Yesterday I received my notification on HiveBuzz: Happy Hive Birthday! You are on the Hive blockchain for 5 years! By now I rarely follow these announcements, checking which levels I have completed, earning arbitrary badges. This time, however, I was quite excited, as it offers me a chance to look back and see how far I have come... and then write a post to celebrate it!
Discovering the Blockchain Blogging Community
Five years is a considerable time span, no matter how you turn it. Back in 2017 I was merely looking for a place to blog. I even created a page on Wordpress, where I posted a handful of permaculture articles. It was also around the same time when I first started getting into crypto, having bought my first Bitcoin only a few weeks previously. Becoming intrigued with earning crypto, I made a couple of posts on Hive (that is, on the "old chain"), and I was awestruck at the immediate results: Sure I got some money out of it too, but it was the community that took it all away.
While my writings and well arranged pictures looked impressive on Wordpress, hardly anyone bothered tovisit them. On the blockchain, however, there were always comments, questions, reblogs, not to mention upvotes. I was completely psyched, though I tried to keep my excitement in check by being reasonable (Got curated? Don't get used to it, that's just a technique to hook you. The coin price made a sudden jump? You bet it will go down again.) And it's true some of those $200+ votes were quite random, leaving the average one closer to a dollar. As for the coin's price... hehehe, we've all been following the charts, so I really feel like some grandpa talking about ancient prices of exactly five years ago.
Back in my day, young whipper-snappers, we would be paid hundreds of dollars for a cat pic, and then the token price would double by the next day...
Still, there is no regret in this wildly exaggerated memory, and hardly any nostalgia. In the last five years we've come a long way, and I much rather keep looking ahead than wanting to go back to the way things used to be back then.
Landmarks and Thresholds
The middle of 2017 was a wild time. Crypto was booming, not just BTC, but most alt-coins kept breaking record heights, and consequently tons of new people joined this exciting blog-based social network on the blockchain. As a result, there are a good number of people celebrating their fifth Hiversary around this time. Congrats all around! Many of them I've known for long... though unfortunately most of the OGs I used to interact with at the very beginning have fallen by the wayside. That's just how things go, I guess. This means, that with each year the people that share your Hiversary will be fewer, essentially getting distilled to a small core. So all of you who joined in the middle of 2017, we're forming a hard core (yeah)!
As I look back on the stats I've reached in my five years of blogging, it may seem ultimately like I am comparing myself to others. How prolific have I been in my posting? How well were my posts received? And ultimately what have I done with my earnings? In the end, all this doesn't matter so much. The race is long and in the end it's only against yourself. - Does anyone know who said this?
One number I keep looking at, though I'm still not sure how significant it is, is my reputation. According to HiveTasks I'm at 72.527. Some people who have started much later have far surpassed me on this, while others who had their fifth Hiversary way before me are still behind. This is why I don't place much importance to this number.
What I believe tells more about what I have done, is the 806 posts I have published, earning an average of 149 upvotes and 12.794 HP as rewards. And yes, this could always be more. I would have been happy to see 1,000 posts published in five years, but that ain't gonna happen any more. Never mind. Similarly, being still just under 20M vests, makes me feel like I've come just short of a major landmark. But hey, if you had asked me how much of a dolphin I was, I wouldn't have had a clue. So there! What I'm quite glad to see, is that I've made 5550 comments, compared to the 4791 I have received!
What To Do With All That Earned HIVE?
So yes, over the years my blogging managed to accumulate a nice pile of HIVE. And in the beginning it was easy to say how much my blogging has earned me, since I would neither buy it on exchanges, nor would I sell it. Right from the start I picked up on staking it, even converting my stable coin into the liquid coin, only to power it up. Eventually, however, as more and more options offered themselves to make use of my earned token without leaving the blockchain, I started diversifying. Splinterlands was one of these options, as well as the slowly emerging HiveEngine with its second tier tokens and connected communities.
By the time LeoFinance came out with various DeFi projects my earned money was well diversified. I'm not sure if I can use "well" to describe quality here, but the extent sure has been great... and always growing. Just before the recent crypto crash I calculated all my Hive-based assets to have surpassed all my other crypto holdings including Bitcoin, a few major alt-coins, and a number of shitcoins. Oh yeah, and still to this day I have not put any outside money into anything Hive related, only what I generated here.
Is There A Point To The Story?
Well, young whipper-snappers, your five-year-old grandpa wouldn't be writing a 1000-word post without a take-home lesson, would he? (Wink-wink - Or would he?) Sure, it's fun to brag, but honestly, there are many other Hiveans who have been way more successful in multiplying their funds, not to mention organizing communities, and improving the blogging experience for all of us. Of course, not all of us are coders or financial wizards, but we don't have to me. Simply interacting in a community and putting our money where our mouth is should be a good start. Everything else will grow out from there.
My message here is simply this: look around to see what you can do, and which ways you can support those who do what you like. Delegating HP is always good, investing into their project with their coin is another one, or depending on your skills and their needs, you can dedicate time and effort to what they do. Otherwise, being persistent is the key. Keep on keeping on, and even if you are just moderately active (like myself here) there are awesome long-term rewards awaiting. If nothing else, a wonderful community with amazing individuals. I believe that alone is worth the effort, but that is really just the beginning.