My Second Steemversary - Reflecting on the past and projecting into the future

Wow! Two years already? There is some truth to the old saying, time sure does fly when you are having fun. It feels like I joined Steem a couple of months ago making my first shitposts and getting flagged by @steemcleaners. A learning process most of us are familiar with. Back then I had no clue what this platform is all about, let alone what a blockchain is.

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Fast forward two years and I'm a self-proclaimed crypto expert and a professional shitcoin trader 🤣

The Journey

In the time I spent here I've been through a lot. Many ups and downs and even a couple of moments when I given a lot of consideration to leaving this place forever but I'm still here. I've been through the roughest of times but I'm still on Steem, posting daily in the longest bear run to date, more motivated to continue pushing on than ever before.

A lot has changed in the two years I spent on here. I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate my success, reflect on the not so distant past and try to predict what future has in store for us and our beloved chain of blocks which became my second home.

As you are probably aware of, two years ago this place was exclusively a blogging platform where people across the globe could share their opinion without the fear of censorship. No strings attached, inoculated against the tyranny and dictatorship of big tech companies like Facebook.

Although I wasn't much of a writer back in the day — not that I am one now, but I certainly leveled up my writing skills which were nonexistent before — I was hungry for crypto and even more hungry to sharpen my skills in order to reach the mythical trending page because as I was told, quality translates into upvotes. Something I found to be untrue when big stakeholders started circle-jerking and bidbots were introduced.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

OG

Let's first talk about the Vanilla version of Steem which I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to experience.

Back then, the first and only bidbot was @randowhale and his upvotes were nowhere near powerful enough to get oneself into the trending page. If you were lucky, they would barely bump you into the hot section leaving the trending page for circle-jerks, @dollarvigilante and anyone who was preaching the gospel of blockchain and Steem in a well-worded, witty manner.

It was a hectic time to be a Steemian — not that it's any different today — because it required a great deal of determination and persistence to keep pushing out worthwhile content every day while getting close to nothing in return.

I was more than happy to get a couple of cents to a dollar every now and then because none of the other sites I produced content for were paying me anything and after all, this was crypto I was getting, not that dirty fiat I learned to hate. Cent by cent, I was slowly but surely increasing my stake on the platform.

It didn't take me a long time to find out what blockchain is and realize how it can/will revolutionize the current, centralized systems. Soon, I got obsessed with it to the point when I was spending more than ten hours a day doing blockchain related stuff. Whether it was reading, watching videos or writing about it, at that point of time, blockchain tech quite literally took over my life.

Here I found peace of mind and clarity that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. Simultaneously, I the potential that lies in cryptocurrencies. A potential of raising us up from the hellhole of servitude to the modern day financial system. And that's when it clicked!

I don't need to be slaving away at a nine to five job for the rest of my life if I play my cards right now.

So I began the grind

Pumping out content day after day, month after month, for two years straight with only a couple of days when I missed out on posting my daily article. At the time my main goal was to reach 10k STEEM as it would equal a nice 1$ upvote. While doing my best to earn by blogging I soon found out that my goal would be unattainable without investing some of that dirty fiat so I scraped everything I could afford to and bought 30-50$ worth of STEEM per month.

It took me an entire year to reach 1k SP but I was thrilled when I got there.

Motivated by my success, drunk from the dopamine hits of creating money through upvotes I was more determined to succeed than ever.

Then Steem became more than just a blogging platform

About a year into my Steem journey is when this chain of blocks took an unexpected turn as ingenious coders developed first Steem-based applications Dtube and Dlive. As I was not much into video content creation, I quickly turned from blogging to streaming video games on Dlive.

I devoted more than half a year to that project, pouring my heart and soul both into the content I was producing and into building a strong community of streamers on Steem. I reached out to people outside of the cryptosphere and onboarded them to Dlive. I spent hours on end streaming and even more time connecting with other streamers, commenting, engaging and supporting the Dlive community.

Shit, I even got completely out of my comfort zone and made a video for Dlive's football world cup campaign.

At that time I was a full-time streamer and a Dlive/Steem evangelist.

A massive hit right in the ballsack

Right at the peak of my "career" Dlive rogues pulled a fast one on us and vanished. Faster than I could blink twice, everything I was working for for the past six months went down the drain and I was back at square one. Although I had earned more than 2k USD streaming for Dlive this was a heavy hit for me and I needed to take a couple days off to gather my thoughts and figure out how I'm going to move forward.

When I got back from the mental excursion I knew that I was not going to continue streaming for Dlive after what they have done so I went on to troll them on twitter, exposing their cruel intentions and lack of integrity.

Tired of trolling, left with nothing tangible to hold on to, I returned back to my original mission, the grind.

With only one thing in mind — 10k SP under my belt — I continued the daily grind.

Being the poor mofo I am with little to no money to invest in something I deeply believe in, this way my only option so I kept on pushing and writing about Steem and crypto.

Dapplications

Soon Steem was upgraded with the addition of SteemMonsters, Musing, Actifit and Steepshot and I grinded the shit out of all of them. I was one of the first investors in SteemMonsters, back when we knew nothing about the game other than that it is going to be a card game. When Musing came along I spent more than four hours a day answering questions on there. Actifit I was a little late for the party but I still joined the platform and posted my first activity post to earn a small amount of STEEM. Steepshot was the bomb and I remember spending hours walking around with my camera, trying to get that perfect shot.

