Wading into the Steem....an Introduction of Sorts

Hello out there in the great big cryptoworld! Just recently opened this thing called a steemit account and after reading a few posts I thought i'd take the time to finally take a step out of my shell and introduce myself. My name is Jeff and I go by my call sign "6h057" or some variation of that handle, depending on what i'm doing or what platform i'm using. To give a little more clarity to my choice of chosen call sign, it is a variation of the original call sign I created "6h05750Ld13r" for the popular GPS game Ingress (i'm one of the many smurfs out there....please be kind, my froggy friends! ;) ) A slightly deeper reason for the choice is my love of all things technology, cybersecurity, computers, gaming, blahblahblahhhhhh.....I could trail off for hours on an endless stream of all things geek. One of my somewhat newfound interests is cryptocurrency and the art and craft of wrapping my brain around this wonderfully complicated topic. Friends and associates of mine shared about their exploits into Bitcoin mining and showed off their rather impressive looking computers which I later learned were called "mining rigs"....which befuddled me because I was used to the word "mining" involving at least a pickax or a shovel or at least .... at the VERY LEAST.....a small hammer. Curious, I googled the topic until my eyes were ready to rebel against me and figured out ..... "Well, my broke ass won't be able to get anywhere near affording a mining rig sooooo.....nevermind!".....right?

WRONG. Enter altcoins and the rest of the world of cryptocurrency. I found a small altcoin GUI miner for my ratty little Dell laptop and began mining......wait for it......Bytecoin. A rather low-grade, almost worthless coin that was the only one my I3 processor could manage to mine without getting so hot it could sear a tuna steak. I watched with glee as my coins gathered.....100......250.......500......515......until the first magic number I came up with, the amount I wanted to get to before taking the next step and hitting the exchange to cash in my coins in that palpable hope of reaching the ultimate prize......my very first Bitcoin.......5000 bytecoins. No one, and I mean no one, was going to pop my protective little bubble I was living in. Until of course I plugged in my number of bytecoins I gathered for exchange. Wow.......never did I hear a louder pop. Enter Lesson #1, This won't be quick at all, will it?

My 5000 Bytecoins earned me 0.00somethingorother worth of this crazy little thing called ZCash. Why did I get ZCash...I can hear some of you asking? Was it after carefully researching the coin, reading reports, exchange rates and making rational and informed decisions? Nahhhhh....it sounded cool so, i'm in! After this investment, I cashed more bytecoins in and invested in things like Ethereum (reminded me of my Dungeons and Dragons days so, sold!), Monero (sounded Spanish and I was craving tacos .... sold!), DigitalNote (sounded like long-term investing and made me feel all fiscally responsible and shit .... sign me up!) and others following that but their names escape me at the moment. Grand total? I had roughly $5.00 in this wild blue yonder I knew really nothing about at the time and had bought roughly 15 types of cryptocurrency. I felt diversified and solidly invested.....ahhhhh the power of delusion, eh?

So, where do I go from here? I decided to open up my steemit account to share my adventures in exploring this personally unchartered territory with goals of education, refining my knowledge of all things crypto, learning other points of view and investing strategies and well....just plain having fun along the journey. I'll post more when I can and regularly as I get more established and we shall see what this new field has in store! I welcome all comments, guidance, advice and .... yes.... even the trolls out there can come out and play too. I could use the sparring practice! ;)

Thanks for reading! Glad to be here! More later!