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It's early Friday morning in Vilnius and I'm going to record one podcast episode, draw some Pinky and Spiky comics and even go to the movie with @laputis. But I wanted to write this post first to help out @lildebbiecakes and other Steemians who have been active on Steem for some time, sometimes as long as one year and as a result have collected rewards in Steem and SBD but don't know what to do with them.

Here's what @lildebbiecakes wrote to me after I offered her help in figuring out how to power up Steem:

> Oh my dear friend, I’m embarrassed to tell you... but I have know idea what a blockchain even is, or how Steemit even works. I’ve just enjoyed drawing and entering contest, I know it’s sad, but true HaHa. I know absolutely nothing about computers really, or computer language. I have never had an interest to go on discord, and I can only hen peck when typing. I’m truly so thankful that you have mentioned powering up, and converting my SBD, because I like the idea that my vote value would double. Rick came home for lunch today and we discussed it, so he will help me out. Thank you so much Vidas, and for the offer, I greatly appreciate it❣️

Yesterday I accidentally looked at @lildebbiecakes wallet and discovered she has over 100 Steem and 38 SBD sitting in there. It means that she has been active on the platform and earned some prizes and upvotes, which is nice. Her Steem Power (SP) value at the time was something like 175 SP.

So I thought to myself that unless she is planning to transfer this Steem and SBD from her account to cash out or as a donation or as a promotion to bid bots, it doesn't make sense to leave them sitting in her wallet because it's dormant there and doesn't work for her.

What do I mean?

You see, the way Steem blockchain works (and I'm not going to flood you with every little detail in this post because it will only confuse you) is that SP collects interest over time (even more that having a deposit at the bank these days). So if you do nothing but have some SP, then after some time this amount would increase. That's one thing.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have more SP, your vote value will increase too. This means you will be able to give more rewards to other authors like you.

And the third thing is that if you are upvoting other people's posts at the rate of about 10 posts per day with 100 % voting power, then you are not only rewarding them but some of the rewards may come back to you as Curation rewards.

The only drawback is that SP is not liquid, you can't transfer it to someone else right away or to cash out, you can only delegate a percentage of your SP to another account to make it stronger, but that's another story.

It takes 13 weeks to power down SP. So if you decided to power down something like 13 Steem today, starting from next week, you will get 1/13th of this amount every week. This would be 1 Steem per week. This is devised to prevent the platform from collapsing if for some reason everybody would power down their SP at the same time. Clever, isn't it? Think about banks and the way they operate...

So you see, it's worth having Steem and SBD staked on the blockchain as SP. In short, not only your vote value will increase but you will get more curation rewards and more interest from long-term holding of SP.

So how do you do it? (Relax, it's very easy and quick process. It will take you 2 minutes or less. Maybe 5 minutes if you are doing this for the first time).

First of all, if you have some SBD that you don't need to hold as liquid, then you can convert them to Steem. You have two options: to do it from steemit.com or from steemworld.com. To convert SBD to Steem from steemworld takes 3.5 days and to do it from the internal market on steemit.com takes just a moment. Obviously for now you want speed so let's do it from steemit.com.

1. Go to www.steemit.com/@yourusername. Instead of yoursusername add your username, of course. Mine is organduo.
2. Click on Wallet
3. Click on the amount of SBD you see there
4. Click Market (You will see two options - Buy Steem (green) and Sell Steem (red))
5. On the column of Buy Steem click on Lowest Ask
6. Click on Available (in the Total you can adjust how much of your SBD holding you want to use, all or just a portion. For our purpose here we use all SBD to convert to Steem)
7. Click Buy Steem
8. Click OK
9. Insert your Private Active, Key, Private Owner Key or general password. I recommend not using general password here but Private Active Key. (Hint: You will find various private keys in your Wallet under Permissions tab when you click Login to Show and enter your general password. Back up them in a safe place so that nobody could seize your funds and your account) [I have a post about locating Private Active Key which you may find useful](https://busy.org/@organduo/went-to-steemit-but-don-t-have-any-idea-what-to-do-next).
10. Click OK.
11. Go back to your Wallet
12. Click on the amount of Steem you see here (should be more from what it was before)
13. Click Power Up
14. Specify the amount of Steem you want powered up (If you click on Balance, all Steem that is available will be powered up)
15. Click Power Up
16. Click OK (if you are asked to enter Private Active Key, enter it again).

That's it! Now the amount of SP you have should be larger, your vote value should increase, even if it's just a little, you will get more Curation rewards and your SP will collect more interest as long as you keep it staked on the platform.

Hope this helps!

Now I think @laputis just awoke and we are ready for another beautiful and snowy Friday...

Please let me know if you have any questions about your journey in the Steem ocean so far.