All of that was a great deal of fun but it took an even greater amount of my time and combined with writing articles, this took a massive toll on my social life. I literally didn't want to get unstuck from the computer.

I didn't even want to take a summer vacation as I knew I would have no internet connection and no way to go about my daily Steem activities so I said: "Fuck it! You are just not going to go this year. It's grind or perish."

Right about that time is when crypto started to take a turn for the best. BTC was pumping and so were the alts.

Happening faster than I could realize, the full-blown bull was upon us. Actually, it was the first and only bull run I experienced to date. SBD was at 10$, STEEM at 7$ and I was earning 2k USD a week!

Happy days!

Although I was earning more than I could spend, I literally didn't spend a single cent but rather invested all of what I earned into increasing my stake on the platform. In a matter of just two months, I jumped from 1k to 3k SP and I was ecstatic. There was no happier kid on the block than me then. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw how quickly I was gaining momentum and how quickly my stake was growing.

Those were some interesting times but they quickly withered away and soon STEEM was back at 3$. My earnings shrunk and depression kicked in.

Nevertheless, I was still grinding, day after day.

REKT

At the time, I got quite a lot of money from a business venture and I was eager to bump my SP but the price was still at around 2.5$ which was rather expensive for me so I decided to wait. With my finger on the trigger, I waited for months. Eager for the price to drop I was anticipating the day I would finally invest a hefty sum of those "worthless" papers into something I value much more than its current value.

When the price finally retraced to around 1.5$ I felt like it couldn't go any lower. SMT's were about to be released in a couple of months and the general sentiment in the cryptosphere was that bulls will reign supreme once again.

I couldn't wait for another day so I took my pile of papers and ran to the bank, sent it to the local exchange, bought BTC and converted it into STEEM, then powered up.

800 STEEM for around 1500$!

I thought I was getting a freakin' awesome deal. I was pumped about my purchase but soon I got a reality check. The coldest, hardest, slap in the face I ever received. In a matter of no longer than a couple of months the price of STEEM took a massive hit. Bleeding away it went from 1.5$ to 0.8$ and finally to 0.25$.

Needless to say, I was fucking devastated.

I could have gotten 7x for my money but I couldn't keep my cool and just had to pull the trigger.

It was then that I learned about dollar cost averaging and this expensive mistake is something I will never ever repeat again.

Back to the grind

Hunger wasn't diminishing, I stil l wasn't at 10k so I kept on keeping on. Though I needed a break from writing content so I picked up my camera, smashed through my comfort zone and started making videos for Dtube. It was a blast! Earning ten, twenty, thirty dollars for my amateurish work felt awesome. Especially compared to the pain and suffering of 8 hours a day of hard labor I had to go through every day, seven days a week, just to get 30 bucks at the end of the day.

Not like it was necessary, this once again proved how creative work on Steem is something I would much rather do than hard fucking labor. Even if I would get 10x less on Steem than I would get working my ass off, I would still much rather produce content for Steem than to work at some shitty ass job, for some shitty ass boss, earning some shitty ass pieces of paper.

Months went by, friends abandoned me because I refused to hang out or talk to them, and my social life has never been more pathetic but I was a happy mofo because I was grinding away, getting closer to the financial freedom I envisioned when I realized the potential of this platform and its respective token, STEEM.

I was creating more content, earning more STEEM and my SP was compounding.

A few months ago, a little less than one year after I earned my first 1k SP I finally reached my target 10k SP!

My dream came true and I was thrilled but the contentment didn't last for long.

I WAS STILL HUNGRY FOR MORE.

In fact, the hunger increased tenfold. I was not satisfied with reaching my long-term goal anymore and I set up an even more ambitious goal for myself which was to reach 100k SP.

But enough about my Steem journey. You've probably had enough of reading about it.

Let's get back to Steem

For a lot of us this place is more than just another chain of blocks. It's much more than that. Much more than blogging and definitely much more than just earning those sweet STEEM's. It's home.

It's our future. It's the future we've been waiting for.

Recently I wrote about the mighty benefits that go along with holding SP and increasing your stake on the platform. I feel like everything I wrote there is going to compound upon itself as time goes on. SP will get much more utility and so will STEEM.

With every new dapp, app and project that comes out on Steem, a new layer of utility is added to both Steem and Steem Power.

Steem has gone from 0 to 100, real quick. In just three years time it went from being just a blogging platform to becoming so much more than that. Hosting hundreds of dapps, rocking the StateOfTheDapps rankings and garnering a massive community of crypto enthusiasts over the shared love of cryptic currencies.

Back when I first got on here if you told me what this place is going to become I wouldn't have believed the word you are saying, and look at where we are now.

What's Steem going to look like in the years to come is anyone's guess and it is all in the hands of those who are building on top of it but whatever they come up with, I'm sure it's going to be awesome!

We are just getting started.

With the benefits of building on top of Steem, developers working on dapps on other blockchains will soon migrate to Steem, itroducing a whole new community of individuals to this place and all it can offer.

In the years to come....

• Steem Power's utility is going to increase a hundredfold!

• We are going to be the #1 crypto community on the entire planet.

• Steem is going to be home for tens of thousands of dapplications.

• Those who are investing in Steem right now and powering it up are going to be rewarded greatly.

• The ones that left will come back.

• Those that sold STEEM will never forgive themselves.

Don't get left behind.

We are all going to make it brah!