As many people have been doing, I've powered down my Steemit account
But unlike many people, I've been actively converting my crypto to Fiat rather than to Hive. To be more precise, I've been converting my crypto to Australian dollars.
Why, you ask?
I have my reasons:
- Firstly, I've never done it before. So I was curious to see how easy it is. Not only have I never bought a cryptocurrency using Fiat. But I had never converted crypto to Fiat. And because of that, my wife never took my dabbling in the cryptocurrencies seriously.
- I needed the money. My finances have been a little strained in recent months and I saw an opportunity to get ahead. So, while Steem was constantly fluctuating in price I converted my Steem to Bitcoin and then to Fiat.
- I wasn't spending any significant time on the Steemit platform and unsure if I would contribute meaningfully to the Hive platform. So bailing out entirely seemed to make more sense at the time.
If you're curious, I used Living Room of Satoshito convert my Bitcoin to Australian dollars. It's a very simple platform to use and, so far, has been very reliable with funds paid into my bank account within a couple of days.
What did I get for my conversion?
As it currently stands, I've managed to pull more than $2000 out of the platform. This probably seems like pocket money to many people here, however one thing needs to be kept in mind here: I never bought any cryptocurrencies, and more importantly, all of my crypto holdings started with Steem. While I have held a wide range of currencies, and still hold a few today, they were all bought using Steem.
And the Aus dollars? What have you used it for?
This is a good question, my original plan was to use it to buy an iPad Pro so that I could re-commence with my photo editing again and do some more blogging after work. My laptop is getting slightly annoying to use so purchasing an iPad sounded like a good idea.
However, frustratingly, my credit card was used fraudulently, and I had to cancel it. At the time that the card was being cancelled the bank employee said that I would need to make a payment to avoid a late payment fee while a replacement card was generated. I looked at the balance, and the amount of funds that I had converted to Fiat from Steem, and realised they were the same figure.
So I paid out my credit card in full...
Exciting hey? I know.... What a boring way to use my Steemit earnings... I was a little sad at the occurrence as well.
But it isn't all boring outcomes
The exciting thing about all of this? My wife has actually realised the potential of platforms such as this for the first time ever. I've been dabbling in this space for close to 3 years now. And this is the first time that my wife has ever truly appreciated the hard work that I have put in, creating content on Steemit and Hive.
What's even more interesting is that she's actually saying now that she wished she made use of the account that I created for her back when I first started writing on Steemit. And she may even start posting her own creations on here. And this is excellent, she's much more talented than I am. So, in theory, her content should do much better than mine.
The reality is that for your average person out there, cryptocurrencies still seem like a scam, or fake, or a pipe dream. But as I demonstrated to my wife this week, a person can turn a $2000 credit card debt into a $0 credit card debt by creating little pieces of content on the Steem blockchain. That's very real. That's a very real outcome.
So while I may have missed a bit of a bull run with Bitcoin hitting $8000 US today, I still managed to save paying 20% interest on my credit card debt and, while I was at it, showed my wife that cryptocurrencies can in fact be used for real world purposes.
So I'm happy with this outcome.
Do you use Brave Browser? I finally traded my BAT tokens for fiat. Turns out it works! Use my referral link if you haven’t used Brave already: https://brave.com/hho814
I'll give it a shot :)
I have it on my iPhone but never downloaded it onto my laptop.
The resistance to getting people to use Brave is incredible. I have friends in all layers of the tech industry and only a handful dabble in crypto... and none of them have tried Brave Browser. Meanwhile, I've earned $120 in BAT just browsing the Internet anonymously.
I can't not use Brave at the moment... YouTube is absolutely unwatchable without it.
Is it because there was at least one article that said it was something that had been compromised by the big scary evil government?
Please don't ask me to find it I have a bad habit of reading a lot of things and not making note of what I read to cite or pass on XD
Or they just prefer something about their current browsers? Like I really tried to use Brave as my main browser for a while but there were too many tiny little ux things that annoyed me personally (I don't think they would be too much of an issue if at all for other people) so Firefox remains my main browser. I do however use Brave when I need to use a different browser for something (usually to be not logged in or for someone else to log in without me logging out) or when I'm doing online shopping or bookings and NoScript is just that little bit too good at its job and somehow managed to scrape together a bit of bat just from that.
Actually, I think it mostly comes down to a combination of the following:
It took me a while to get over my crypto fears myself... I joined Hive when it was Steemit as a first step into crypto. Probably should have started slower. After getting used to the whole idea of crypto, I was hooked.
There's no way the legacy banking industry is going to survive without transitioning over to blockchain. It's just too easy.
If you've got friend in Country C who needs money, just send whatever amount you want for 4 cents. It's ridiculously easy and cheap.
Anyway... Probably should have made this a post of my own.
Oh well... Maybe I think better in comment format.
If they're fearing reprisal from current employers for using a different browser there is something seriously wrong with that employer and perhaps seeking a new job should be in the near future XD
The other things are definitely things.
