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One year in Steem

Today my Steem account celebrates a year of existence and there are many things that have happened during this time, I am very grateful for having found this community and being able to be part of it, not only has been a lifesaver of which I grabbed in the midst of this economic drift through my country, is also a means where I could meet wonderful people, find valuable content, high quality and diverse nature.

I will tell you my story, how I got here and everything that has happened to me so far in the community, read on until the end of the post, there will be gifts, sweets and fireworks ...

This is how my adventure begins

If someone has followed my account and supported the variety of content I share (not so much lately, I admit) will have noticed the eclectic of my person. In these last 4 months the Steem Blockchain has become my refuge, all this cumulus of great writers, musicians, philosophers, programmers, gamers, painters, designers, ordinary people telling their experiences, sharing their achievements and mistakes both in Steem and in life itself, all of them make me learn something new every time, making my day more interesting.

<All this crossing started long before, before I created my Steemit account in March 2018. Back then in the first quarter of 2017 a few months had already passed in which my extinct electrical maintenance company did not receive a new contract, there were no more invoices to be made, no documents to be drafted, no jobs to be done, there was nothing! For a while I only killed the leisure in the office playing Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm, but the economic situation worsened every day and I needed a new source of income, and this there in front of me all that time, a computer with internet. I tried a lot of things to make money on the web, from freelance work to RPG games, through online poker, auditing calls, micro-tasking and of course the criptomedas.

<It was then at the beginning of last year when in a telegram group I met @daninata who told me about Steemit, or more specifically about a game where I could win Steem. Several of the members of the group made the request to create our Steemit accounts and we waited a couple of long weeks, but we already made life in @steemnova, an entertaining browser game of intergalactic battles in which I would win a lot of SBD weekly.

Arrived by the game, I was left by the Steem

until then I had been a person anti social networks, sharing information on the network did not go with me and if I had a facebook was only because many times I needed to log into various sites on the Internet and nothing else, but for the money dances the monkey, so Steemit would give an opportunity.

As expected, my first post was a complete mess. I didn't know and I'm still not sure what content to share or how to make it attractive to others, but I saw many posts that earned hundreds of dollars and I also wanted something like that for myself, so I set out to study and improve.

It was then when I really started to fall in love with Steem and the "proof of brain", I realized the valuable original and quality content found in many publications; nothing to do with cancer found in other social networks. I learned a lot about Steem and how it worked, in theory.

A couple of months of love and hatred about Steem passed, @steemnova's earnings were not very significant and the game was consuming a lot of my time, despite having a lot of fun attacking the other alliances along with @daninata and @yoner, I was leaving aside online poker and the scalping which were the activities that brought me the biggest earnings at that time. Besides, I felt that ironically the more I tried to bring quality in my post the less people read them and only those referring to @steemnova had some visibility, until many more people started coming to the game and began to abuse the tag #steemnova and gradually these post also began to lose visibility, that's when for the first time I was disappointed by Steem.

In spite of everything, I spent very pleasant moments in @steemnova and in the telegram of @ultima-alianza, I remember the jokes, the recommendations, the memes, the SAC´s. All in the ally with so different profiles sharing something in common. In addition to @daninata and @yoner had made some friends @carlosgaluem, @fknet, @fiebrevinotinto, @joseromerogc, @ferflo, @eddiespino, @reinaldoverdu, @jimhutch, made up the "ultima-crew" some of them apparently have left Steem while others have persevered, a hug for all.

Hey you, there are more ways to win Steem!

<Despite being disappointed in some way by Steem, I continued reading various posts and published something from time to time. I found tools like @steemauto and @smartsteem that allowed me to use my voting power during my sleeping hours or when I was simply offline, power and internet failures were recurrent so I found them useful tools not to be completely inactive. I also discovered @busy and @minnowsupport where I could get a little support and started to support myself in the Spanish speaking discord communities and participate in some contests.

One of the competitions that hooked me the most were the chess tournaments @schamangerbert, during several consecutive Saturdays I attended punctually to the contest to practice this sport loaded with memories of my school days. Unfortunately the situation with the internet worsened to such an extent that I could no longer log on the platform of lichess.org and I stopped attending the appointment, maybe someday I will participate again, thank you very much @schamangerbert a hug.

<I also discovered @steemmonsters the game that would be integrated to Steem's Blockchain, developed by witness @aggroed and @yabapmatt, announced with fanfare to the four winds, this was going to be great and I wanted to be there when the party starts, so i did my part i invested my $5 in SBD, i'm not exaggerating to say it was one of the best investments of my life, i registered as a writer in their discord, it was definitive, i would create stories for the lore of @steemmonsters and i would get great rewards for it, but it wasn't quite so.

