The more people @world5list & I bring onto Steemit, the more questions we get about the ins & outs of this platform; one of the most common being the Wallet. Today I'll breakdown the most basic functions of your wallet in the simplest, most newbie-friendly approach possible. Note: this is merely for simplicity purposes, which are not necessarily the most cost-effective. For more optimal techniques on boosting your ROI and getting more out of each transaction, @alexpmorris and @jerrybanfield are great places to start!
Wallet
This is your Wallet:
One of the main features of blockchain technology is its open ledger transaction recording/history, and as Steemit is based off of blockchain technology, anyone and everyone's Wallets are viewable to the public as well as their transaction history (listed at the bottom portion of the Wallet).
Once you've become more active on the platform, you should always keep checking your wallet, because you may have payouts waiting to be claimed from either posting or curating. If you do have a payout waiting to be claimed, it'll appear as a green box at the top of your wallet like so:
By clicking on the blue box on the right that says "REDEEM REWARDS (TRANSFER TO BALANCE)," you'll instantly claim your pending payouts, which will be reflected by an increase in the amount of STEEM POWER and STEEM DOLLARS in your account. You'll want to claim your rewards as soon as possible because you want your STEEM POWER to be as high as possible at all times!
Note: the "Potential Payout" amounts you see under each post are based on the STEEM/SBD to USD conversion rates at that given time, which is why it's not uncommon to see a post's earnings fluctuate before it actually pays out in 7 days.
Potential payouts to an author are broken down in the following manner: up to 25% to the curators (or people who upvoted the post) with the remaining % going to the author. Of the 75% or so you earn as an author, half of this is rewarded to you in STEEM DOLLARS and the other half is rewarded in STEEM POWER, which is why you see two separate amounts in the above photo of the green box (one for SBD and one for SP).
STEEM vs. STEEM POWER vs. STEEM DOLLARS
The Steem blockchain utilizes two different tokens (or forms of cryptocurrency): STEEM and STEEM DOLLARS (abbreviated SBD). SBD can be converted into STEEM (and vice versa) in several different ways. One way is by clicking on the SBD amount in your Wallet then selecting "Convert to STEEM" and entering in the amount of SBD you'd like to convert to STEEM.
As you can see below, this conversion process takes 3.5 days and instantly makes your SBD unavailable.
Another way is to click on "Market" (instead of clicking on "Convert to STEEM"). Doing so takes you here
where you can see buy- and sell-orders in realtime, as well as the amounts of STEEM people are buying/selling and the prices they're willing to buy/sell for.
Although it may seem a little overwhelming at first, it's really quite simple! If you're looking to convert SBD to STEEM, you simply enter the amount of STEEM you'd like to purchase and at what price you're willing to pay for each unit of STEEM (noted in SBD/STEEM, meaning a price of 1.5 means I'm willing to pay 1.5 SBD for every 1 unit of STEEM). Once you placed your order, it sits as an open "Buy Order" in the market until a seller is found who is willing to match your price and amounts. (Obviously the higher the price you're willing to pay for STEEM, the easier it is for you to convert your SBD)
Once you have STEEM, you can use it (not SBD) to instantaneously "Power Up" (increase your STEEM POWER) by clicking on your STEEM amount on the right like so
and entering the amount of STEEM you'd like to add towards your STEEM POWER (see photo below). There is also another, simpler method of directly converting SBD to SP (without having to first convert SBD to STEEM then SP) using BlockTrades. For more info on this, skip ahead to the "Cashing Out!" section I've written below!
Now what exactly is STEEM POWER?
STEEM POWER (abbreviated SP) is STEEM locked up in the Steemit platform used to gauge the amount of influence a user has on the community. The higher your SP, the more money each of your upvotes is worth (ex: a brand new user's upvote may be worth only 1-2 cents, while an upvote from someone with 3,000-5,000 SP may be worth several dollars).
SP can be cashed out, although it takes 13 weeks to completely "Power Down" into regular STEEM. So if you have 13,000 SP, for example, and you choose to Power Down, 1,000 STEEM will be released to you (and deducted from your SP amount) every week for 13 weeks.
Aside from gauging a user's influence on Steemit, another added benefit of locking STEEM up as SP is that it prevents whales (people with large amounts of SP) from dumping/selling all their STEEM all at once, thus keeping the value of STEEM stable. Just like the stock market, dumping significantly devalues the currency...NOT GOOD! Just think of it as a regulatory/preventative measure the developers put in place to protect us all!
Cashing Out!
