500 followers and my first steem exchange to USD !

Since I have 500 followers now, I decided to share my experience with withdrawing some funds that I made here on steemit.
Also, thanks to everyone who follow me ! It's been an awesome ride so far :)

So my first withdrawal took place 6 days ago. Steem price went up and I decided to sell 55 steem to see if I could actually turn it into real money.

The first thing I needed to do is find guides or information on how to withdraw these funds. I've searched and found guides that show you how to convert steem to bitcoin and guides how to convert bitcoin to real money.

The first part I figured out pretty fast. It's not hard at all to convert steem to bitcoin. All you need to have is a bittrex account, send you steem to that account and buy bitcoin for steem.

Now the harder part was selling bitcoin. As I searched for guides to help me sell bitcoin, I found that the websites which offer these services were not available in my country !

I thought to my self, "Well shit... I will never be able to convert my steem to real money". The first website that I've tried was Coinbase and I thought it's going to be cool and all. But when I registered, I realized I can't sell my bitcoin there because my country was not allowed.

So I ventured back into the search engine to find other sites which would allow my country. I've registered to 2 more websites only to find that it won't work either...

I was lost. I thought that there won't ever be a way for me to withdraw funds. I even went to steemit.chat to ask for advice but didn't get any useful information other than some advice to keep the bitcoin and buy stuff with it.

I wanted to have real spending money so keeping bitcoin was not an option for me. That's when I thought about searching for a Lithuanian website that let's you sell bitcoin !

"Why haven't I thought of this earlier ?", I said to myself after spending like 2 hours of searching. So I've searched for a Lithuanian website and the first website was some bullshit and I didn't really know what did I register for. I registered some sort of bank account and it even asked me to fill my location to send me a credit card.

I said, "Fuck this shit, I'm out". Left the fields blank and left the website, never to return. I continued my search and found a decent looking website. This time I made sure it's about selling and buying bitcoin.

I registered and looked around. Seemed good and I was really happy to finally find something that might work. I could store my bitcoin there because it has a wallet. Also, I could store DASH there and sell it as well.

Now, I've had everything set up. The last thing to do is transfer my funds to bittrex, buy bitcoin and then transfer it to my wallet. Since I've never done this, I was afraid to do something wrong and lose all my funds.

I did some testing a few days before all this. I've sent 1 steem to bittrex to see if it would successfully get there. It got there in 10 minutes so I was sure that it will work next time.

I sent 55 steem to my bittrex account. Got it in 15 minutes. Bought bitcoin and then sent it to my bitcoin wallet. This is where I was afraid that something could go wrong.

Since I've never used this website and I couldn't find anybody talking about it, I thought it could be scam and my bitcoin would never show up in the wallet.

20 minutes passed and it still hasn't arrived yet. "Oh great, I lost it. It's a scam", but then I remembered that bitcoin takes a bit more time until transactions complete.

I decided to watch 1 episode of anime to pass the time. After I was finished, I've checked my wallet again and I could finally see the bitcoin inside my wallet !

Now I had to sell it for real money. I exchanged the bitcoin to EUR and the money appeared immediately in my wallet. There was one last step. Withdraw the money.

There were so many withdrawal options but I was mostly interested in bank withdrawal. The fee was only about 1-2$ so it was a really good option.

I sent the funds to my bank account and I didn't know when to expect them to arrive. I thought maybe 3-5 days or something like that.

Next day I was steeming and BAM, I get a text message that 65 EUR has arrived to my bank account. I was really happy how fast it arrived.

And that is how I successfully exchanged steem to real money !

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