In my first post on Steemit I wanted to share how I ended up finding this awesome site.

I am a big fan of placing sports bets on Bovada, MLB, NFL, NBA, College Football/Basketball and PGA tour golf are a few of my favorite sports to wager on. After a few weeks I found it extremely difficult to withdrawal the money that I won. I had 3 options to withdrawal some of my winnings:

A check by courier, that would take 10-15 business days, and a minimum $50.00 USD withdrawal plus fees.
A bank wire transfer, that would take 10-15 business day, and a minimum withdrawal of $1,500.00 USD!!! Plus fees of course.
Request a Bitcoin Withdrawal, and have the money in 10-15 minutes.

I was attempting to withdrawal $200.00 USD, so a bank wire transfer was out of the question because of the minimum amount required to take out. Plus I was not very comfortable depositing from my checking account to Bovada in the first place, but I wanted to give the site a try to see how I liked it. I wish I would have done my homework prior to joining, Bitcoin deposits/withdrawals are absolutely the way to go!! So at the time I had them send me a check by courier. Needless to say over a month later my check showed up with $25.00 in fees taken out of it, plus shipping!! So my $165.00 check from the Bank of Indonesia definitely raised some flags when I deposited it into my US bank account. Long story short it finally hit my account after my Bank held it for 10 days.

Immediately after this event, I started doing my homework on Bitcoin, and how I could use it with Bovada.... Before April of 17' I had no clue what Bitcoin was, and I must say since then I have been amazed at Bitcoin's and cryptocurrency's huge upside.

Bovada's customer service was very helpful walking me through the process of setting up Coinbase to buy Bitcoin, and set up Blockchain for the wallet. Transactions have to go from Coinbase->Blockchain->Bovada. Its a pretty painless process, and the only thing my bank knows is I spent money in Coinbase.

To take it a step farther, I thought of another layer.... I set up Paypal in Coinbase so my winnings can go from Bovada->Blockchain->Coinbase->PayPal.... If you really don't want your bank to know.... Have Paypal send you a prepaid Paypal Mastercard, and you load your winnings that you received directly onto that.

This process has worked well for me, and hope it helps someone else!

Since this event I have been doing a lot of research on cryptocurrency. I found Steem through one of Jerry Banfield's videos! Thanks @Jerrybanfield!! I have a lot to learn, but Steem is right up my alley!