3 YEARS on Steemit 🎉 What has changed?

Today is my 3rd birthday on Steemit and I feel as if I should go out and buy myself a teddy bear shaped cake with three candles, just as my son Esteban had last year.

Or even better a STEEM shaped cake!

Am grateful to @steemitboard for alerting me to this info, without which it would have been just another day.

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What has changed since then?

In a word, everything.

• the way I earn money
• the way I store money
• the way I spend money
• the way I document my life on blockchains
• the way I interact with like minded people
• the way I am able to help others
• the way I continue expanding my knowledge of crypto

I had already left the banking system three years ago when I started using Steemit and was living a life of cash payments for my film work in Indonesia.

This is me at the 2017 Bali marathon with my DJI Inspire drone (decorated for the sake of my kids, who loved watching it fly).

Stop supporting the banksters!

With crypto I finally had a way to store currency outside of the corrupt & broken banking system and access it with relative ease when I needed it. In Bali there were two bitcoin exchange shops (one of them a 15 min drive from our home in Ubud) where I could exchange my steem for bitcoin and cash it out as the local currency. Once a week I did this and it could not have been more simple.

I worked my little socks off to earn 10,000 steem before the bull run of 2017 and was cashing out over $2000 a week towards the end of that year, when the value of 1 steem shot from $0.07 to $8. Yep, we were living a life of luxury for a little while thanks to steem.

Be in no doubt, everything works in cycles... including the crypto market and it is only a question of time before this happens again.

Crypto Angel

I am very grateful to a man I refer to only as 'crypto angel' because he prefers to remain anonymous. The Universe guided us together at the perfect moment in the jungles of Ubud. He needed a drone and I had one, so we spend the afternoon together and he told me all about this digital revolution and introduced me to Steemit.

We clicked immediately and he ended up hanging out in the eco community for a few months as my neighbour, where he continued to guide & teach me. When it was time for him to move on I gave him one of my cameras because I could see clearly that what he had given me was going to change my life forever and I wanted very much to express my gratitude.

The Gateway Platform

What Steemit offers us is a way in to the massive world of crypto. Needless to say, once we are earning steem, we must investigate more to learn how to sell it.

...and once we are selling it, it doesn't take long before we see how much more there is going on in this space.

Three years later

What we have now is a plethora of crypto based social media platforms, all of them jostling for our attention, seeking to push further, improving on that which has come before.

It can feel a bit overwhelming at times will the ever expanding crypto universe but we must follow our instincts and see where we feel most at home.

I do love steem, but I also love Whaleshares where I have found a more select group of friends and less spammy type comments.

In recent weeks I have been warming to Weku where @gavvet & @richq11 have been offering their support during my new found quest for consistent sobriety.

I love Bearshares because I was there on day 1 and have amassed what appears to be a huge sum, 160,000 Bear Dollars. Fingers crossed it will one day shoot to the moon with the rest of crypto!

Minds.com I toyed with for a while but struggled to keep up because it was not a simple copy/paste system like the others.

Now we have #palnet & #creativecoin who have enhanced on the steem system by permitting us to join them by simply including their tag.

I recently downloaded Appics on my phone (like a crypto instagram) and now that I have exercise and sport back in my life again, I am testing out sprtshub.io which narrows the focus to a specific subject. This makes a lot of sense to me and I look forward to seeing where this goes under the guidance of @derangedvisions

Who knows what comes next?

The key is keeping your ear to the ground and always being ready to adapt & change.

Okay, that's me for now.

Onward & Upward into the unknown...

Who is @samstonehill?

He was a London based filmmaker until he sold everything and set out on a barefoot journey around the world, currently based in the south of France.

He is travelling with his partner & two children and with no bank account he has been living on STEEM & crypto for over two years.

Sam supports @naturalmedicine because they are seeking to help us in ways which go far beyond money. Please come and join us on Discord

All content created for this account is 100% original (unless otherwise stated), produced by @samstonehill who invites you to use & share freely as you wish.

All non original photo sources can be found by clicking on the image