Save money by trading SBD/STEEM in the Steemit Internal Market

I've been looking at a lot of users' wallets recently as I evaluate accounts for the Minnowbooster whitelist, and one particular pattern keeps popping up. It looks like this:

This is a record of a user trading SBD for STEEM on an external exchange, and it drives me a little bit nuts. I don't dislike Hive account@blocktrades; they're obviously a key player in the success of the platform, they're heavily invested, and supportive of the community. I don't want to take money away from them. But every time you do this you're paying them an exchange fee that you don't have to.

There's a better option: the Steemit internal market. There are two easy ways to get to it.

The internal market allows you to trade SBD for STEEM, or vice versa, with other users without paying a fee. It's only for trading between those two currencies - to trade into BTC or ETH or whatever you'll still have to go through an exchange, and that's where you should be giving Blocktrades your money.

When you first open it up it can be a little intimidating, but it's actually very simple. There's a lot of information here but I'm going to explain what you're looking at.

Let's start by ignoring everything above "BUY STEEM" and "SELL STEEM." The pretty visualizations can help people who want a good picture of the market as a whole, but we're just here to get a good price for our STEEM.

We're going to choose the side that corresponds to which direction we want to trade. Use the left side to trade SBD for STEEM, and the right side to go the other direction. If you want to be super-lazy, you can just put the amount you want to sell in the "Amount" field and hit the button. The price fields are automatically filled in so your order will be filled quickly, and you'll still get a much better price than going through an exchange.

Any buy order with a price above the sell order at the top of the list will fill immediately. Any sell order with a price below the buy order at the top of the list will fill immediately. You set the price just by changing the "Price" field on whichever form you're using.

If you're just a little bit patient, you can usually do even better. In this case we've got a really big order holding the top of the Sell side, and a fairly big order holding the top of the Buy side, so you'll want to put your order in to be ahead of them. But a Sell order put in at 1.1448 will probably fill quickly, and the same is true for a Buy order at 1.1444.

When you set your order it takes the currency you're selling out of your wallet, and when the order is filled the currency you're buying shows up in your wallet automatically.

At the time of this post, selling 1 STEEM would get you 1.088 SBD on Blocktrades, and in order to buy 1 STEEM you'd have to pay them 1.207 SBD. Compare to around 1.144 either way on the internal market and you can see this can make a pretty big difference in either direction.