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When a good friend of mine told me about Bitcoin back in 2011, it took me quite a while to take him seriously, because - as an asset manager - I was suspicious about some funny digital internet token. I could not understand how you prevent it from being multiplied at will. Since I have no clue about coding, I did not really understand what he was talking about, until he explained it to me as "digital Gold" and how it was designed that way. As a voluntarist in the tradition of the "Austrian School of Economics", I was instantly thrilled and Bitcoin and the whole new cryptocurrency universe became a passion.

That being said, after having spent almost 20 years of research of monetary theory, I consider myself as a monetary agnostic. I don't know what the best money is. But for my subjective taste and needs, Gold and Bitcoin are two pretty good challengers in the currency competition and I like holding both.

As a global-macro fund-of-fund manager, I was used to check any imaginable form of Gold investment, from physical to ETFs and all kinds of derivatives with more or less close link to actuall real Gold and there is not much I would wholeheartly recommend. So when I first heard about a company called "Vaultoro" and checked their service for the first time about two years ago, I was very impressed by the high transparency standards and low costs.

In the meantime, Josh Scigalla, CEO and Co-founder of @vaultoro, has turned into a good friend of mine and yesterday I spent a greet day at the Oktoberfest with him and Erik Voorhees of Shapeshift, when it occured to me that thanks to their combined companies, Steemians can actually turn their liqid STEEM into physical gold!

The best thing: it is surprisingly easy.

Just open an account at Vaultoro.com. If you follow this link, you'll use my referral link, a nice feature you will be able to use too if you become a fully verified user:

But you don't have to! At Vaultoro.com, you can buy up to $ 5.000 Dollars worth of Gold with Bitcoin, without having to do the full KYC process. Just make sure to activate the account protection with Google Authenticator.

Once you have your account you can convert your liquid STEEM into physical Gold in a few easy steps. I will show you the easiest way. There are also a lot more advanced settings for experienced traders.

Go to "Deposit/Withdraw" and choose "Instant order on deposit"

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Then click on "Deposit with Altcoins", pick "STEEM" in the dropdown menue and hit "submit":

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Now you see how much STEEM you can convert and where to send them:

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Copy and paste the address and memo into your wallet and voila, seconds later the STEEM are being converted to BTC and sent to Vaultoro:

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After 6 confirmations, I now am the proud owner of 0.332 g of pure Gold, stored for me in the Swiss alps by Josh and his team:

https://s14.postimg.org/r8f7eyd0h/shapegold.jpg

Thanks you guys for the excellent service and here is the proof that Josh and Erik can also handle liquid Gold.

Prost from Munich!

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