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So the end of the year is upon us and of course it's the holidays but also time to reflect back on the year. I am taking a look back from when I started Steemit and it's only been a few months since I started in August. Prior to that, I was just in the same boat as most of you, looking for the next big thing.

Social media was a somewhat new experience to me since I haven't tried it since it was starting with myspace. Yes I said it, or even as far back as Xanga? Any of you remember that? I had my reasons for not continuing in social media and it was interesting to see how society has changed with social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Up until August 2016, I been learning my ways around the crypto space for the past couple years trying to learn new ways to progress in bitcoin and other crypto-currencies and Steem amazed me the most. A blockchain based social media platform was enough to spark my interests so I gave it a try and dove in. I was amazed at the amount people were earning. I didn't have much rewarding posts in the beginning but as I learned more, I learned I needed to have better content. So I learned more and started to see better results as I put some work into my posts.

Seeing so many successful bloggers I figured I needed to bring something to the table contribute something to this platform. I had some help brainstorming a project called @voteinterestpool. Seeing something like @steemsports have so much success and distribute Steem, I like that idea and wanted to encourage the same thing. My thought behind it was to have more transactions on the network, distribute to maintain and gain new users, and have a project a community help make successful and grow the platform. There's a big change of heart for steemsports and it amazed me on how quickly the community turned on them. I remember hearing from a lot of people saying "that's genius" or "it's great for the platform." I still think it's great they have that success and branching out and I'm realizing how many new people they could turn on to using the STEEM currency. I thought that was the point was to find way to expand and have adoption of the currency and platform. I do see the current issue and it is a problem but I think the community could of handled it differently. It is great steemsports is trying to change their model and have their own site and there still might be an issue but I'm sure there's a way to co-exist within the ecosystem without the reward pool being drained.

During my time with the project @voteinterestpool, I wanted to have the community to interact more so users could get on @steemspeak since there is a voice chat there and talk on the mic. For that they would get a rewarded by a post VIP created. At the same time, all the voters that voted on the post would receive a reward as well. I had a great experience with steemspeak when I tried it and been there since. I can't say that everyone has a great experience but I learn quite a bit from the community there so thanks for all the input, feedback, and taking the time to share information. Maybe it's me but it has changed since I first joined. To get back on topic, the project was doing well in the beginning, and I would go over a person's post and feature it on the VIP post and take hours setting up the post. With the hyper-inflation, the rewards started to drop and maybe not seeing much whale support eventually left me distributing a fraction of a cent worth of STEEM to voters and I decided to shut down the project. I felt if I am asking for votes, voters should receive a decent amount otherwise they are better off voting on something else and earn curation rewards. I am not a coder so I had to manually do the payouts and that took some time as well.

At this point, I felt discouraged and was getting ready to move onto something else. I had shutdown the project and tried to approach this platform from a different perspective. I did some tests here and there and I realized my approach wasn't going to work. I really believe in this and want to see it succeed and it's something I would like to be apart of. So from here I decided to learn how to become a witness. I had the idea to revive the @voteinterestpool project but as a witness. To help the network with transactions and overall performance and reliability. At the same time I wanted to revive the project but am a little weary with the recent backlash on @steemsports. I had no intentions of draining the reward pool and take earning from the project. Since starting it as a witness, the earning in steempower VIP earned would go to server costs and back into VIP as bonuses to distribute. 99% of what I have earned on this platform from this account and VIP has gone to distributing to others on this platform and powering up. I tried one time where I took out $20 worth to see what I get on poloniex. Now that I am running a witness you will see more transfers to poloniex to help with the cost of running a witness.

There's a whole lot to learn when becoming a witness and I am still learning now. It has been a bit difficult since I am not coder or in IT so it was going to take some time. At one point it seemed like the current witnesses aren't welcoming to new comers and I kind of had to run all over the place to just even get help with getting my witness up and running. The great thing about this, it helped me learn more and figure out on my own when I had an issue with my witness on hard fork 0.16.0. After doing more of my own tests, I was able to get it running on a single core CPU with less than 4GB of RAM. I thought I had a great find since everyone was telling me the minimum required was 8GB of RAM but eh, it's not a big deal. Now there's more to a witness than just running nodes. With all the division in the community lately I find it confusing to know who's real and what their intentions are. I am looking to learn on being a better witness and hope to become one for the community.

The year is at an end and I know my mindset and approach has changed on Steemit and what direction I take in 2017 still might be a mystery but the journey has been great so far and I hope to be able to be apart of Steemit in a bigger way.

Thank you to all those that helped me get this far on Steemit and I look forward to help the Steemit community grow in 2017!

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