I'm sure there are more cost-effective solutions for liquidating your SBD or STEEM into USD (or whatever other fiat currency you so choose), but the method I'm about to show you for cashing out is, in my opinion, the simplest and most convenient.
First what you'll need is an online wallet in which you can hold Bitcoin (BTC). There are several out there, but the one that I choose to use is Coinbase.
Once you have your BTC wallet AND your BTC vault set up on Coinbase, click on "Accounts" then "Get Bitcoin address," which will produce an address for you that you should paste onto a separate notepad. Go back into your Steemit Wallet, click on the cryptocurrency you'd like to cash out (STEEM or SBD) on the right, then click "Sell." Doing so will take you to blocktrades.us, as shown below.
Copy-and-paste your Bitcoin address from your notepad into BlockTrades's "Bitcoin address" field and wait for it to validate. Once this is done, click "Get Deposit Address." This will generate trade info like so:
The two important pieces of information here are the account name (blocktrades) and the memo (d75bb9a9-7450-48d1-b943-863923634dec). Now go back into your Steemit Wallet once more, click on the cryptocurrency you're looking to sell on the right, click "Transfer," then fill out the fields with the the appropriate information. Mine will look like this:
Blocktrades will then automatically convert your SBD (or STEEM) to BTC and deposit the respective BTC amount into your online wallet (mine being Coinbase in this instance). After anywhere between 15 min. to a couple hours, the deposit will have fully processed and you can instantly sell your BTC on your online wallet's platform for more real currency, which can ultimately be withdrawn via PayPal or as a direct deposit into your bank account.
As I mentioned above, BlockTrades can also be used to directly convert SBD into SP without having to first convert your SBD into STEEM. To do this, simply select "Steem Dollar" under "Send" and select "Steem Power" under "Receive (estimated amount)." Type in your Steemit account name (withouth the @) as the receive address, click "Get Deposit Address," and follow the steps above (in the paragraph starting with "The two important pieces of information here..."
Anyways, I hope this helps guys! I'm still learning everything myself as well, so if there are any errors I've made please don't hesitate to let me know with a reply below :) And if you have any other tips/tricks/strategies you use to make things easier, boost your ROI, etc. feel free to let us know here, as I'm sure the Steemit community will really appreciate your input too!
This post received a 4.7% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @theywillkillyou! For more information, click here!
newbie here!
upvote this :D
Thanks for your step by guide about steemit.
My pleasure :) Thanks for stopping by!
excellent post @theywillkillyou, very thorough overview on how to cash out some of your post earnings! :)
Thanks my dude! Thanks for all your money-making tips as well :)
GREAT info and so easy to understand- thank you so much @theywillkillyou
Thank you for this post, just what I needed. I think I have to read this a few times before I try it out. No hurry, as I haven't earned enough yet!
Great, I'm so glad to hear that it helped! Please feel free to write me if you have any other questions :)
One more tip that you forgot to mention is that if you buy your steem or bitcoin on a trading platform rather click the market tradings option than the buy bitcoin now!
This save you more money for then you buy bitcoin on your own and the trading platform will take less commission......I learend the hard way when it comes to buying steem haha
Great point! Thank you so much for adding that in :)
Thanks for the great post! This really helped me out as a brand new user.
Awesome! I'm very, very glad you were able to find it helpful :) Makes it well worth writing about at the end of the day.
Very educative . how do i contact you for more insight on cashing
Muy bueno este post, me saco de muchas dudas, Gracias...
Gracias parcero!
I'm a noob. I've also realized this week that I'm what's called a minnow, or is it plankton? Whatever, I'm swimming in the steemit ocean and that's cool. This is the third article I've read on getting paid and it's the clearest. Thank you. I'll be referring back to it. I'm still figuring out etiquette, but I've seen comments mention they followed and upvoted. So, uh, I did that...but only cause I like the content, not to garner favor. ...But if you'd like to peruse my page I have quite a few wonderful- I'll shut up now. Anyways, I have a coinbase account, so when I first get paid this will be a great resource. Looking forward to that and thank you again.
My pleasure, I'm glad you were able to benefit from it :) Will take a look at your blog shortly!
That was an amazing tutorial. I wish I could figure out a way to save it for when I want to cash some Steem out .
Reading this long after it was posted, I came across your comment here @whatitsworth. I am quite new and I was also wondering why it wasn't possible to save a post in SteemIt, e.g. building a "Favorites" list ...
By now, you have likely already figured this out, but there are a number of interfaces to the Steem blockchain. The one I use for saving a post, like this one, is Busy.org. It is a very good alternative to SteemIt.
