Good afternoon Steemit family! I just wanted to do a quick step-by-step tutorial on how to use the market to convert your SBD rewards into Steem Power. This helps avoid the agonizingly brutal 3.5 days wait for a group of people who want it NOW!
Knowledge is Power
I have been on the platform for about a month and a half now and feel that my understanding of the platform is pretty solid at this point. This weekend, while acquiring some BTC at an ATM, I found a little trick to convert SBD to Steem (and than Steem to Steem Power if you desire) without having to wait the 3.5 days for it to convert. I've also found, that depending on the price of Steem and SBD at the time, you can actually get a little bit more than you would if you used the convert button. Getting a little extra will always depend on the direction Steem goes or would have gone, over the 3.5 day waiting period.
Execution is Crucial
The first thing you want to do, once you have some SBD to convert, is click the drop down arrow and instead of doing the normal step of hitting convert, click Market.
When you've selected Market a screen like this should show up. This tab is showing, in the table, the current buy and sell orders for Steem. If you have history in trading crypto currencies, precious metals or stocks, this probably looks familiar to you. An in-depth understanding of these numbers is not necessary though.
Next, you will click on your available SBD which is directly below the "total" field. This adds all the SBD in your account and calculates, based on the current price and current outstanding orders, how much Steem you will receive. If you had a lot of SBD and didn't want to use it all to buy Steem, just change the number in the "amount" field. When you have the amount of SBD you would like to spend, click "Buy Steem" and a message should pop up like the one shown below.
Although the message says the order has been placed, it is complete at this point as you can see if you look in your wallet.
You will notice, that with a reward of $0.42 on a comment, which pays out 50% SBD and 50% Steem Power, when we spent the 50% SBD, we received .213 SP while 50% Steem Power reward was .211 SP. Judging by that, you can see that sometimes it's better to receive 50/50 payouts, as you will end up with slightly more SP. This all depends on the price of Steem obvioisly.
Helpful?
So, in concluding, I hope this tutorial was able to help some of the newer users who don't like their SBD tied up for 3.5 days whole it converts. Maybe other minnows figured this out, but I hadn't until yesterday and figured I'd share with you guys. If you found this article helpful, please upvote and/or resteem if you think your followers could benefit from this as well. Please do not hesitate to comment below either as it's truly my favorite part of making a post like this. Thanks for reading!