That one time I tried to mine STEEM

It was the weekend of July 9th, 2016. My first full weekend of Steemit, in fact. I had trouble concentrating on work both Thursday and Friday (lower back pain wasn't helping) because I kept tabbing over to the Steem whitepaper. I had to get through it and try to understand what this was all about. It was so exciting. It felt like early 2013 all over again, staying up till the early morning on bitcointalk.org and discovering the blockchain for the first time.

I had written a couple Steemit posts just to test things out. One was a repost from Faceboook about my thoughts on July 4th. The other was a collection of thoughts I had also posted before concerning non-violent communication which was the best way I could think of to respond to violent shootings which had taken place recently. I then followed it up with my own #introduceyourself post, hoping to join the community and... to be honest... cash in! So many people had made hundreds, even thousands, and I was certainly hopeful. I got a whale or two to bite and was pretty happy about it. I could already tell this was a unique time in the history of Steemit. I was checking things constantly, refreshing my steemd page, checking for replies, and voting on new and trending posts. It was actually possible to keep up with the stream of new content. It felt like real community. Discussions about gender bias were surfacing (okay, let's be honest, they were more about boobs). The community was figuring itself out. Wang, the bot, welcomed everyone before being promptly down-voted. Dan posted Steemit's Evil Plan for Cryptocurrency World Domination. Exciting times, to say the least.

One thing I hadn't yet figured out was mining. I heard it made both pools and ASICs improbable, so I thought, what the heck? Why not try it out on my Macbook Air. I expected an uphill battle, and my expectations were surpassed. Homebrew doctor said I had a lot of cleanup to do. Libraries were missing. I had to create an alias or two because homebrew was doing it's own thing, naming wise. Compile errors. Didn't know to use --rsync to get the blockchain synced up, which then took a whole day. 500M. That was the size of the blockchain in the summer of 2016. The target was bouncing between 27 and 28. The queue was under 100. With my sad 7khps, I was seeing estimates between 300-700 minutes that I might actually find a POW. I mined all night Saturday and most of Sunday. I didn't think I'd get anything, but I was hopeful. I just wanted the story to say, "Yeah, I joined Steemit when you could still mine with a laptop over a weekend."

All in all, it's been a pretty exciting time. The price of STEEM went a little crazy and everyone was pumped.

It was my first weekend on Steem. It felt like something important just happened, something I'd been waiting for in the promise of blockchain technology. It felt like the future.