So, I’ve got this friend who has been blogging on Steemit and been extremely successful in just one month.

Her Homesteading and Self-Sufficiency blog is awesome and people love it (what are you doing with your life, go follow her here).

Her posts have accumulated STEEM Power and SBD using the 50/50 post option (and you should too, no ‘100% Powering Up” when SBD is valued greater than 1USD).

Protip: Don’t use the 100% Power Up option when SBD is greater than $1.
If your post gets upvoted to $100 and you are 100% Powering up, you get $100 worth of Steem giving your post a total value of $100. Congrats!
If SBD is sitting at $2 per SBD and you had elected 50/50 payout, you’d have received 50% Steem ($50 worth) and 50% SBD ($100 worth) for a total value of $150 (much better!)

First, we’ll discuss the decision to Power Up or Take Some Profits. Next, I’ll walk through HOW to take those profits.

Should you Power Up or Sell Off SBD?

There are two camps of thought on what you should do.

Long term, you believe Steemit platform is going to continue to excel and become adopted more widely by those who aren’t immediately scared off by the terms ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrency’. You ‘Power Up’ every chance you get so that you accrue more Steem Power. As the Network becomes the next big thing, your accrued SP mass becomes crazy high-valued.

Short term, maybe your husband doesn’t believe in this ‘crypto-voodoo’ stuff and you want to show him that you can quickly sell off one-months’ worth of your elite blogging efforts and turn it into actual money in your bank account.
If you’re newer to cryptocurrency, sometimes you just want to ‘cash a little out’ and prove to yourself that it’s real.
Sometimes you want to cash out and buy something physical and say, “this was paid for with cryptocurrency”. This is what I did when I paid for last Christmas with cryptocurrency.

What are you missing out on by doing this? Had I not sold off my SBD and ‘Powered Up’ instead, I’d have a lot more Steem Power right now. This would allow me benefits of higher reputation score, more curation power, more money given to people for votes, more given to myself when voting on my own posts, etc. If Steemit becomes the bee’s knees and STEEM value increases exponentially, I’d have missed out on having a larger critical mass of Steem Power because I took profits while it was in its infancy.

To understand this risk, imagine you were a bitcoin miner when it first started in 2009. You had diligently mined a lot of this bitcoin stuff (let’s say you mined 100,000BTC) and you decided you wanted to cash some of them in and prove it could be traded for something of value in the real world. You work out a deal to buy a couple large pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. You enjoy your pizza and feel very happy with yourself. In hindsight, 8 years later that 10,000BTC you bought that pizza with is now worth about $20million.

Same with your SBD. You can cash them out, take profits, but if network value continues to increase, down the road you might look back with 20/20 vision and regret it.

Or Steemit could fail completely, Steem value could go to $0.00, and taking some of those profits while it had value was smart. Who knows.

Personally, I think you should take some profits. It’s good for the soul. Especially for those of you who are hobbyists and are here for the 1) outlet to blog your heart out and 2) for the community we are creating with like-minded folks.
What are YOU doing with SBD prices where they are today? What would you suggest an up-and-coming blogger on the Steemit network to do?

Let us know in comments!

My thoughts?

How to Take Profits

First look at how much your SBD is worth. I typically won't sell off anything less than 20SBD at a time as the transaction costs will take a larger bite.

Go to your Wallet, select the down arrow next to your Steem Dollars and select Sell.

This will open an SDB -> Bitcoin transaction page on BlockTrades which looks like this:.

Type in the amount of SBD you are thinking of selling on the left. The amount of Bitcoin you would receive will autpopulate on the right.

At this time, my 28 SBD would sell for 0.0150772 BTC. But how much is THAT worth? You can google BTC to USD or go here.

Type in the amount of BTC your SBD would fetch you and it’s “Street Value” in US Dollars will autopopulate.

If I wanted to sell my 28 SBD, I could get $168 into my bank account.

Making the transfer

Get a Coinbase account or a Poloniex account (or any other exchange account). When you create your account, you’ll be giving obnoxiously long ‘keys’ which act like an address. Be very careful as you only want to give out your RECEIVE ADDRESS. Your Receive Address can be made public, it’s what you give to people who will pay you in BTC (For example, you can send me BTC here: 3LofSzQxzTmtDofjjDUUiD3BLzjzQ75PGT, give it a try 😉).

Go back to the Blocktrades page we used earlier and put in your Receive Address. It will verify the correct address was used. Click “Get Deposit Address”.

Type in your username and and click Transfer Using SteemConnect.

Click Continue

Click Sign in

That’s it! My transaction went through at 4:03 pm and is ‘unconfirmed’ at this time. Remember when we determined I could get $168 from selling my SBD? The actual transaction posted as $167.61.

You've just converted SBD to Bitcoin, use your exchange's Withdrawal function to turn that BTC into sweet, adulterated US fiat Dollars. (Hurry and spend it before it inflates away)

Once it is confirmed (mine was confirmed in about 15 minutes while I formatted this post), you can transfer it to your bank account.

How to Power Up

Sure you could Transfer your SBD to Steem Tokens then click the Power Up button, but don't when SBD is trading at a premium. Check out Alex's writeup on why it's more beneficial to just buy STEEM on the open market.

I recently noticed a fellow steemian using the SBD "convert to steem" feature. While this may be fine (and possibly even advantageous) to do when SBD is trading at a discount, you're literally throwing away money if you do it while SBD's trading at a premium, as it is currently.

Let me know if you have any problems!

Also, what are you doing with your SBD? Selling it? Powering up? Gifting it to libertyLOL? Let me know in the comments!

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