I received this email today and remembered that I had gotten another one recently that I had ignored. When I looked more closely into it I remembered the address to the site and it hit me what it was. My first Litecoin mining pool! I was reminded of when I got to learn about Bitcoin in early 2013 and when I gave up mining it at some point when the difficulty went really high. I stumbled upon Litecoin instead which was one of Bitcoin's, dare I say, first forks? I went to the website and of course I had forgotten what password I had been using at the time even though it was probably something unsafe and simple cause I didn't care enough back then to secure things (a lesson I learned in a harsh way later).
So I reset my password, log in and lo and behold I see this.
How crazy looking at the difficulty at the time and when I decided that its going up way too much for me to make it profitable anymore. What an idiot I was back then, or just uninformed or just underestimating the power of blockchain at the time.
I do remember when Litecoin went up to $40 with Bitcoin going past $1000 for the first time and me going back to try and mine a bit more Litecoin but it just felt impossible at the time. The 27 I had managed to mine when difficulty was still under 1k were more than I would ever manage to mine again in a lifetime. It is kind of a crazy thought, but the difficulty right now is around 9 million.
I'm not really making this post to brag about me being clever or lucky enough to mine some of these coins early when most of us that happened to hear about them brushed them aside. I'm just trying to prove a point of how easy it is for early adopters to earn a currency, but just as easy for them to decide to get rid of it because it doesn't feel worth to hold. Time and patience has been the miners and traders worst enemy in crypto and I have felt this mistake many times over the years. Of course that currency has to prove itself valuable over time as well else you're just holding something no one cares about buying, but is the risk worth it?
I don't know, I personally feel that even if Steem never takes off, if this becomes a failed experiment, I don't see myself ever selling too much of it. This invention and our activity and odds of happening to be here and this involved as we are today only happens once in a lifetime, I'd rather take the chance of holding something that might become worthless in the long run than sell all of it now and never be able to "mine" it back or buy it back before it blasts off into the atmosphere.
