It took 1 year to turn my whole world upside down!

Some of you might know that I got in touch with crypto through steemit. What most of you won´t know is how it changed my world - so here is what crypto did to me:

I qitted my secure and well paid job as Business Development Manager in an aspiring marketing agency!

But let´s start in the beginning...

It was in July 2016 when my longtime friend @cass gave me a call and invited me to his place to show me something, that in his words will change the way social media is working forever. Because of my marketing background and my interest in the way people communicate online I agreed and went of to my friends house to find out what he was talking about.

We hadn´t seen each other for a longer time, so I was a little suprised when I entered his home office. I always knew he liked hardware and stuff, but his desk was full of screens, laptops and small devices looking like mp3 players like I have never seen it before.

I asked him: "Hey man, what the hell are you doing in here?!"
He answered: "I´m fighting for revolution!"

I laughed. He told me about decentralized money systems and how they can change the world we live in. I laughed again, but honestly not as loud as before. I always knew cass as a very powerfull guy, who wouldn´t invest time and money in an idea he doesn´t believe in and because in my opinion he is a very smart man I started to listen.

After a short introduction in Bitcoin he told me about bitshares and while I tried to understand what the hell he was talking about he switched over to steemit. I was impressed of the idea that every community member should get paid instead of just some people by running a business earning money for selling other peoples attention to advertisers.

When I´m thinking of this moment today a line from the Tron Legacy OST always hits my brain. It´s at 0:34 min - enjoy!

Even if I have done this in person before I think it´s time to do it again in an official manner:

@cass thank you for opening my eyes to a world I thought I´d never see!

Sometimes, when the whole system is fucking me up as much as it never did before it really hurts and I wish I would never have entered that god damn rabbit hole, but as we both know it´s important to show people what is happening and that it´s important to start the fire and fight for revolution!

I love you!

(I just cried while typing this. Sorry folks, but I´m not as tough as you might thought)

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Back home I posted my first articles to get a feeling for steemit. Because I´m not a writer or blogger or anything like this I thought about how I could help other people to get in touch with the idea of decentralized money systems. This was when I heard of the first steemit meetup in hamburg, organized by @timsaid and @sirwinchester.

This is where I got to know @pharesim and @fabio - two awesome guys I´m still friends with. Thank you for this, steemit! Together we travelled to another steemit meetup in potsdam where I got to know @knozaki2015 and @aaronkoenig and bought a beer with crypto for the first time of my life

After all this @pharesim and me decided to start a project called @steemit.academy and after some conceptional work we created the steemit ambassador kit, which is still ready to use at meetups and events, if you would like to promote steemit to bloggers, artists, musicians and everyone else who is creating great content.

Here is the link to the last update: https://steemit.com/marketing/@essra/steemit-academy-or-or-ambassador-kit-update-feb2017

From then I intensified

I attended the STEEM Fest in Amsterdam, visited several meetups, organized another steemit meetup in Hamburg with @timsaid, bought some books and started to talk about the whole topic with friends and even my parents.

It was early this year when the final shot was fired.

Because of @fabio I got a deeper look into our current financial system and behind the scences of money in general. This is where my point of view changed rapidly. I just wasn´t able to believe, that almost everybody in the world got deceived by a mad system and that we all need to pay for the "mistakes" of the people who are running it. For a lot of you this may not be great news, but for me it was.

I decided to fight!

By having no idea how to change things without a budget, without being financial independet and tied to my regular job I ran into DASH. I learned about the DGBB, had a closer look to https://www.dashcentral.org/ and figured out that this might be the chance I was looking for.

For me it has always been a bit difficult to understand all this crypto related stuff (and I maybe didn´t in the deep yet) because everything is always published in englisch. That´s why - before our first proposal - @fabio and me reached out to tungfa, who is a member of the DASH-Core Team and responsible for the translations of dash.org. He sent us the .yml file and we started with the translation. At the same time we got in touch with Mark Mason from https://www.dashforcenews.com/

Long story short - this is what happened after our skype-call:

https://www.dashforcenews.com/de/
https://www.facebook.com/dashforcenewsde
https://twitter.com/DashForceNewsDE
https://steemit.com/@dashforcenews-de

I´m very happy to be part of the team and I hope that our work will help people to build up trust in cryptocurrencies.

Good start, but not enough

In the past I had so many ideas to help crypto finding it´s way to massadoption, wether it´s through direct-marketing, workshops, public relations, event-integration or project-support for thinks like this proposal created by @fabio

https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dash-at-digital-finance-frankfurt

Even though I made my past employer the first agency in germany, which accepts crypto-payments: http://paart.one/ I never felt like doing enough for the massadoption of cryptocurrencies. Additionally I never really cared about marketing activities, which are manipulating people...

I decided to quit my job and this is were I stand right now!

I don´t know where this way will guide me and I don´t know if I can effort enough money to keep my current lifestyle, but I don´t care. The only thing I´m looking for is happiness and I believe that happiness will come to you, when you focus on things that really matter to you. For me this means I need to fight for equity and take responsibility by doing a meaningfull job that matters.

In other words (even if they are a little soupy): I need to follow my heart and help to build I world I want my children to live in.

(No, I don´t have any children yet, but I hope I will in future)

And a big thanks to @twinner @pollux.one @felixxx for chat and support. I like you guys.

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cheers,
@essra

#pardonmyenglish

EDIT: I deleted my original document, after people told me that publishing my signature may not be as clever as I thought before.. thanks for advice.