I was actually invited to join at some beta phase, can you believe it! Why exactly, and why me, I don't know. But those were stormy days, I did't have enough bb, enough time, or enough courage to dive in just then...so I politely refused - something I deeply regret.
I was working on an alternative currency idea at the time. It had nothing digital about it. In fact it centered only on finding a parity better than gold to link the value of currencies to - one that would defeat inflation. So I became intrigued with using energy as a link between money and reality, because energy relates to production, and production lies at the heart of all real economies, and I was discussing the possibilities of this with several people on the www. Maybe it was this that one of the original participants had picked up - I will probably never know, as my records of that lie buried several devices and hard drives ago, maybe irretrievably so.
Anyhow, the name and the concept stuck. Then a friend re-invoked my interest in alternative currencies, also in Bitcoin, that I had also taken note of at it's birth , by mentioning crypto's earlier this year. This in turn stirred my by this time rather vague memory of 'steem-whatever' as a likely platform on which to learn more and to possibly work on.
So I 'googled' it, found steemit.com, explored it extensively, joined - and here I gratefully am, again pursuing the possibilities of a currency related to reality in a way that makes a lot of sense to me! Energy, after all, lies at the basis of our very existence.
Imagine a perfect currency, distributed in the perfect way, developed by members of this community, by making use of the technical means this platform runs on - imagine the income it can generate for this community and imagine the wonderful spirit of participation in establishing it that could come from making it work!
Thank you Dan, Ned - and all the others that maintain this beautiful platform!