After many created accounts and failed attempts my friend @darkminded153 and i finally managed to buy bitcoins in a relatively simple manner. Ironically we are buying it through virwox.com which was the last site we tried because it has very high commissions.
Before that we tried multiple other sites like coinbase.com and localbitcoins.com but we could not pay in a safe manner (yes, i am also afraid of identity theft) or simply through PayPal. Finally i gave up looking for cost effective ways to buy bitcoin and created a virwox account. There i tried to pay with paypal but got an error. I tracked the error to a few specific settings which i would have to change in order to pay to virwox but changing those settings would (in my opinion) make the payment unsafe. So @darkminded153 ended up ‘’sacrificing’’ his prepaid credit card in order for us to make a deposit to virwox.
Unfortunately virwox imposes restrictions on new accounts:
- During first bitcoin transfer a manual step is required
- You can only deposit 90€ per day
- You can only deposit 270€ per month
Also in order to buy STEEM you must exchange several currencies.
Step 1: deposit EUR (or USD)
Step 2: EUR (or USD) -> SLL
Step 3: SLL to BTC
Step 4: BTC to STEEM (or STEEM POWER)
In every step you pay a fee or a commission or both. In step 1 you lose around 4€, in step 2 you lose around 3.5%, in step 3 you lose 50 SLL + around 4%, and in step 4 you lose 0,004 BTC. Note that the fees and commissions vary with time.
In the end we got effective 0.7 btc for 480 € which is approx 19.5% more than was the normative EUR/BTC price at the time of buying. At the time of writing this we would get approximately 760 STEEM POWER for that, which amounts to 0.63 € per STEEM. Which is $0.7 per STEEM.
The upside is that older your account is, less limitations you have, thus your STEEM to FIAT ratio improves. Also we have heard that fees decrease for accounts with high flow, but i cannot speak about it yet at this point.