I read about Bitcoin soon after it was announced in 2009 and then became very interested in it a year or so after that. At the time, I didn't have much money and decided to focus on building my local business and to maybe get into Bitcoin later...
Big Mistake!
I'm sure many people have a similar story. About how they wished they would have got in on Bitcoin earlier. That's my story, too.
From the encouragement of a friend, I started to educate myself more about crypto-currencies. I knew about Bitcoin, but I didn't understand it. I spent about three weeks of intense reading almost every evening. I found Steemit, signed up in June 2017. Kept reading. Bought some Litecoin and used that to buy Steem. Powered up. Wrote some posts.
My introduceyourself post did really well and I ended up keeping some of the payout in Steem for a while.
Now that the Bitcoin hardfork is over, I decided it's time.
Time to get some Bitcoin!
I've used 
- How To Trade STEEM DOLLARS For BITCOIN - video by
A small purchase with 10 of the Steem I had earned from my post. I read through the instructions on Blocktrades and got the receiving address from the Electrum BTC wallet that I just set up. Then used the Steemit interface to send
After the cut that Blocktrades took, I ended up with what is now a little over $11 USD worth of Bitcoin. You can see that the unit is in mBTC instead of BTC in the Electrum wallet. Maybe 3.40659 mBTC is easier to express than 0.00340659 BTC.
It's a small thing, I know. Most of you crypto-currency veterans do this kind of thing all the time. But I feel really good about it and I'm sure that there are a lot of people here on Steemit who haven't done anything with Bitcoin yet, but hope to from what they earn here. Maybe this can serve as an informative inspiration.
I'm grateful for the opportunity and for the people who generously upvoted my first post.