Introduction : With a full head of STEEM!

I've been poking around in STEEM for about a month now, trying to figure out if this is a platform I want to get involved in and I've finally decided to take the plunge. Never really been one to like putting photos of myself on the internet and I do value my privacy so I had a bit of fun with my hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil photo. Hope you don't mind me breaking the introduce yourself convention :)

I'm a middle aged white guy, but before you start hating on me please read my story. I am happily married and a devoted father of 2. I'm a fairly passionate and driven individual. A little bit unorthodox and unconventional in the way I think and behave so I've had quite a journey to get where I am today.

Beyond my obvious stereotype I can be a little bit hard to categorise and I don't like being put into a box, so I'll give you a bit of my history and you can make up your own mind about who I am. Looking at it now there are distinct phases of my adult life, all have lasted about 5-6 years and each has taught me invaluable life lessons. I am just now embarking on a new phase so we'll see where that takes us....

1. The Corporate Wage Slave

Coming out of school I did what many normal people do and followed in my fathers and older brothers footsteps. I took a job as a computer engineering cadet at the local industrial plant that our town has historically been built around. It involved doing a 7 year part time university degree on top of a regular full-time working week. The expectation was that I'd be doing 60-70 hours a week between uni and work. The company I worked for is pretty soulless and are fairly big polluters. The pay was good but it was not really a place anyone felt passion for. Middle management wanted their pound of flesh and I learnt all about "The Bottom Line". I became a Weekend Warrior and was self-medicating with alocohol and partying (escaping) whenever I could. Eventually I crashed out when I started dropping subjects at uni and the pressure of expectation overwhelmed me. So I quit uni and work together, travelled a bit and tried to figure out what I REALLY wanted to do with my life.

2. The Internet Boom Entrepreneur

It was mid-90s and I'd learnt a bit about the internet but it was still very new. Most people in my town had no idea and maybe only 1% of people even had an email address. Even less had home access. The idea of a technology enabling the decentralised exchange of information outside of government and big media control really excited me. I was convinced the internet was going to change the world and I wanted to be part of the change, so I set up an internet cafe and a dial-up internet service in the middle of the CBD and started selling internet access to the public. I was probably working more hours than my last job, but I was invigorated and passionate about what I was doing so it didn't bother me. I must have personally introduced thousands of people to the internet and I got involved in eSports early (but it wasn't called eSports back then) I did a lot of work with adolescents and even found time to organise fund raising eSports events for the local charity youth club. The growth in the internet access market was huge, but I was just a little local player. In the first two years the number of local competitors grew from 6 to about 36 but there was room for us all. When the dot-com bubble burst though, the market changed from being focused on growth to being focused on capturing market share. Competitors started cutting each others throats and with price wars rampant it became a blood bath. The little guys were either bought up or sent to the wall as the game was now all about "economies of scale". I ended up merging with a slightly bigger competitor but that was just a stay of execution. I still vividly remember the day I showed up at the shop to find out my partners hadn't paid the uplink bill and we'd been cut off. We were dead in the water and my new partners were ready to walk out the door and close it behind them - let the chips fall where they may. I spent the next few days negotiating a fire sale of our customer base and assets to try and save the creditors and my old customers balances (there were a lot of family and friends in there!) but in the end, after looking after everyone else as best I could I walked away with nothing but a crappy old computer chair and a few cheap furnishings.

