A Crypto Update. Positive news at last.

It’s been a while. In fact, it has been over eight months since I last had any activity in crypto logistics outside of steemit. From that point of view I was a little tentative about re-engaging in the system but I made a decision a while ago to add more steem and I was determined to do it. Through all my fears and worries I have actually come out the other side positive and hopeful. So here is the story of what happened and why I’m feeling, dare I say it, a little bullish!

It has never been a better time to buy some steem! That’s what lots of people have been telling me and I am tending to agree with them. I am eleven months into my steemit life and, for someone who never usually put pen to paper, I feel I have had relative success. Things seemed to have settled nicely and I am still enjoying the experience. Being part of a few communities helps, the main one being Power House Creatives. This gives me a place to start my day almost every day and I like the people and the routine.

So! Things are good and the price of steem seems like great value. Time to dig out all those usernames and passwords so that I can embark on what, up until now, I considered a war of attrition. A while back I wrote a post on my experiences on entry into the crypto world. You can read it here. The Diary of a Crypto Novice

I currently live in Romania which presents certain problems when opening accounts in crypto. Nobody seems to like the fact that I am from the UK but I am based in eastern europe. He must be laundering or doing something dodgy! Well no! I teach English and unless you think that’s dodgy then let me get on with it! An issue that has been created from this is that my 2 step verification is on a UK sim card and not on my Romanian one, so I now have two phones for varying reasons. Any time we make a monetary transaction in a new place in Romania our card gets blocked and we have to call the UK to unblock it. We ask them ever so nicely to stop blocking Romanian transactions but the next time we make a transaction it happens again. None of this is directly cryptos fault but and indication of the hoops that you have to jump through.

Command central at the ready. I have phone number one and phone number two, my iPad, the PC and about three million bits of paper with tiny scribblings all over them. Finally ready. First things first, I want to avoid fees as much as possible. I can use a UK credit card but Coinbase will instantly take 4% off of me. Not doing that! I need to shift some money out of the UK account and transfer it to Euros. Bitcoin can be purchased in euros but not English pounds (or so I thought).

I opened my Revolut app; Revolut is an online banking app, on my old phone and it’s acting like I have just opened it for the first time. I put in the email and phone number and my details were not there. I called their customer support and got through to an operator surprisingly quick. I was a bit apprehensive because my previous dealings with Revolut support were less than stellar. She took some details off of me and within 20 minutes, had sorted it.

Improvement in crypto number 1: Revolut customer service was fast and efficient.

The next step was to top up Revolut with GBP. I set the transaction up and guess what happened? My Uk bank blocked the transaction! Surprise surprise. To be fair we made a quick phone call and they released the funds. It showed up on Revolut almost instantly. So far so good. Now I needed to log into Coinbase for the first time in donkeys years! Oh cripes! Heeeeere we go!

I sifted through my virtual rolodex of usernames, emails and passwords trying to get to the information I needed. I had visions of the Matrix with the characters streaming down the screen in indecipherable code. I finally found it and attempted to log in. Now the two step verification was needed so I grabbed my old phone. A message came up to say I’m logging in from a IP that has not been used before, which is not true but anyhow. I needed to log into one of my email accounts to verify the log in, verify once more and then start the process all over again. After all that I was actually logged in!! Wow.

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Now for the first real revelation of this process. You can now buy Bitcoin on Coinbase with GBP! For anyone in the UK this is a huge step forward for Brits trying to get into crypto. Up until now we had to use a credit card and let Coinbase take 4% off of you or if you wanted to avoid the fees, convert your GBP into Euros (for an exchange fee) and then use a bank transfer which took a couple of working days to complete.

Improvement in crypto number 2: Buying Bitcoin with GBP

The only drawback for me at this stage was that I had already transferred my money to Revolut so I could end up waiting a couple of days for the transfer to Coinbase anyway. Oh well, lets see what happens. At least I didn’t have to convert into euros which was a positive. I looked up the transfer details on Coinbase; noticing that they now had a UK banking address. I filled out the form with the relevant details and sat back expecting to wait a couple of days. After all, I was doing this on a Sunday.