Not only can you save a list of "favorite" posts, but it also automatically stores a draft copy of any posts you are writing yourself. These drafts are saved until you either click on "Submit" or delete it. I don't know which of these two features I like best, but they have both quickly become indispensable to me.
That said, I do still find it helpful to go into SteemIt a lot. In fact, in my Update: Month 1 post, I cover the 3rd interface to the Steem blockchain I also find indispensable - Partiko. To learn more about it and stay on top of developments, I'd recommend you follow @Partiko.
It is a very nice (and fast!) mobile app I use on my Android smartphone. This app didn't even exist, at the time this post was written ...
While maybe too late to be of value to you @whatitsworth, perhaps someone else, like me reading this much more recently, will find my response to you to be of some value.
All the best to you!
Steemin’ along and on the move ... Posted using Partiko Android
Following you @roleerob, I noticed this comment and have just come here and read through this post myself.
Excellent content all around!
Thank you for your kind words, I'm very happy to hear you enjoyed it :)
Good tips for newbies. I personally prefer blocktrades for converting SBD to Steem Power. Very quick and easy and the rates are usually good.
Yep yep, mentioned that towards the end of the article too ;) It's way easier than most other methods!
I've been wondering about this for awhile now, thanks for simplifying the process and making it easier to understand.
My pleasure, thanks for taking the time to check it out!
Just what i need really! In depth explanation of what steem, steem power and steem dollar means. And at the end, how to cash out, all in one post!
recommended to newbies
Thank you for putting a lot of time in this post. You will be rewarded dearly by steemians great community! . As a newbie, this post is important to me. Thanks again!!!
And thank you so much for your support! I'm glad you were able to benefit from it :)
I see that to change your SBD to steem you can either convert and wait 3.5 days or use the market. But do you know if you simply convert what price you are getting? The price at the moment you click on convert o the price it converts after 3.5 days? Great post a clear explanations, will follow!
So according to the FAQ, the price you're getting is the median price over the course of the 3.5-day period.
And welcome to Steemit btw ;) I hope you enjoy the @randowhale vote I've just sent you! Followed...looking forward to seeing more of your travel content!
Thanks for the up vote and follow and for clearing that up. Seems to me that its better just to sell on market and know the exact price you are going to get!
Thanks for the info! upvoted and followed
Thanks for checking it out! Glad you enjoyed it :)
WAY beyond confusing! Steem, SP, SBD, Steem Power, Steem Dollars SMH!!! I feel like I'm gonna have a stroke. I own Steem purchased off of Bittrex. How do I promote a post? I see no where I can convert Steem to SBD so I can begin promoting my posts. My Steem in already is my Steemit Wallet. Please help.
This was very helpful. Thanks.
Thanks for this post, I just started looking into Steem and was completely confused by the multiple tokens. This cleared this up a lot.
This was really enlightening. I'm a newbie and I'm still trying to understand most things on steemit. I want to ask; if I have steem power, can I change it to steem just the same way one can convert SBD into steem?
Thanks for the info.. Although the "Convert to STEEM" doesn't seem to show on the pull down menu of STEEM DOLLARS, but it's easy to do it on the Market..
One question: what's better ROI-wise, powering up and putting everything in STEEM POWER, or transferring to Savings?
Thanks,
A
Relevant info @theywillkillyou. Thanks for sharing! :)
Very enlightening, I'm still learning how this all works. Thanks for the simple breakdown!
This is great information. Thank you for sharing.
I'm searching a post that will help me to start my own and I stop here, Thank you @theywillkillyou, It's help me a lot.:D
Great, I'm happy to be of help/service! If there are any other questions you may have, don't hesitate to ask & I'll try to help you out @rychemrycho to the best of my ability :)
Thanks for answering my questions!
My pleasure, thanks for stopping by!
Great guide on using Steemit
I hope it you found it useful! Thanks for stopping by :)
These are the information I have been looking for ever since I created my account. I used to be really confused about this whole sp and sbd and steem trio. Thanks a lot for the part by part elucidation. I really appreciate it. 👍
This article offers some interesting ins and outs concerning use of the steem platform but I'm still no clearer on the differences between Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars than I was before reading it. Are there any other resources that break down the structure and relationship of these three element?
Thanks for the introduction! Are there any indications that things will change in the future?
this post made me understand alot
whoaa.. lot more to learn, still confused... new here.. please up vote.
This was immensely helpful!
thnx for this article...really it was helpfully
im just a newbie, joined today only :p