Okay so I finally did it and bought an actual real object with my Steemit earnings. It wasn't a Panasonic TZ camera as I planned. Although I have the funds for that already, I got the Camera as a birthday present, so I just purchased a nice little case for it.
The actual process of buying something in Amazon with my Steemit earnings, turned out to be surprisingly simple. I have a Spectrocoin wallet (disclosure: this link is my Spectrocoin referral link, so if you plan to open a Spectrocoin account anyway, I’d appreciate it if you’d use this link). I used Blocktrades to exchange some SBD to Bitcoins and send them to my Spectrocoin wallet, by following this procedure, and then I used Spectrocoin's built in vouchers purchase feature to buy an Amazon voucher. It was all straightforward and fast. I must say that it really feels great to be able to purchase something - a real object, so directly with what I earned out of my writing, without having employers or banks involved. But then I hit the good old real world again.
I reclaimed my voucher into my Amazon account, and then went to look for a case for my TZ camera. It turned out that I had to do that beforehand. If I did, I would discover that most of my favorite options do not ship to Israel. You see, because the combination of complicated custom regulations and the terrible service of the Israeli package mail, many Amazon retailers do not ship their products to Israel, and those who do, charge quite allot for shipping and custom handling. I ended up having to add $8 for a $10 case, while paying $12.5 with my voucher and charging the rest on my credit card. But still I am glad I did it.
So I guess this story is just typical of the current state of things where the cryptocurrency future hits the wall of the still conventional system. Now, I know that some of you think that the old system just has to go and clear way to a brave new world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, but I don’t think so. I don’t think the old system will go all at once. I believe that to change the system, you got to use the system. Change will come gradually as people will use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, more and more to buy real things. So you can aid the revolution by simply doing that every once in awhile. Buy yourself a little something in shops the accept crypto. Make them less and less a fringe phenomena. It really depends on us.