My experiences - Buying SBD or Steem with Credit/Debit card

Hello fellow Steemians.

Today I just wanted to share with you my experiences trying to buy some steem or SBD’s with a debit card as I’m sure several of you are encountering the same problems I did.

Unfortunately, buying crypto, without an existing crypto, can be an absolute nightmare especially for the non tech savvy, which is kind of sad seeing as the original plan was for crypto’s to become a mainstream alternative for money as we know it. The advent of all these “centralized” exchanges hungry for your personal information also brings into question the so called “decentralized” claim of crypto’s.

The internet is not short of tutorials, including some excellent ones I found on bitstamp and bittrex by our very own @jerrybanfield on YouTube and steemians such as @dollarvigilante making a strong case for steem, but it appears that no one can keep up with the demand for crpyto’s resulting in horrendous delays for any bitcoin or altcoin transaction.

A quick search turned up several results on steemit, the first being changelly, an option quickly disregarded due to the mass of negative comments about misrepresentations, money lost and the fact that @changelly hasn’t posted or replied to comments for quite some time now or responded to support requests.

Next up in line were all the exchanges which apparently accept credit and debit cards such as coinbase, Cex, coinmama only to realize that half of them aren’t accepting new registrations and the other half have practically no support, ridiculous KYC requirements including I.D, residential address etc. verification requirements which even upon submitting were rumored to take 2 weeks plus if lucky to receive a response and another 2 weeks to actually receive your cryptos…, yikes. Here’s hoping coinmama will review my documents sometime this century.

On others such as 247exchange everything seemed to go smoothly until you actually tried to make a purchase then ”sorry this service has not started please leave your email…,. Then there are pages of pages of Google results of unheard of very shady looking exchanges promising to process your transactions with independent review sites yelling scam.

I did come across some promising and (I think legit) almost instant payment sites. If anyone has tried these please confirm:

Circle.com- appears to be an excellent and easy way for people to buy bitcoin, unfortunately accepts registrations from very few countries.

localbitcoins.com, this seems to be a firm favorite of many. This site shows you buyers and sellers of bitcoins near you and what payment methods they accept.

indacoin.com, where you can buy bitcoin or ether with any 3DSecure or Verified by visa card in over 100 countries.

cointeq.net/ getbitcoinsnow.co.za and/ or coinsbank.com, not too sure on these. Seemed a little shady to me.

Close to ripping my hair out, I finally settled on what appeared to be the quickest and least painful method albeit with higher fees, enter virwox.

Although not a Crypto exchange per se, VIRWOX, or the Virtual World Exchange is an exchange for trading virtual currencies, i.e. currency to be used in online virtual world’s such as Second Life hence is not subject to the restrictions of Bitcoin and Altcoin exchanges. The trick here is, once you have a virtual currency, namely Second life’s linden dollars or SSL’s, you can exchange them for bitcoin and send them to any bitcoin wallet…, phew.

The steps I followed were as follows:

1. Create a VIRWOX account
   

2. Log into my new VIRWOX account

1. Navigate to deposit

There are several methods available namely: Pay Terminal in My Virtual Community, Bitcoin, PayPal,Skrill, OKPAY etc. Credit and debit cards are processed via paypal, skrill or okpay.

As I avoid paypal like the plague, having lost $300 previously and been faced with the most incompetant customer service team ever I opted for skrill.

Depositing via skrill was painless and the next step was to navigate to USD/SLL.

1. Change the deposited USD into SLL

Note there are two options, a market order which is immediate at the best current price or a limit order where you specify the price you are willing to pay. I chose the market order. Note the minimum is $10.

1. Obtain a deposit address from blocktrade

Navigate to your steemit wallet, click on the arrow on your SBD or STEEM balance, choose buy which will take you to blocktrades.

Enter the currency you want to exchange for steem (choose bitcoin) and the amount or the amount you want to receive in steem.
Click “Get a deposit address” and copy the corresponding bitcoin wallet which appears below.

6)Exchange SLL to Bitcoin on VIRWOX

Navigate to BTC/SLL on VIRWOX

Exchange the SLL you have for BTC. Input the previously obtained Blocktrade wallet in where to send the bitcoin then…, “Trade held for 48 hours” …., crap, not again. To be fair VIRWOX mentions that for new accounts this is standard. In my case I received a notification of a successful exchange in about 16 hours and the corresponding SBD’s happily appeared in my wallet.

Many people complain of the number of steps required to do this and the high fees (about 10%) due to the number of exchanges required but for sheer speed and simplicity I believe this is the easiest please share your comments below.

Website used: https://www.virwox.com

For those those would like to sign up with my newly created affiliate link, please use: https://www.virwox.com?r=22e5ef

I hope this helps somebody!