3 Years on Steem! What's it been like? - A Recount of My Personal Journey Starting as an 8th Grade Steem Adopter, and a Summarization of my Experiences

Hello everyone! I always love this time of the year. Summer always brings back fond memories of my first months on Steem, and it is always around July that I begin to feel a sense of pride in the work I've done on this platform, and a sense of humility in regards to the work to come.

Image source: Pixabay.com, License CC0, Public Domain

Every year, on July 22nd, I post an article about my experiences on Steem, and this year, my third for those who are curious, will be no exception. If you wish to read last year's entry, here it is. Now, let's get into my foolish ramblings :)

My Background Story

I didn't tell this story last year because it was in the first year's entry, but I now feel it is necessary to recount just because of how different the Steem/Steemit experience is for the new user.

My gateway into cryptocurrency was an antminer that my father (@remlaps) gifted me with for Christmas. I ran the antminer for several months, and, once a week, recorded how much money it had made. After 6 months, I'd only made about 30 dollars in bitcoin. The miner was slow, and recording its slow progress really isn't something an 8th grader wants to spend his time on, so I quickly lost interest in Bitcoin (and therefore Cryptocurrency). July rolled around, and I was spending most of my days sitting at home writing music or playing video games. One day, my father told me of a new Beta Platform called Steemit.com which was rewarding content in a cryptocurrency called Steem. Remembering my previous disappeal with Bitcoin mining, I stonewalled the idea of posting on it for over a week. After a week passed, he finally convinced me to take a look at it, and my first thought was the same as any muggle thinks when they see this platform:

This must be some kind of scam. Or illegal. Or there's some kind of fine print that will screw me over in the end.

But, the allure of posts on the trending page with $40,000 in payouts (or more) convinced my 8th grade self that it might be worth giving it a try. So, I created an account utilizing my initials and graduation year. I then proceeded to post an introduce yourself article, responding to any of the feedback I got (back in those days I wasn't nearly the "wizard" I like to tell myself I am now at formatting). When that post hadn't made anything more than a few cents after a couple hours, I decided to post a little-known fact about the first Bach Invention. I'd learned this fact when I auditioned for the Bryn Mawr Conservatory of Music and the interviewer (who is now my piano teacher) taught me about it. After this, I posted what I'd written so far of my first "symphony."

I went to bed, disappointed but not surprised, that all the posts I'd made hadn't made any money. At 1am, for whatever reason, I woke up and needed to use the bathroom. On the way back upstairs, my father (@remlaps) told me to check my posts. To my surprise, all of them (meaning the ones I previously mentioned) had made over 500 dollars because a user named @blocktrades had voted for them. Sadly, my first thought was:

This is too good to be true. This guy, @blocktrades, is gonna come back and unvote me right before the payout. He must be a prankster.

When that didn't happen, I was thrilled. The reason why I tell this story is that it is a reminder that Steem defies the odds. Even though everyone(that I've met thus far, including myself)'s natural inclination is to say that Steem must be a scam, that no good can possibly come from cryptocurrency, and that what Steem says it does is impossible to do, Steem continues on. Whether at 8 cents, or at 8 dollars, it rewards content as the community sees fit. And, for that, I am forever thankful to Steem and its creators. Though I'd prefer 8 dollars (hint hint, market). It was really embarrassing having the whole market turn around after having bragged to all of my classmates about how they should have listened to me about Steem, and how they wouldn't be invited to my bitcoin mansion. I guess Karma loves the cryptocurrency nerds.

What's Changed

Now, I will continue the tradition of listing what I've observed to change in my time on Steem.

I remember on that first day, there were several things that we can't even imagine these days.

• Posts paid out twice: The first time 24 hours after it had been posted, The second, 30 days after the initial post. This concept was quickly removed and replaced with a 7 day payour because it could not be sustained by the blockchain.

• Steemit had an Active category where posts with high amounts of activity would appear. I actually quite liked this concept though I can understand why it would be removed.

• The trending page was full of huge payouts (in the 10s of thousands). I think this was for several reasons besides the higher price of Steem. The first of these reasons is that curation wasn't yet conceptually understood, and, manually voting, there was not yet a percentage bar for voting. This, paired with the fact that curation bots were not yet popular meant that if a whale voted, it was with 100 percent of their voting power. The second reason I think is that the whales were trigger happy. They were all excited that their Steem was worth something, and were voting on pretty much anything just to feel the pleasure of giving out thousands of dollars in payouts. I used to think the fact that my first few posts made so much meant that those posts were special. I think its really that the whales who voted for them, happened to vote for them.

• Also, back then, the voting system was tuned to 40 votes per day rather than the 10 it is now. This meant voting at 100 percent voting power used .5% of your voting power. So, as you can imagine, curating was extremely different.

