My First Month on Steemit

On August 13th, one month ago, I published my first post on Steemit.

And, boy, it has been an exciting month!

@fabio and @capitalism recommended Steemit to me some time ago, but I was too busy finishing the first episodes of our animated series Captain Drakins' Bitcoin Show to have a thorough look. On August 13th I finally found the time to read some articles about it, which as a Bitcoiner I found quite confusing. Why would you need three different versions of the currency? Why is Steem heavily inflating? How can you make money with this? Isn't it some pump and dump scheme to make the founders rich?

I guess most of you asked yourself these questions or are still asking them. As it was easy to sign up and try it out, I put all the questions in my brain's "to be answered later" folder and just did it. I saw that several people I knew just posted a "Hello, that's me" article without much content and made thousands of dollars. So I wrote my first post to introduce myself and ended up earning about 1500 Dollars with it.

Not too bad. But was it real money? 24 hours later, I exchanged my freshly earned Steem Dollars into good, hard Bitcoins via Blocktrades and within minutes the Bitcoins were in my wallet. Wow, it really worked!

That same week we had our Bitcoin Exchange Berlin slated, a monthly meetup where newcomers can try out Bitcoin and ask questions. My friend and film editor Nastya a.k.a @film-editor suggested that we should also cover Steem, so I asked @capitalism to give a short introductory talk about it.

The talk went extremely well. Some experienced Steemians like @fabio and @knozaki2015 were in the audience and added their insights about Steem. We even had a surprise visitor from Hamburg, @mrs.steemit, who seemed to have appeared to prove @capitalism's claim right: "Steemit is like Bitcoin but with girls".

This meetup inspired me to invest more time and energy into Steem. I was looking for a topic for a new book (after having written a book about Bitcoin and Austrian Economics), so I am now working on a book about Steem. It will mainly be a book about people, so if you have an interesting story to tell and want to be interviewed for the book, please let me know.

As we have been organising film festivals and online film competitions for many years, I thought this could be a nice contribution to Steemit, so we started the competition Bitfilm of the Day. It's quite simple: we present a film that we like every week day, Steemians can vote for it and the most popular films wins the award Bitfilm of the Week and the prize money generated through the upvotes.

On my way back from Amrum some days later, I met up with @mrs.steemit in Hamburg who introduced me to @sirwinchester, one of the most active and successful Steemians in Germany. He invited me to give a talk at the Steemit Meetup in Hamburg on September 2nd, the first German Steemit Meetup (I don't count our BXB, as it was not planned as a Steemit Meetup, but just turned out to be one by chance). So I travelled to Hamburg once again (it's only a two hour train ride from Berlin) and it was definitely worth it. I met many other Steemians in real life, even @pharesim, a whale and witness, who could answer some of my critical questions.

One week later there was another Steemit meetup in Potsdam near Berlin, in a café that accepts Steem Dollars as payment - probably the first brick and mortar place in the world to do this. It was a small and cozy circle, @sirwinchester, @mrs.steemit, @soldier, @pharesim and @essra, whom I had met in Hamburg the week before, came to East Germany especially for this. Afterwards we went to Berlin-Kreuzberg to have some drinks and talk until late.

The next day we had another BXB meetup in Berlin, which was even more dominated by Steem this time. @sirwinchester and @mrs.steemit gave great talks about their experiences with Steemit, and we had Steemit's founder @ned as a special guest via Skype from New York. It was nice to have a chat with the founder of the platform that brought us all together.

Community is a word that is being heavily overused in the online world, but for Bitcoin there is a true community spirit that unites people. And for Steem this seems to be the case as well. I am happy to see to the announcement of a Steem Fest in Amsterdam where Steemians can meet up in real life. Unfortunately I cannot be there, as I will be in Buenos Aires then, but we are thinking to organise a real life Steem event in Berlin for next year.

If you want to be part of it, please get in touch!