It's a lazy Saturday morning, on a short vacation between a natural building gig and the regularity of city life. The only plans today are enjoying the beach and cooking some amazing food with family. But while enjoying my morning coffee, I thought I may just type up a few lines responding to @themarkymark 's question on how I got here and why I'm still here.
What's the Deal With Hive?
The "here" could be understood as the Hive blockchain in general, the blogging platform in particular, or - since the question was posted on LeoFinance - that particular tribe that has since become so much more than its parent environment. Since all three are relevant to me, at differing extents, let me start relating my journey as it progressed.
Back in early 2017 I was looking for a place to blog. I didn't know anything about crypto at that time, apart from the occasional meme telling me about the sudden price increase of Bitcoin. Since I felt completely out of my depth in both finance as well as IT, I was hardly excited about this. Also, I couldn't imagine how this could have anything to do with my passion of writing. Until I was literally pushed in the deep end by being offered some BTC for some work I did. So why not, I thought, got a wallet, and embarked on a long journey I still can hardly believe.
As I was getting acquainted with the crypto space, I came across a blogging platform where you could earn cryptos for publishing posts. By that time I had just started a Wordpress blog, and out of curiosity I posted similar content on both. The difference was astounding: The crypto blog was so much more vibrant! I kept getting comments, through which I got to know fellow bloggers, exchanged ideas, took part in challenges, and eventually created some of my own. Oh, and then there was some money coming in too! Not much later, I abandoned Wordpress, and continued blogging for cryptos. Never looked back!
Came For the Crypto, Stayed for the Community
Admittedly, being noticed by big-time curators got me the occasional $100+ payouts, but in general I realized that as a small minnow I needed to work hard on getting bigger. No problem with that. This challenge became even more intense when we found ourselves in midst of a long and hard bear winter. But wasn't my original point sharing my thoughts with others? And that was going fabulously well, even if a post barely got me more than a few peanuts. So I didn't care.
There tended to be a nice resonance, so I kept blogging, engaging, and powering up. Just in case the price of the coin may go up sometime. And then eventually it did, and those peanuts started to look more like walnuts and eventually coconuts. Wow! So there IS some actual financial benefit in all this. By that time the finance crowd had their own coin and a cool looking front end. But there was so much more to come...
Careful Visits to the Lions Den
As I mentioned, my financial knowledge (and interest) has been somewhat limited, so I didn't feel qualified to write valuable content that would make good posts for the LEO community. However, I did visit LeoFinance occasionally to read what others posted, hoping to learn a bit about what to do with my cryptos. As you can see at the bottom of my profile, it was really not a lot. Until the WLEO/ETH pool was built.
Since I did have some ETH lying around in my wallet, which I had HODLed from 2017, I thought why not! At first I just took a tentative splash in @spinvest's "kiddie pool" but then I thought, I'd try the swimmers' section. In the end it was not too complicated, and I was looking forward to counting my earnings from playing bank. That's when the hack came, and the subsequent bailout by the LeoFinance team. Needless to say, this strengthened my faith in LeoFinance immensely. By this time I didn't simply see them as some shady characters on the internet promising you breathtaking returns, but more like the good guys from Hive, who were taking it all to another level. My initial FOMO had turned into a strong willingness to support such a dedicated effort.
Embracing DeFi With CUB, Looking Forward to More
As you may have guessed, when the other DeFi opportunity presented itself in the form of CUB, I was all over it. At first I just used my airdropped CUB and my liquid LEO, but then I started adding my Geyser payoff, and even some other unused crypto from my wallet. Needles to say, I'm super stoked about CUB, and all the possibilities it may hold in the future.
So what am I still doing here? Well, pretty much the same as always: I keep writing posts about my life, reading those of others, and enjoying social media the way I believe it's supposed to be. At the same time, I am using my crypto for more than just speculating on. I'm actually investing it, making it work to generate more wealth. Thanks to LeoFinance, I keep learning more each day, about finance and investment, topics I'd previously felt completely incompetent about. All in all, it has been a fun and exciting trip, but ultimately highly educational and very rewarding.