I had a message from Revolut letting me know that they had submitted my transaction. OK! That’s quick. Maybe I won't be waiting so long after all. The next message said ‘processing’ and the third message, said ‘transaction executed’, all within half an hour of submission. The money arrived at Coinbase within 3 hours. Wow! What a difference. Go back to eight months ago and it would have taken three days not three hours.

Improvement in crypto number 3: Bank transaction times drastically reduced.

One of the things about this process is that I am always trying to avoid fees as much as possible. If I was feeling lazy or the fees didn’t matter to me then I could have used a credit card and taken a 4% hit on the money I had transfered, plus the purchase of Bitcoin will be a lot more expensive because I would be using Coinbase and theyl charge a fee for the purchase and take a cut in the actual exchange of fiat to crypto. Your original cash would be substantially depleted at this point. Gdax is the other option. It is professional broker owned by Coinbase and is far more cost effective at the purchasing of your crypto. Which is all well and good but it’s not called Gdax any more! WHAT! It is now known as Coinbase Pro.

All of my money was sat in my Coinbase account, still intact with no charges or fees so far. I needed to move it across to Coinbase Pro. This has always been a fairly easy step in the whole process. Your Coinbase account details are the same as the Pro details. It even logs in automatically if your coinbase account is open, which is handy. Transfering between the two sites is easy, quick and, most importantly, free. You click on deposit within your Pro account and it gives you the usual crypto type address. Copy and paste it over to the Coinbase account, hit send and Bob’s your uncle!

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Now to buy some lovely Bitcoin. This is always the exciting bit, for me. There is something rather majestic with BTC; it is the crypto daddy after all, and I enjoy dealing with it. So with my entire purchase amount still intact, I go to the BTC - GBP page. Another thing that hasn’t changed about this process is saving fees by using a ‘limit’ order. Using a limit order means that you have to set the price and the amount ahead of time and hope that the overall price hits your request. If it does then you don’t get hit with any fees other than the exchange difference that Coinbase will take. Boom! Done.

The next stage on my journey to buy some steem is to move my purchased BTC to an exchange. The exchange of choice is Bittrex and I needed to transfer my newly purchased BTC over to this site to buy the steem that I require. The process is the same as before, go to your Bittrex wallet for BTC, click on deposit, copy and paste the address over to my Coinbase Pro BTC wallet and hit send. This is a nervous time waiting for something to happen. You check and double check the address to make sure there are no mistakes. The first time I did this (late 2017) i was actually sweating and trying to find excuses not to hit the button. Oh how times have changed! 😁

Now for the fourth improvement in crypto. One of the first times I tried to move some of my Bitcoin; i think it was December 2017, BTC was valued at around 19,000 dollars. For security reasons, I wanted to move my BTC to a different wallet and off of Coinbase. When I was preparing to hit send and make the move I noticed the fee for moving it. 23 dollars! What! I thought the point of crypto was to move it quickly and cheaply. The miners fees were ridiculous at this point and it was inhibiting for any sort of transaction. I had heard that things have improved so I was interested to see what fee I would get charged for moving it across to Bittrex. $0.04! Better!

Improvement to crypto number 4: BTC fees are now negligible, as they should be.

That put a big smile on my face. I hit send and waited for the next Block to move my funds. I admittedly hit refresh quite a lot until I could see a pending transaction show up. It did, and it only took about 20 minutes.

The Bittrex UI is quite nice to use. They had updated it just before my last transaction eight months ago so I had a first hand look at how it was going to work. You find the pair of cryptocurrencies that you wish to trade with and then, like Coinbase Pro, you set your limit order to avoid extra charges. I was feeling like a pro at this point. Everything was going swimmingly so I was in the mood to haggle. I set my initial limit order based on the current price and waited. There was lots of jostling for position, people jumping .0000001 up on the BTC price of the next person and so on. Eventually my order started to come in but I had a feeling that It was going to get cheaper so I cancelled my current order and waited some more. I was wrong! It went the other way, so I had a decision to make. Bite the bullet or hang in there with the big boys and see if it came back down. It did and I made a little bit more than I would of in the previous order. Feeling even more like a pro. LOL. I probably made myself $0.05! 😁

So I now own a bunch of steem at, in my opinion, a massively undervalued price. I now need to get it over to my steemit account and power it up ready to upvote all you lovely people. OK, where are the guidelines for moving steem from Bittrex? I seem to remember them changing a little while back. I searched for ages and I couldn’t find anything that definitively said you must do it like this! I even asked on the PHC general forum. Nada!