Steem Off

<For months my partner and I would update the claim to the telephone company without getting any response until today. Without having access to the Internet it was time to try to survive in another way in the middle of this "sweet dystopia" called Venezuela.

I started another type of IRL business, the new monetary cone was just coming out and there was enough cash on the streets, so I traded for a while, specifically I bought bread from the wholesaler and then traveled to the south of the state, to the mining areas and sell at a higher price. In the beginning I did quite well and I thought that I could dedicate myself to that for a long time and thus save to buy a vehicle or invest in a new company or form of business, until a mishap occurred which I will not share here, I just say that I realized that I was exposing myself to a great danger every time I traveled and that the best thing I could do was to abandon this practice.

^{My activity in the last months according to Steemdetective}

Steem On Baby!

I started to cashout the little I had left in exchanges and poker rooms thanks to an old 3G modem that I rehabilitated to connect to the Internet from home, a week later I realized that the @steemmonsters market was already working and that soon it could be played, I saw that my alpha cards were worth a little more than the current beta and I began to trade cards very timidly. Crypt scalping became an asshole! in a couple of days I was buying about 3 copies of the same card, I combined them to level them up and sold them multiplying what it had cost me by 1.5 I was making good profits but I limited by the RC.

When the game was ready I already had a decent deck, soon I would receive a delegation of 20SP to consume all my RC playing, I could do more transactions in the market but it was not enough, solution: rent SP to @blocktrades.

<With a higher SP I noticed that I received healing rewards more often, besides that apparently my account was now more relevant, so I decided to rent more SP, which gave me a very healthy RC, enough to participate in the giveaways that were beginning to make without stopping my cards trading. Also the @steemmonsters upvote bot that helped to raise my reputation from 35 to almost 50 points by means of the giveaways I started to make, gained followers every day, many commented on my post, my account came out of anonymity and began to become known, Thanks @steemmonsters!

Contests and Challenges

One thing is related to the other, thanks to the @steemmonsters giveaways I met @dosdudes and @o07 and since then I invoke the @contestkings mantra "👊 no upvote, no follow, no resteem" in all my contests and giveaways. Being announced in the @contestkings post has given great exposure to my giveaways, I have also won occasional @steemmonsters cards, SBI and Incinboost shares, I am very grateful to this great family.

At the same time @contestkings made me connect with wonderful people like @dynamicgreentk thanks to whom I won a good amount of SBI, I joined the @dynamicsteemians trail and got to know a new tool @share2steem, all this gave me a boost and encouraged me to upload content daily, thanks for everything friend.

I promised to upload content daily, but what content? Of course, more contests! I found the @elarca account and its poetry contests. Here I must clarify something, since my adolescence I have enjoyed reading a lot, especially science fiction, fantasy, philosophy. But never poetry, who really likes this literary genre is my wife and it was she who challenged me to participate, and so I did, in my second participation I got a second place with an ovillejo. I enjoyed learning about the structure of poems, metrics, rhymes, etc. And I was pleasantly surprised with what I could accomplish.

My WordPress Blog

If I had managed to make such a beautiful poem without knowing practically anything about poetry, what could I achieve if I set out to tell some of the stories that abound in my head? digging a little, I found the #MicroCiFi256 and #MicroTerror256 from @trenz, writing a short science fiction story was what I needed to put myself to the test, I made a very simple micro story, easy to read, with which I got a second place, this small achievement encouraged me to continue writing.

And of course, if I was going to participate in writing contests I wasn't always going to win, and more so if I was going to experiment, to "find my style" or something like that. All the stories in my head hope to be able to come out with their own form. I noticed how some writers receive rewards from @steempress and like a child who craves a candy, I also wanted that, so I created my wordpress blog thanks to @vornix people, now my quality publications would have a little more support, in theory.

CryptoPoker

I'm practically out of banking in the conventional poker rooms, so, I stopped playing for a while, until I bumped into @spl and registered at both lucksacks.com and scorumpoker.com, to this day I've won some SBD and SCR playing poker in these rooms, if you like poker you should stop by them, maybe we'll coincide and play some games.

On the other hand, I have to participate in the @crystalhuman poker tournaments where the prizes are @steemmonsters cards, so far it has not been possible for me to participate, due to the lousy internet I have at the time of the tournaments. I am still very grateful to @crystalhuman. I was the winner of a great giveaway made by him, where I won an alpha copy of each of the @steemmonsters cards by then my collection had a value higher than 200$, I noticed he's also casually celebrating his anniversary, so congratulations!