3. The Public Servant Idealist

I went back to uni and finished off a degree in Computer Science before picking up a government job with a volunteer emergency service as a software development contractor. These guys did some really good work in the community and my first task was with a team building an emergency management system which was both exciting and benevolant. I loved my first few years here and with my private sector work ethic it wasn't long before I was getting promotions. Years later I ended up as manager of the whole IT department, overseeing a staff of 20-something and a budget of millions but the job had changed for me. I wasn't on the tools being creative any more. I was caught in the politics of the organisation and spending most of my time doing conflict management. I was always the sort of person to break eggs while making cake and while that placed me well with peers and stakeholders who saw me as someone getting things done, it made me pretty unpopular with some of the staff I had who preferred things being a bit more cushy. My boss was a good guy and he was offering to groom me to become an executive. My star was rising, but the higher I climbed the more I could see how things were operating at the top and I didn't like it one bit. Politics was rife, as was wastage and conflicts of interest. Life as an executive would involve lots of public speaking, grandstanding and horse trading. I wasn't interested in any of that and I felt my integrity was being compromised with some of the policy being pushed down which I thought served our political masters more than the public interest. I was pretty miserable so again I walked away from what many would consider a great job. Many of my peers and staff were shocked but those who knew me well could see I was burning out and had to get away.

4. The Lone Wolf Risk Taker

Back out in the wilderness again I wasn't going to repeat my mistakes. I didn't want to work for someone I didn't believe in, I didn't want any staff to give me headaches and I didn't want any expensive business overheads that could send me broke. I'd always been interested in sports and had bet recreationally on them for years to the point where I was starting to get good at it. Logic, probability, statistics...these were all useful computer nerd skills I could use in the betting arena. I'd learnt a bit of risk management too in my last job so I decided to get serious with my betting and take on the Bookies. I could work from home, do my analytics, build my systems, work my own hours and enjoy my sports at the same time. Life became a roller-coaster. No safety net to speak of there were some massive ups and downs that threatened to turn me into a manic depressive, but I was gradually getting consistent and confident. The bookies hated me. Once they figured out I was doing arbitrage or was sharp enough to pick them off consistently they would shut my accounts down, but usually not before I got paid. I was making good money picking up a few short term development jobs and generally living the dream, but I was ready to go to the next level. I had the freedom to research whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted so I studied up a bit about global politics, macro economics and finance. I always knew the world was a bit dysfunctional but this was like a new awakening to see just how broken things are. I'd always been interested in the stock market and found a lot of similarities between trading stocks and trading sports. I realised some of my systems and processes might carry over so I started to joke with family and friends that I was "Going Legit" and getting into stocks. I've had some success, but the stock market is a shark tank and it's a dangerous place for little fish still learning to swim....

5. The Crypto (INSERT SOMETHING HERE)

This is where I am just starting out, so I don't really know what this phase of my life looks like. I'd first come across Bitcoin in 2015 and after a bit of a dabble and a few trades I'd come to the conclusion that Bitcoin was a cool idea but maybe a bit futile. Proof of Work was a waste of energy. Back in my youth spare CPU power was used in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) not wasted on hash power for virtual coins. I could see transaction times were not realistic for use as point-of-sale currency. Scalability was an issue and there were almost zero merchants accepting bitcoin as payment. I kept a casual eye on it but stepped away. It was early 2017 when I found time to take another serious look due to the emergence of Ethereum and smart contracts. I wanted to understand what that was about and as I went on a deep dive down the rabbit hole I saw some of the alt coins which were solving the issues I had identified in 2015. Proof of Stake to save power. Masternodes and fast transaction times. Potential scalability solutions. Of course the massive bull run in prices has also helped open my eyes to the enormous potential of blockchain technology once the mainstream catches on. I haven't been this excited about anything since I came across the internet in the early 90s. This decentralised technology is going to change the world. It may even be more disruptive than the internet and I'm finding I have a lot of the right skills and experience to be constructively involved.

So here I am. Arriving on STEEM to join an autonomous community and talk about cryptos, politics, economics and anything else I bloody well feel like. As I said in my opening sentence, I've been poking around STEEM for a month now and I've come to the conclusion the concept and design is brilliant. The potential here is enormous and I'm hoping I am going to be part of something important. The biggest question I still have is whether the STEEM system is going to work as intended to build an invaluable community or whether it is going to be gamified for the benefit of whales. I hope you will help me figure that out and maybe help me make a difference.

Well met!