You can still write a post about it if you so felt the inclination but I don't see how having people who can long form comment can possibly be a bad thing ;D
or perhaps I'm just saying that because I can leave some essays when I feel like it x_x lol
It's exhilarating to witness the light switch go on in somebody's head like that, isn't it. I'm betting your wife, like nearly everyone else, used mainstream social media all these years when she could've been using Steem instead.
The world literally pays people for being early adopters in this age. The reality is you get paid in hard currency for taking part in something completely novel like blockchain-based social media. This is only possible because most people, when the concept is introduced to them, choose to drag their feet. It's mind blowing but that's the way it is.
My wife is a massive user of Instagram and the like. She never understood why I spent so much time on Steemit. I suppose she kind of understands now.
The thing is, my wife is an artist and recently started creating her own music. So she'd do very well here I think.
Has she been able to turn her Instagram presence into an income stream?
No, but she's starting to develop an income stream via her art work now. I'm thinking Hive/3speak might be a good avenue for her.
I'm trying to create an account for her now however have no liquid Hive so will need to wait for my post payout.
Has her Instagram presence or presence on other mainstream social media platforms helped her market her products, then?
Nothing wrong with taking some money off the table. And converting it to fiat is a practical part of things these days.
We still do almost all our purchasing in fiat (and bill paying) so it makes sense to add some to the pile when you can.
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Converting my Steem to Fiat has definitely taken a load off right now. Seeing that $0 on my credit card makes me smile.
i have moved completely away from steem as i find it boring. i really love the new Hive.
Same, I haven't been back there other than to transfer my Steem to Binance.
I Am glad you invested on yourself
Thanks mate.
If you bought $100 of BTC in 2011, she would definitely take it seriously.
Very true. Sad thing is that I'm one of those people who had the opportunity to buy a few hundred BTC back when it was worth $20 but thought it was too hard to buy at the time...
I'm even worse... I had mined something like 0.5 BTC when it was CPU mineable on a laptop. It took a whole 24 hours! I became discouraged at the slowness of the mining process and promptly wiped my drive without writing down any of the keys.
Oh my god... mineable on a laptop lol. Yeah I'd be pissed at that. :)
TubCAT!!!!
I had no idea that Tubcat's lead such interesting lives! Or were married or had bills to pay, etc.
There's obviously absolutely nothing wrong with dipping into your crypto holdings to take care of real life business... after all, what's the point of having all this value lying around if you don't use it.
I've been powering down Steem as well, but I've just been using it to buy Splinterlands cards, which has definitely made the game more fun for me... hopefully those cards appreciate until I need to use that value for real life stuffs too.
TubCAT!!!!
Tub Cat's owner is quite irresponsible and generated lots of debt to pay... So the Cat in a Tub must save the day.
How is the Splinterlands thing going? I have a few cards but haven't logged in for many, many months.
I also cashed out some BAT.
My STEEM, on the other hand, is going straight into BNB, which I'm holding until they stop burning tokens. I also chose BNB because some of my STEEM withdrawals amounted to dust, which BNB is able to convert. I haven't given much thought what to do with it afterwards.
If Hive keeps going higher, I might be inclined to go 50/50 on rewards rather than 100% power up. At that point, I'd cash out some HIVE rewards, not HP. I don't know what that cash out price would be yet.
I typically hold some BNB as well. But not right now. It all went to BTC and then to Aus dollars. I always post 50/50 as I plan to continue to convert to Aus dollars for a while to come. I'm hoping to buy a house soon, and if I get the one that I have my eyes on it will take about $50k to fix up. :)
Why is it unthinkable? Absolutely nothing wrong with paying off debts (and if you believe in that sort of thing perhaps it's what you were "meant" to do if the numbers lined up xD).
Hopefully you'll be able to get that iPad Pro soon :)
And yay for it clicking with the wife! Be cool if she starts using her account, better now than never right ;D
I had a similar thing with JJ, he didn't really care about me playing around with magical internet money because I wasn't "wasting" "real" money on it, and would sometimes be amused when I would tell him the estimated usd values of my wallet as prices went up and down. What made it real for him was when I bought him some Magic cards from @bogglemcgee, so now he's slightly more interested when I'm cheerfully telling him my wallet values XD
I'm converting all my steem to hive but at this stage I'm probably going to do the same thing as you and cash out the kids' steem to their bank accounts. I was going to increase their hive holdings as well but then decided to show them what can be done if they kept at it.
Their hive holdings meanwhile are getting increased super slowly by trailing my votes, which I probably should have done with their steem accounts too but I didn't think about it at the time x_x
That's such a good idea to show your kids what can be achieved in the crypto space.
I'm pretty happy with my decision. And I'll get that iPad Pro soon enough :)
Maybe buy JJ a nice bottle of Whisky with some crypto. I'm sure he'll get right on board with this thing then.
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