Committed to Steem

And so I have been integrating myself little by little in various communities with which I am very grateful, I became quite active, I began to publish articles in @steemhunt, use @steem-bounty and @dpoll in some of my giveaways, comment on each interesting post, talk a little more in discord. I set out to raise my Steem account to infinity and beyond, making the most of every tool and Dapp available. I joined the "Redfish Power UP League" and "The Curation and Engagement Leagues" that manage @paulag and @abh12345 respectively, in order to measure my growth in Steem with people who are also quite committed to the platform.

<And in the absence of writing contests in Spanish, I have tried to break the language barrier and participate with writing in English. I participated a couple of times in the #fastfiction of @jayna and in the #freewrite of @freewritehouse, making some mistakes, but at the same time correcting and learning on the fly.

I've always liked Japanese culture, I have a weekly commitment with @bananafish's "Mizu No Oto", and I was very close to deciphering the enigma of his great project "Quest In The Realms", also by participating for the first time in his "Finish The Story" I got my first @Curie upvote which filled me with joy, this happened just 2 days ago, a little before my anniversary in Steem.

Live off the internet, without the internet

In my home there is no access to a telephone line and to connect to the internet I use an old 3G modem of movistar, during the day the service simply does not work, it does not open the pages, so I have been forced to work in the early hours.

I had a schedule and a routine, go to bed early, get up early, prepare coffee and Steem On until 6~7 am, but recently move the rate increased enormously and becoming too expensive to connect to the Internet, which is why my activity in Steem has dropped considerably this last week.

For that reason I want to apologize for not sharing enough lately, I almost do not pass by discord to talk or leave comments in the post of others, for the first time I did not get to diamond in @steemmonsters and I fear for my resources in @drugwars for the next few hours. All that's left is to wait for the hyperinflation of my country to do its job and again it's profitable for me to pay for the internet service daily.

I'm here to serve you

<I often meet new people who try to do things well but don't know how and make a lot of mistakes. Images with copyright, misuse of tags, do not know how to use markdown or html, do not interact at all with other people, etc.. Every time this happens I identify a little with my early stage as steemian and try to help them, leaving a comment with a good advice, recommending a tutorial or something.

There are people and projects that help a lot other people in Steem and from which I have a lot to learn people like @crypto.piotr who is constantly creating connections between people by making them known through memos in their "transactions", I personally like very much to receive the "piotr-messages" keep me up to date, and inform me about good content that I might have missed, thank you friend.

<I am also very grateful to @help.venezuela, who recently added me to their voting list.

And of course thanks also to @feedyourminnows the project @scrooger and @oleg326756 who also support me in my publications for some time now, I invite you to participate in their weekly draw for a membership of their bot.

A everyone in Steem have my support, I am always willing to help, within what I can, sometimes I do not know how to help or how to support, I would like to have more SP, more RC, a better Internet connection, but well, this is what there is.

What's next

I have a couple of stories to tell, which will soon see the light. I know very well that it's not enough to have a good story, you also have to know how to tell it, and that's why I've tried to polish my narration all this time. They'll be here soon.

I want to help the other steemians, especially those who have just arrived and don't know how to get around on the platform. One thing I've learned in my walk around here is that not only by creating content you can win Steem. Also by commenting, participating, playing, you can win and grow in the chain of Steem blocks. I want to create publications explaining how to get the most out of all this, counting on my humble experience.

And of course, I can't leave @steemmonsters aside, if it wasn't for that game I wouldn't have returned to Steem, so giveaways and @steemmonsters posts will follow, and also other "cryptogames" like @drugwars who are about to release the new version of the game where there will be battles to loot resources. if you're playing @drugwars and need protection join @steemcartel.

Gifts, sweets and fireworks

<Yes! You finally got to the part where the gifts are, thank you for reading my story on Steem. if you really did it

I want to give back a little what Steem has given me and although my economic situation is not the most comfortable at the moment, I have learned that "the more you give, the more you receive".

To participate in the giveaway of my SteemAnniversary just leave a sincere comment, what did you think about my trip so far in Steem? how much does my experience resemble yours? what do you advise me? do you have any experience/anecdote with me and I have not mentioned/thanked you sorry?Do you want to give me 100 Steem?

I will add a small bounty to this post and I will be voting the best comments to receive part of the jackpot, plus I will make the following drawings in Steem Random Draw

• To participate in the draw for a @steemmonsters Gold Card place the #steemmonsters tag on your comment.
• To participate for 1 unit SBI tag #steembasicincome.
• Participa por 1 Incinboost share using the tag #incinboost.

Due to the length of this post I will be doing a separate version in Spanish, with other awards, you can only participate in one of the two publications and you can only use one (1) of the tags. Upvote and Resteem are not necessary to participate, but they are very grateful and appreciated.

And those are the gifts to hand out, then the treats:

^Source

And the fireworks:

^Source

Thank you all for being part of this community!