That was a great post, congratulations. I have yet to make an actual withdrawal from steemit, one day I will. The higher the steem power (SP) you have the more valuable your vote becomes, and after you get to 480SP then you get a vote slider to vote with. To increase you SP you need to convert your SBD's to Steem, then power the steem up. The down side of the process is that if you ever want to start taking steem out, powering down it is called, it takes upto 13 week. But with higher SP, you can earn more on your curation votes, I still have yet to fully figure it out.