How did I get on Steemit?
Image used with permission of my niece, @alannapendragon
...Let’s start at the real beginning…Bitcoin.
A gentleman at work, must have been just a couple of years back now offered another guy at work 3 Bitcoins for him to get him a coffee at the café.
I thought to myself, what the heck are these Bitcoins? And felt this was worthy of a listen in or at least a laugh :)
They proceeded to have an argument about the value of money and why these weird virtual coins called Bitcoin could be the future.
....Apparently this one guy was a Bitcoin miner??…and I had no idea what that was? And this other guy was just a regular skeptic on anything new.
The Bitcoin miner said “look I’ll give you 3 Bitcoins for a cup of coffee next door” “All you have to do is download this software wallet thing and I’ll give these virtual coins to you”
Now this other guy just shook his head..” there is no way I’m buying you a coffee with my hard earned money for these crap virtual coin things - just cause some dork bought a pizza with them”.
The argument went on for a number of days, but eventually the bitcoin miner, unable to convert the guy gave up and kept his bitcoin….True Story!!
Anyways a year or so passed and I was having a beer with a mate when he said “hey man I hear that bitcoin virtual coin thing is starting to be worth hundreds of dollars now and that even some other coins are coming out?, maybe we should investigate."
We spoke about it, did some internet searches while sipping our beer and came to the conclusion, that it seemed very technical and not sure we wanted our computers being part of some crazy global network thing…I mean what if it was used as a way to hack our computers…yeah, we were lame!
Anyways some time passed and suddenly articles started appearing about people buying cars, young lads not even out of school becoming millionaires, so forth and so on so our discussion over beer and bitcoin started again.
This time we agreed, I would be a miner and he would buy some with cash as an investor.
So I proceeded to download the wallets and found with my poor internet it was gonna take 27 days to download the Bitcoin one or anything similar and approx. 127 years to mine a bitcoin if ever!!….so I looked at some altcoins.
A little research and I went for Reddcoin, Digibyte, Vertcoin and some others instead.
I was unhappy to learn it was too late and the chances of me mining my own coins were slim, so instead I join some mining pools and did some mining with my home PC. This seemed great, until I got my power bill and noticed my monthly download was exceeded and I was now shaped.
I thought to myself, there must be a better way???…but sadly I gave up on the scene for a bit, leaving my coins secure in their wallets.
Some more time passed and my mate said, hey I’ve made about 3 times what I paid for on those coins, you should check yours out…so I did and found a nice little loot, not heaps but ok!
So I recommenced mining only to immediately find, it was going to take 100 days to make anything, seems people had caught on. So I decided against this and sat back some more.
On a completely different topic, I decided I was going to write a choose your own adventure book and get it done as an epub. yeah I'm crazy!!
To do this, I joined forces with my niece for some illustrations and was all set and started making a few pages.
Then life got in the way, so did the fact I'm not a good writer, well developing hehe…and I could see we wouldn’t be able to finish the book.
So I thought with my love of crypto and a half written book in hand, wouldn’t it be great if I could some how combine these two things? there must be a way!!
So I searched the internet : Crypto, publish your work etc…and found Steemit.
I signed up with a quick SMS, done nearly straight away, thought this is cool! and so much better for the environment and proceeded to convert and transfer all my alt-coins across to power boost the SP and presto!
Image used with permission of my niece, @alannapendragon
Welcome to Steemit lordnigel.
Nice to have a bit of background.
I should've known you had a bit of history with crypto pre steem.
You act like somebody who's already lived through a big, missed opportunity and is determined not to let it happen again
People ask why I'm so bullish on steem, and to be honest, it's because I wasn't bullish enough on bitcoin :)
Wise words Matt... always appreciate your insight!
You have shared more then a few good reasons why Its such a good investment. I've made some progress, and my thinking is changing. i.e. I need to up the stakes to gain some more benefits in the longer run - look forward to future discussions :)
Interesting read. First time I've come across someone here that actual tried mining Bitcoin. Sounds quite adventurous, except for the power costs and the potential in computer outlay.
Still, it eventually led you here with the opportunity to be a part of something even greater than what Bitcoin was designed to be.