From memory, I seemed to remember not needing the memo anymore. That latest tutorial I could find was a few months old and looked a little different. So I literally put the max total in and added my steemit username to the address box. That’s got to be it, right? Right? Tumbleweed! I guess I’m on my own here. I am now just sat there absolutely bricking it thinking that all my hard work was just about to be blown into the ether by the ‘evacuate and panic’ button, otherwise known as send. I couldn’t do it. I was chatting to a couple of PHC members @wales and @mattifer at the time so I put the ball in there court! “Shall I hit the send button”? @mattifer said ‘go for it’, so without thinking any more, I did. Gulp!

I was half expecting alarm bells to ring out, a few pipes to spew out some gas and a humanoid voice shouting out warning, warning over a tannoy! But nothing happened. But the other problem was, NOTHING HAPPENED!. No confirmation, no pending etc. I’m starting to get my sweat on, starting to think about how to tell the wife, whom I’ve been trying to convince to let me do this for a couple of months, starting to think about who to blame! @mattifer! It was all her fault. She made me do it!

About 15 minutes later; mid nervous breakdown, it arrived. Pheeeeew! Quick and simple really. I would of liked some guidelines or a tutorial to have made it a little more stress free though. The fee for moving it from Bittrex was small and acceptable. I powered up and started to breathe normally again.

The whole process from transferring GBP from a UK bank all the way through to powering up took less than 4 hours as opposed to taking two to three working days. I think some of the reason that I found the experience easier was because I had been through it a few times now and I just trusted it a little more. That didn’t stop the stress at certain points though. It has to be said that a number of things have greatly improved in this whole process and that is a good sign for crypto in general.

The four main improvements that I have listed are:

1. Revolut customer service was quick, efficient and friendly. Im making a slight assumption here but I think that/hope that this is a general trend for the industry. For mainstream adoption people need to feel safe, secure and looked after. My experience with online only banking was not a good one up until now. Please continue this trend.

2. Another Fiat currency that you can directly buy Bitcoin with. Ie British pounds. I know GBP only helps us Brits out but its a move in the right direction.

3. Bank transfer times have been smashed! Literally from two to three days to a couple of hours. They were always able to do this but not willing. Maybe this is the start of something very positive between the traditional banking system and crypto. (pig’s might fly!)

4. Bitcoin mining fees are now under control and are negligible. The crypto daddy leads the way for all others, even steem. If Bitcoin was broken we were all doomed. Thankfully, we are back on track.

Compare this to one of my first posts on steemit and you can see that we have come a long way in a relatively short space of time. It’s called Bitcoin ready for mainstream? Not a chance. Here is the link if you would like to read it. link

I’m satisfied with my purchase of steem and I may consider adding some more in the future. I enjoy the steemit experience more now than ever before. Being a part of something like the Power House Creatives community makes day to day on steemit fun and gives me a routine on steemit that I like. I would recommend finding a community that relates to your interests to anyone on steemit, especially the newer members who are struggling to get their work some exposure.

I am confident in the future of crypto in the long term. I know the dollar value is not where we want it to be right now but think about it in terms of industry improvement. What I have just experienced is a tiny piece of the overall improvement being made to the crypto space and that improvement, in my opinion, has very little connection with the dollar value at the moment. The spike that we experienced in late 2017 was a fad. A mainstream FOMO that was always going to end with panic and sell off. Bitcoin and the whole of the space wasn’t ready and still isn’t ready for mainstream adoption. What we need is small steady improvement over the long haul with adoption to match that improvement. If it’s stable and gradual they will come!

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Thanks for reading and keep on steeming!

Gaz