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I had the "bitcoin conversation" with a group of friends yesterday.  They've all heard the crypto-buzz and want to know what's happening and how they can get in on the action with this magic made-up internet money thing.  You're probably having similar conversations yourselves, there's a lot of it about.

So when we got to how much BTC I'm holding, I've got a small amount here and there, but quite a bit of it has passed through my hands (not hands obviously, because intangible) in the last year or so.  I was quite pleased when I sold a couple of ETH for about £80 each when I'd hardly paid anything for them.  But my BTC story is different and it's because of STEEM.

I haven't yet found (I'm leaving this open for someone to point out something obvious, but as yet unknown to me) an exchange where I can trade STEEM directly for fiat.  The only time I've done this was at Steemfest2 when @luzcypher was short of readies and I gave him some EUR from the ATM in exchange for a transfer of STEEM - in the hotel lobby.  He gave me quite a generous deal since it was ready money no questions asked and he's also naturally a generous guy, but opportunities for this kind of deal don't happen regularly.  When I get paid in SBD and I want GBP, I need to change it via BTC and that means the pain of BTC transaction fees and the volatility of that currency.  

So what does it mean for it to go through BTC?  Well, let's take an example from the summer that's easy for me to pull out of my records.  On 27th June, I exchanged 10.728SBD for 0.00642103BTC on bittrex.  Bittrex has a 0.001BTC withdrawal fee so with BTC at ~$2300 it cost me more than two dollars to even get the money.  I then sold it on localbitcoins for GBP.  In fact over a couple of weeks, I turned about $350 worth of SBD into GBP this way.  At the time, that was about 0.15BTC.  It's fine, I needed to take the money out, it paid for all sorts of stuff, *but* if I'd been able to wait, that 0.15BTC would be worth nearly $1500 today.  

The way I explained it to my friends was, imagine that you get paid in pure copper, but there's nowhere you can get cash for copper, the only way is to sell it for some gold and then get cash for gold and imagine further that this is happening at a time when the price of gold is going through the roof.  Of course, you *think* you'd have held onto the gold, but that's the benefit of hindsight.  Even if I hadn't needed it for essentials, there were plenty of people saying (as there are today) OK, this bubble's about to burst, it'll crash before it hits $2500.  Wouldn't it be great to just be able to sell your copper for cash?

So yeah, the need for a BTC-less exchange really boils down to making sure people can't rub my nose in the fact that I had to quickly buy and sell an asset in an inefficient way that has appreciated enormously since I sold it.  That's life :)