After 6 months on this platform, I had amassed about $3,000 worth of STEEM. Two months later, that number is around $30,000. I have no idea what the whales are thinking with their now tens of millions, but I'm practically in shock. it's almost as if all the work I've done and all the support I've had has paid off!

But the money never felt real to me, not until I actually spent some. Readers likely are aware at this point that my last laptop has a huge sword dangling above it on a horse hair. With a ten second battery, a broken charger, a broken chassis and buttons, fried motherboard, broken ram and so on... it was time to move on. I'm a very HODL person when it comes to Steem and I'll not be powering down at any point in the foreseeable - if I can help it.

But I decided to buy a mid-range laptop, but with excellent timing of the bullish STEEM market a few days ago, I took advantage and converted my bittrex Steem and took the plunge on a brand new, $2,000 high-end laptop: The Gigabyte Aero 15:

_{I tried to use Dtube but after 6 hours of upload time, it asked me to choose a snapshot and then disappeared and had to start again so f*** Dtube}

_{tl;dl - Gigabyte Aero 15, Nvidia 1060 6G, powerful enough for high end games and music processing, but slim and cool temperature. Perfect colour rating on a bezel-less screen, huge, 10 hour + battery and up to 1TB of 40gb/s transfer speed SSD HDD. 32GB Ram and fun, rainbow pattern backlit keyboard.}

First and foremost, thank you everybody who made this possible. I haven't had a high end anything my whole life, really, and having this top-of-the-line beauty is still boggling my mind. In terms of computers, I'm practically set for life, and it's completely in thanks to Steemit and everybody involved with me.

But it gets better than that. The timing was so good, that by the time I actually got round to making the purchase after pulling out $2,000, the value of my remaining Steem on bittrex gained about $2,000, almost as if I never bought it in the first place!

This honestly feels like a free upgrade to my life!

'It's Not that Simple: The Saga'

Ohhhh no, it never is, dear friends. It never is.

You see, I haven't actually paid anything with Steem yet. So far the process has been:

Steem - bittrex - bitcoin - ethereum - external wallet - usd

Being in China, I've been limited in the methods that I can actually do things, and as a point of principle, I wanted to avoid bitcoin at all costs because I can't stand the coin. Most exchanges don't allow their services in China, or allow partially but no withdrawals, for example. The only one I found I could get away with was Cex.io. And I hate it.

Cex

So I put my money into cex, changed it to dollars with the intention of sending to my friend in the US, who would then come back to China and pay me in Yuan (RMB). But the security measures in cex prevented me from doing so. Not only was paypal not a service, but adding a second card was practically impossible, and the card I initially put on there for it to function at all was my credit card.

I asked my bank in England and they said not to risk putting credit onto the card because it could be blocked or returned or anything else for fraud and laundering prevention. Fair enough, I'll just do bank transfer.

NOPE

For whatever reason, their minimum bank transfer requirements was $5,000!! I'd never have that much money going spare!

So I went through a whole process of figuring things out, looking up alternative sites and so on. At this point the process was going to be:

Steem - bittrex - bitcoin - ethereum - external wallet - usd - wait a month for new bank account and debit card in england to be delivered to me in China - debit card - RMB

Thank you again, Steem

At this point, steem went up even higher to somewhere around $8. This meant that within a day, I had made up that $5,000 minimum and decided, screw it, I need the money anyway with my savings rapidly draining.

So I put $5,000 total onto Cex, but the remaining $3,000 I decided to go via ripple for fun, recommended by @rawdawg for being fast and cheap.

It was, but stupidly I didn't realize cex doesn't allow ripple to USD, only Ether, bitcoin and BCC. Pretty dumb but ok I'll just trade it in their internal market.

I decided to wait because ripple was shooting up and I could make a few extra pennies, and when it hit a nice high point I went to sell... Except I couldn't.

The market built into the website is so poorly done that it seems impossible to set your own rate or change the rate it gives you, and by the time you finish getting past their error code every time you try to sell, the rate has long since changed, and your money never sells.

It took hours to finally go through, and by this point ripple had gone down as steeply as it ever had pretty much, costing me a few hundred bucks (though not less than what I started with) in the process. I could not wait to get my money out of this site forever.

And well, this is where I'm at now. I actually managed to pay a small debt of $100 on my credit card prior to this, which made Steem real enough psychologically for me to purchase this laptop with my actual Chinese money in my bank, with the assumption that i'd be getting it back a few days later.

But now cex tells me the transfer may take up to 60 days and may not even work and that they are entirely clean of responsibility.

So although I technically bought this laptop with the value generated from Steem, I STILL haven't actually physically used the steem money. But I will.

I can't wait for the day when I can use steem directly with a little steem card. I'm frankly disappointed that isn't the case already.

One more time, thanks

This thanks is not just for me. Another user, @kenadis has been posting on Steemit on his phone for 2 months, and has finally earnt enough on Steemit to buy a laptop, too. Another user @earisu is in need of one and I've confidence Steemit will provide.

Curating for Steemstem, I can see many people living in poor conditions, from farms that are falling apart to a country full of corruption, and they have been given this opportunity to make a real, decent living better than traditional jobs. This is why Steemit needs to sort its sh*t out and become a truly viable, sustainable concept rather than a perpetual 'beta' abuse simulator. The potential is phenomenal, and sticking with it as I have, has paid off.

Thank you and good luck everybody, and enjoy the bull while it lasts!