Crypto Noob: Alt-Coin Gateway Drugs

Some of the more veteran miners might forget the wonder, bewilderment, and shock they felt when they mined their first bit-coin or alt coin. The first thing I ever mined was XMD on a laptop while using Minergate. For awhile, I felt the "holy shit this cool" elation most noobs must feel. That promptly ended when I looked at Poloniex and the actual value of XMD. It was practically worthless, and I mine thousands of coins just to make a nickle. That's both time and processing power put to waste. It's no surprise that, eventually, Poloniex delisted XMD altogether. I promptly started looking for other coins that I could scrape off the Internet. Eventually, I ended up with a two card AMD miner using Claymore. I'm doing ETC at the moment, and I have no complaints. No.... wait, yes I do, and it is symptomatic of what I think noobs like me enthusiastically go through once start wading into the crypto world.  

Sometimes, alt coins are like drugs in one respect: the gateway syndrome. One coin is never enough. One miner is never enough. You have to move on to the bigger, nicer, more power coin and miner. Steemit is like that as well. It draws in the causal onlooker thinking, "Interesting! Digital play money!" Only, it isn't play money one quickly finds out. I discovered that once I did two power downs and realized that I easy had enough money to go back to the USA and see my family this summer (I live and work in China).  Thank you, Steemit! My guess is a number of newbies get a crash course in Bitcoin because they came to Steemit out of curiosity, first. As for mining, I am currently fighting the itch to buy three new AMD cards and go after some Z Cash to supplement the Steem, SBD, and Ethereum Classic I am already taking in. That brings me to another example. Burst.

My experience with Burst recently has proven to me that the gateway drug phenomenon is quite real, for me personally, at least. I have been looking for something easy to CPU mine for quite some time now. So, I got a 100+ GB flash drive, plotted it, and pointed it a Burst pool. I saw next to no results. I did the same with an 1TB external hard drive. Now I have 16 Burst coins sitting in a wallet with more dribbling in every 24 hours. So, now, I am thinking of running to the store and buying a 2TB drive and setting up a miner on an old laptop to increase this stream of income. But, then, I ask myself. Is that enough? After a month, will I be itching to run out and get a 6TB hard drive? Probably. Once you get the itch, you want more, more, more.

There is one distinction I must make with the gateway drug comparison. 

I am not comparing alt-coins to drugs. Narcotics are destructive elements and that can destroy lives. Alt-coins can be self destructive if you are overly obsessive them -- but that can be said about anything done with an insane amount of obsession. The gateway phenomenon with crypto currency is a good thing. A year ago, I didn't know what Steemit was. I had a vague idea what Bitcoin was, but if you started talking to me about blockchains, internet of things, internet of value, and megahashes a year ago, I would have thought you were talking gibberish or some alien language. Now, I am supplementing my income and building a retirement savings from places others hardly know exist. That's not destructive. That's a very positive thing I am grateful for.