Why (and how) I invested in STEEM directly on Steemit.com

Well, I tried my hand at writing "quality posts" and earning STEEM rewards for my (wonderful? insightful?) content and, like many others I have often contended, as one other poster opined here, that Tits and Travelogues are Trumps, (or is it the whales' fault)? It's all so confusing...

What I do know is that I am a crypto investor and one of those investments is currently STEEM. But I noticed something, I bought 150 coins and left them in Bittrex, which I've done for other coins (though I usually move them to wallets and then to private keys for longer term storage). Simple, boring, static speculative investment. However, with STEEM, I read about the rewards and curator system, which I think I might only somewhat understand, and concluded "Wait a minute, as long as I'm a long term investor of STEEM, I might as well hold it at Steemit.com and use it vote (receive curations and interest)." This is interesting - this makes STEEM much different than some other buy and hold coins that are pure speculation. This is actionable.

And now, I have some juice in it too, in a way, I'm one of the ones who can decide in a (somewhat) meaningful way whether a post is worth an upvote or not, whether we are a tits and ass site or one about welding advice or beautiful crochet projects. But more importantly, now I can do it with a little bit of gumption. I ain't no eight million dollar whale, but I'm no $40 noob either. Now I can play around a little bit while I hold my STEEM investment. And earn with my votes, above and beyond static speculation. I like this. This is the kind of thing I tell other people about.

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I started dabbling in crypto somewhat early 2011. I have since been developing an ever-evolving crypto investment strategy for several reasons, which is for another post. Investment means something different to different people which usually comes down to what % of a portfolio the position or strategy is, and the actual amount. To me, dabbling is $5-100, investment starts at $500 and $2-3k or more is pretty serious money. Everybody has their lines where they are personally, and those are mine. So my investment of 150 STEEM at ~$4 is about $600. Not a serious investment, but not dabbling.

Here's what this looks like in the real (well, "crypto") world:

After 20 worthless blog posts, and some significant number of hours commenting and voting, my account looked like this:

Which put me at #3777 on the "whale list":

So as I stated above, it was time to make this transfer happen. I sold STEEM on Bittrex and bought about the same amount on the Steemit site:

Blockchain.info showed me the BTC status:

Which resulted in the deposit working as expected:

And now I'm all the up to #1271 on the whale list!!!!

But more importantly than lists, I like the feeling that I can cruise around the community giving upvotes that may apply a more meaningful dollar value to the posters and receiving curator awards for my effort that used to be $0.0003 or whatever. I mean, hopefully, I'm not sure exactly how the curator awards work. But I take those kinds of risks for this amount of investment.

If you want to be a STEEM investor, and you like using steemit.com's site (especially reading/voting) perhaps this is the way you want to invest as well. This post doesn't mean too much more than that, but I wanted to relate it anyhow.

Perhaps I could've gotten to $700 by photographing a caterpillar that a whale indescribably loved. But it wasn't in the cards. So have my hard earned money instead. I'm still hoping for the best with STEEM (and my investment), in either case! Maybe that's one of the beauties of STEEM after all?