Buying steem as a total crypto beginner - my experience

Whats up, its me shyaren again :)

Today I want to share my "journey" to buy my first steem. If youve read any of my others posts, you now that I need/ed steem for #splinterlands aka #steeemmonsters, but it turns out, that as someone with zero crypto assets or experience, its not that simple as just buying something via paypal or on amazon haha.

Quick info to myself:
Im a 26 old guy, who of course has heard of bitcoin before and I knew that others cryptocurrencies exist, but I didnt really have anything to do with any of them before. I looked at CryptoKitties ones, but didnt pursue it as far as starting to "play" it.
Before the talk from @aggroed durin #steemfest I didnt even really know what a blockchain was. lol.

So how did I find myself even getting onto steem(it)?
Well, it was really by accident, one day in october I had some downtime during work, decided to browser kickstarter for some new projects, and then I saw this:

The logo looked cool, so I decided to check out the campaign itself. Apparantly it was some kind of "decentralized card game" or some stuff. Many of the terms I didnt hear in this context before, but it looked cool so I investigated some more!

Im not sure if the discord was linked in the kickstarter or if I went to the website, but I ended up joining it.
Talked with some very nice people and ended up with a promo code to start the game for free, great!

The first few days I only played a tiny bit each, but then I got hooked haha. So I wanted to buy some steem, to get a few cards.

0.25$ for a card, cant be that hard to get some steem right? WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG.

Well okay, to be fair, it took a while longer before I bought my first own steem.
One of the discord members gave me 10$ worth of steem for free (thanks again!)

After that I bought some steem from the same person via paypal. First 20$, then 50$. At some point I decided I will be here longterm and should learn how to buy it myself.

So I went to google, like any same person would. I googled "buy steem", "buy steem with €" "buy steem with fiat" and many other things to check out different websites.

Fun fact: since english isnt my main language, I also didnt really know that EURO, USD etc. was called "fiat" at first :p

Long story short: I ended up registering for a website that needed ID confirmation via video-call. I didnt wanna do that, so I dropped that site, and looked further.

After asking around in the splinterlands discord some, I ended on coinbase.

So far I've bought around 400€ worth of BTC there.

BTC? Why not steem? Well, haha, yes becouse coinbase does not offer steem.

1. So I had to buy BTC on coinbase,
2. then make a binance account
3. transfer my BTC from coinbase to binance
4. wait like 6 hours for it to transfer
5. then buy steem with my BTC on binance
6. then send my steem to my steemwallet
7. YEAH now I was able to buy a card x)

Its a super annoying process really, but I managed somehow. But I still feel like this needs to be easier, if steem games like #steemmonsters ever wanna reach the "casual" audience. I would call myself technology and computer savvy, and it was still super annoying to get my hands on some steem :/

Talking about binance, y'all know this screen?

Many of you are probably looking at it like this:

But me? OH BOI, this IS the "BEGINNER" version on binance, I havent even looked at the advanced one haha.
This is what I used mostly:

I only really used the little box to type in buy orders, and I realized that the thing on the left is the list of buy and sell orders aswell. But this is really information overload.

Conclusions:

Do I know more then before?

Yes for sure! And I learned many different things, crypto is really interesting.

Am I interested in other cryptos?

No, not really, for now steem is all I wanna manage in my life.

Do I belive in steem?

Im honestly not sure, steemit etc. has a cool concept, but I see way too many "trash posts" (low effort, spamy posts) that for some reeason or another get like 8$, sometimes more in up-vote rewards, and Im not sure why. Something seems flawed here.
I made three posts so far that got around the 8$ mark in up-votes, which is nice, since you cant really get that on platforms like reddit etc.
I belive more so in #splinterlands, I invested nearly 1.6k$ in it now (1200 kickstarter) rest ingame, cards etc.

Future plans?

For now I keep playing splinterlands daily, and make a few posts a week on here. I feels nice sharing my story and beeing rewarded for it haha. So really steem-community, Im here to stay! Look forward to more quality posts in the future.