Also notably during this time, Steem was ranked NUMBER 3. It is now NUMBER 83. That speaks well for the other currencies.

• I remember during that summer something my father vested his time into was mining Steem. Back then, Steem used distributed proof of stake to select 19 of the witnesses, and proof of work mining to select the 20th. Hardfork 16 removed the possibility of mining Steem. I am sure that there was a good reason for this, but I was sad because we earned several hundred Steem through mining alone that summer. Hf16 also replaced the original 2 year complete power down period with a new 13 week structure (imagine having to wait 2 years to power everything down).

• After this, I think we entered a different period. The whales (and users) began to understand the concept of curating. And the initial bubble burst. Steem was not ready to sustain 4 dollars of worth and the amount of fair weather users that come with it. The bubble began to deflate, and the fair weather users left. We entered a period where the price was near 10 cents.

• Around this point, huge debates began to spark among the remaining community about where Steem should go. Many users said curation bots would be the end of Steem, many said that self voting would be. Around this point, whales such as @abit could be noted to be utilizing the downvote to enforce their views (I'm still salty about that Chopin article that he downvoted from 110 dollars due to the fact that the steemvoter trail voted it up that far). Either way, downvoted articles aside, those users were all wrong. Curation bots continue, as does self-voting, and as does Steem.

• Around this point, HF19 implemented a linear voting system as opposed to the original N². Overall, we didn't observe a notable change in our curation bot's rewards due to this change.

• HF17/18 removed the penalty (which had been there for as long as I could remember) for posting more than 4 times in a day. It also added beneficiary awards, which, at the time, were also a foreign concept for me. HF17/18 also brought us delegation. Which, back in the day, was conceptually cool to realize. If you'd told me that would be a thing in the previous summer, I would have been shocked.

• Since then, Steem's price has been a rollercoaster. I've gone from $75k in Steem to $3.5k in Steem (right now). And, I am okay with that. Frankly, the lower price periods are better for accumulating Steem (my post that @curie voted on last week is gonna pay out like 40 Steem, and there is less competition). Let's just hope it goes up eventually, and I get a scholarship for college (I would cry if I had to cash this out to pay for college).

• Notable within the last year was the rise of Steem Monsters as well as the foreshadowing of SMTs with the creation of Steem-Engine. I personally think these are hinting at what Steem will be prominent for: rewarding game playing, and the concept of tribes. Come on Steem Chess Community. We need a way to be rewarded for chess. Can I just say, never did I ever think I would hold 500 dollars in virtual collector's cards? When I joined, a game utilizing Steem was as realistic a thought as flying with cardboard wings.

• Something else new that's been added are interfaces such as Steempeak.com and Busy.org. My father and I used these platforms to fundraise for my school's marching band through the @rgkmb-unofficial account. We raised about 40 dollars in a year (after factoring the huge price drops).

• Also, I have created several Steem (and Steemit) shirts.
  2018 edition:
  
  2019 (Polo) edition:
  
  I'll make a post about these shirts eventually (there's a new T shirt too).

Yearly Statistics

This year, I have made curating:

@cmp2020 - 170 Steem
@cub1 - 601 Steem

Total: 771 Steem (an increase by 7.5% from last year's total).

This means I have given out through curation to content creators:

@cmp2020 - 510 Steem
@cub1 - 1804 Steem

Total: 2,314 Steem (an increase by 7.4% from last years total)

That means I have made over 1,400 Steem curating in the last 2 years, and I've given out over 4,000 Steem to content creators.

In the last year, my total Steem has gone up by 5,124 Steem.

This time last year, I was at 9,183 Steem, and I now have 14,307 Steem. So, in the last year, I have gone up by over 50%. Some of this was from posting and curating, and some was from moving from other cryptocurrencies. Either way, I am still no where near my 8th grade goal of becoming a whale without buying from real world dollars. But, I am excited to be growing my portfolio, and look forward to what can be done in the next year (I have some plans, let's hope I live up to them).

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this! I still have just as much passion for the Steem blockchain as I did in 9th grade, and 10th grade. And, I still think it will become a force to be reckoned with, with a marketcap bigger than Facebook's. Of course that is if Steem plays its cards right. I recently read an article by @yabapmatt about how Steem could do that. I tend to agree with a lot of what he suggests (specifically about marketing being the next step, and a need to focus on the macro in these hardforks). I hope that this article has helped to record what was, and what still could be. Have a nice year! See you in the next post!

(Note) In order to encourage meaningful feedback on the platform, I will check comment trails of users who leave superficial comments (ie "Awesome post," or "Upvoted.") and will mute any users who exhibit a pattern of leaving "spammy" comments.