1000 followers, the benchmark of a Lifetime

What a journey it has been on Steem, I have enjoyed every moment which is just making it more sad that I am quitting the platform forever.

Psych! Don’t think you can get rid of me that easily!

I learned about Steemit from a 2016 headline on Extra torrent. I would never click on those articles but this time it was something like: Social Media where you can Earn Crypto goes up 10 times in Value Overnight. I had barely heard about bitcoin and had no idea about the blockchain or anything like that.

I was given 10$ worth of Steem for free as an early adopter. Back then you had to upload pictures to a third party server and that was just too much of a hassle. I think I only wrote a handful of posts.

In 2017 I realized this was fixed thanks to the Amazon cloud service and posted again but it was hard. Everyone knows how hard it is for minnows, earning nothing on posts or just a few cents. And then it happened, a giant @curie upvote and then another one right after, we are talking a few hundred dollars. It struck my imagination big time.

After this, the speculations of 2017 created a giant pump, bigger upvotes were rare but kept coming.

At the height of it all, my full upvote with 300 SP was worth around 20 cents or at least 13, I am not sure.

I had put a bit of my own money but most of it was from earnings. On the other hand I had got 500$ worth of Bitcoin to buy Steem Power in 2016 but didn’t and I was glad too. However, I also got too much into alt coins since, they haven’t done well

Having never powered down and only sent a little liquid Steem on exchanges, all my hard work was devalued, such is life.

Since then, Bitcoin made a recovery which second gen crypto like Steem did not have which is to this day a crushing truth.

I recently saw a Brave browser ad on Insta where they don’t even mention earning crypto focussing on bullet points with more mass appeal like speed or anonymity. When you think about it BAT has been doing extremely well in this bear market. It is about as far up compared to last year as Steem is down which is 50%.

Blogging on Steem should not be all about the money but to neglect that it plays an important part would be foolish. Likes are the currency of many social media and no one wakes up to find out that their likes are worth less. In that sense, Steem has helped me become tremendously more mature towards money and keep a cool head. It’s good to be a critic of the World Bank and the Federal Reserve because then if you loose money with the risks in crypto, you take it out of their hands forever.

Taxes are a big issue but to this day in Canada, they focus on miners and other big businesses and I recently read that this is changing in worrisome ways. From my understanding it is considered to be a ressource for barter so I am sure that if you only barter 500$ worth of your ressource or less in a single year, they are not going to be interested.

Basically, my Steem is bags of cement in my basement and if I want horse feed, provided someone wants to trade, I can just get it with my bags of cement so long as I pay taxes on the ranch itself.

If I sell you my bags of cement for fiat, that is an entirely different story. It would be like selling stocks purchased independently so roughly 30% on all your profits goes to the Canadian government.

In that sense, NFTs can provide a valuable opportunity to build a virtual business I am sure because they can help keep bigger transactions above board or more specifically, bigger assets.

This is my limited understanding of the situation and I am probably wrong so needless to say that none of this should be considered financial advice. Further, you should only invest what you are willing to loose.

Anyway, this is a bit on my financial journey so far I have since become more and more successful at connecting with people and work with the blockchain's subtle but potent effect. I would love to keep writing about my journey so far, let me know if you have a favourite angle among the following points.

How Steempeak changed my life
Appics, a tool for boarding the masses?
Art on Steemit
what is broken with Steem?
Finding your inner voice

Let me know in the comments ;)