Hey Bryan, good to see you blogging here. Off topic, but you should blog about your post black friday experiences; SWC, the chilling police raid, and living in central America would be a great read for more than just the small poker community here.
Any particular reason you prefer storj to its competitors? I own some because I participated in the ICO and can hold the coins on MyEtherWallet, but I preferred Siacoin in the small amount of research I did: more decentralized and better file storage rates for users. And there are others on the horizon like FileCoin (Naval Ravikant will be involved) and Burstcoin (which I know nothing about). I suppose there is room for many in the space, but it would still be nice to invest in the best one.
And if you like the decentralized file storage space, check out Golem, which is like the decentralized computing power version of it. Since you are an old school bitcoin guy who probably prefers PoW to PoS, the idea of renting out computing power should interest you.
As for steem, I generally advise people to just use the site and not buy up Steem or SBD. You'll make more posting here than you would on facebook, twitter, or medium, and you don't need to invest in it to build up a following. There are some annoyances about it: a lot of circle-jerking, absurd payouts for shit content and the like, but you can taylor your feed to your needs and get a lot out of posting here regardless.
Again, welcome to the site.
Golem is a broken model out of the gate. I don't think businesses are going to be cool with having to buy GNT from some speculator at arbitrary prices, then spend arbitrary amounts of it (that can and will change from task to task) to get their work done -- and then, if they want to get more work done, buy that GNT back from the speculator again and pay him another arbitrary amount. It's a recipe for disaster when you get have to use company scrip and are forced to shop at the company store.
Gridcoin is the only actual blockchain-based project for distributed computing in production and paying people now for both CPU and GPU-based work on a variety of projects. Beyond the broken model, Golem is CPU-only, rendering-only until Clay at least, and god knows when that will be out.
Hello and thanks for the welcome. I will consider bloging about the past, but at this stage I'm more concerned with blogging about the current & future state of cryptocurrency - it is simply too exciting for me and seems to present massive opportunity. To reiterate my thoughts on StorJ, I only bought some because I thought it would increase in value relative to Bitcoin within a short timeframe. While I do think the nerds behind the project are awesome, I don't understand the project enough to make strong long term predictions. Essentially I enjoy gambling, and StorJ seems like a +EV wager.
As for Steem, this place seems cool and I'm definitely intrigued. I like it as a format for spewing my cryptocurrency thoughts. I like the idea of getting paid for creating content people like.
As for Golem, I've done only cursory research. I may use this Steem account to drill down the highest market cap digital assets & cryptocurrencies and post my thoughts on each.