When compared to a lot of people I encounter, I'm relatively new to the concept of investment in digital assets and most of my decisions have been based on speculation and buzz. During my sojourn through internet land, I encounter people that are considered Investment experts and most of them basically spin the same thing in different packages. While I don't necessarily dance to their tune, I've picked up a thing or two since 2017 December when I joined Steem and made this here platform my most heavily invested scheme of all time.
I got into the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain investment through Steem. I earned my first couple dollars and used the money to save Christmas of 2017, it wasn't what you'd call an investment because it was on food and a new pair of shoe but it certainly showed the potential steem held.
...may not seem like much to most of you but is actually a lot to me
As time went on, I started grasping the concept of cryptocurrency value volatility and means of leveraging the variations. Investing in Steem was naturally my first course of action but with so little fiat then, my investment seemed rather insignificant compared to the prevalent value of Steem(about $5 at the time).
That first investment of about $40, which may not seem like much to most of you but is actually a lot to me was pretty much an epic fail and even though I recouped the money through blogging and content creation, it still lingers in my mind and perhaps is the reason why I don't necessarily fancy soothsayers aka investment experts.
Despite my first epic fail, I harboured thoughts of taking a plunge again but this time my plan was to invest from within. By June of 2018, Steem was pretty much my only source of income; it was from Steem I bought food, paid for alcohol and sometimes shoes when I get really big upvotes. The plan was to cut down on my excesses, socialize and hopefully grease a few upvotes here and there. This worked to a varying extent, and the Steem and SBD came through, and thanks to @blocktrades, I powered up lots of it.
The problem with Bitcoin is that there's literally nothing I could do with it.
Diversifying your portfolio is one of the most popular songs in the cryptoverse and is a tune I decided to dance to when I got me some Bitcoin to hodl. The problem with Bitcoin is that there's literally nothing I could do with it. I traded about $50 worth of Steem earlier in 2019 and up until now, that Bitcoin is just sitting there in my Binance wallet, waiting for something significant to happen.
I've come to terms with the fact that diversifying is probably not the best for me and while I always encourage people to do it, I find it to be a tedious process to keep up with all those portfolios. I got an EOS account because of a dapp called EOS knights, played it for a while and just when I thought I was going to trade in some more Steem, EOS implemented some fork that made my account virtually useless. I still have a small fraction saved in my "belemoisheir" account but I've misplaced the keys so that's just sitting there uselessly.
Despite the obvious deterrents, I still found some startups that looked interesting enough...
I think the major issue with my investment strategy is that I wasn't cutthroat and was more concerned about actual use of the platform. I read about people shilling XRP, Litecoin and a bunch of others that I quite frankly don't understand. With Steem, it was easy to understand; you blog, you get upvoted and you power up. With the other guys, it always seemed so complicated and depressing.
Despite the obvious deterrents, I still found some startups that looked interesting enough for me to throw some Dollar$ at. I invested a couple in a virtual reality platform called XrWeb and then some through ETH on VidApp. The bottom line is that Steem is the basis of all my investments and all my investments so far have been on digital assets.
The next plan? Well, I'm going to take things a step further by investing all my Steem and some Fiat on a Chess Dapp that I mentioned to the Steemleo community and got lots of encouragement for. The hope is to attract many more chess players by leveraging the social aspect of Steem and contribute to the elaborate winning machine that is Steem blockchain.