I did the unthinkable
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.
