close to the 100 Steem Dollars I initially transferred considering the few fees I paid for the transfers and the debit card.
It all seemed legit, but could I actually buy something?
I was pretty satisfied at this point. But I had to continue and buy something with this money just to finish it off. I ended up buying a new butane stove and kettle from amazon. This little stove will go great on my sailboat just for making coffee or making scrambled eggs in the morning. And once I added the debit card amazon asked me if I wanted my order calculated in USD which worked out perfectly.
Now that my order is on the way, it is safe to say that Steemit is completely legitimate. Although it seems like I lost about $25 dollars in the conversion, I'm not exactly sure what the Steem Dollar is worth at the moment. I'll clearly be doing some more reading up on this and not going to just sell my Steem for the sake of having it in cash. It will be way more valuable as Steem when this thing takes off with the zombies like Pokemon Go.