Hi everyone,

This is my participation for the contest hosted by @dobartim. To join this contest, please check this link:
https://steemit.com/steemitultimatechallenge/@dobartim/45eugt-steemit-ultimate-challenge-8-weeks-prize-fund-2000-sbd-week-4-registration-is-in-progress

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My Story

I’m a believer that blockchain technology will bring many opportunities to people, including the achievement of financial freedom. Probably this is a one-lifetime opportunity, so i feel it is important to explain our friends and family what the heck is all of this. Sometimes is hard to explain these concepts, because are not easy to grasp at first. They are learned after some time, depending on the interest of the receiver. I also feel that we are in a “war” with the traditional banking system. This is the first time in human history that we have a technology that allow us to democratised the issuing of money. This have a lot of benefits as well as some disadvantages. For now, I’m not interested in discussing these pros and cons.

What I want to highlight here is the fact that the Country in which a live (Colombia) and the sister country of Venezuela, are passing trough difficult times, specially Venezuela. I live in a “third” world country, where government is very corrupt, banks services are expensive, minimum wages sucks, among others things that had created a lot of poverty.

Thanks to God, now I have a good job, after fifteen years of experience and lot of hard work, which cost me too much sacrifice of my personal life. It should not be that hard, but after all, I feel blessed, because now I have more free time to be spent in things that matter for my personal life and my family, so I’m very lucky for that. But not all of the people has this same luck and they are still struggling in their life. Our social and economical system does not help too much to improve quality of life of our fellow Colombians. There are many people willing to help, but their effort is not enough to provoke a great change in our society. As many of them, I also want to contribute to improve a little the well being of the people of my country.

When I watch my environment, I realised that is very little what i can do to change the society in which I live. Sometimes this becomes frustrating. This situation is even worse when I see what is happening with our sister country of Venezuela. Is not a secret that their government is worse than ours. This situation is causing that many of our fellow neighbours are migrating to Colombia, trying to survive in this country. So unemployment situation is becoming a big problem, both for the people of Colombia and Venezuela. This could be more dramatic if we consider that our economy is not performing well and the fact that we have to pay a lot of taxes, as if we were living in a developed country. Not to mention that we are going to elect a new president.

Anyway, that’s the life we have to live and we should move on. Somehow, we have to find a solution to these little problems. This force me to think on alternatives that could help people improve their finances. So I decided to study the financial system and the Forex market. After spending some time, I realised that this was a daunting task. Finally, I ended up trading cryptocurrencies, because they were easier to operate than forex. I had the idea of teaching trading but there were many youtubers doing that. So I abandon the idea and continue trading. In some point of time I bought SBD and STEEM. When I reviewed their fundamentals, I thought it was an interesting project.

The project was so interesting that I wondered why people still using Facebook when they can be rewarded in steemit. I also like drawing and art in general and I saw that Steemit offers a nice opportunity to show artwork. Considering this, I signed up to steemit with the aim of learn more about it.

After a lot of unsuccessful tests, now I feel comfortable with the plattform, because it has proven to be a real alternative that encourage people to produce content, to express themselves and what they think, and be rewarded for that. However, the rewards do not come immediately, they take some time. The learning curve is pretty difficult and some people abandon this. On the other hand, in our country Steemit is not well known, most of the people is still using Facebook and are reluctant to blockchain technologies due to many scams related to bitcoin. I thinks these are problems that should be resolver, however, I do not have the solution for that yet, but I know that other steemians are working on that. Considering all of these challenges, is a pretty good job to promote steemit as an alternative to earn some revenue.

Fortunately, I met some fellow Colombians which are also on steemit and they are also interested in the promotion and building of a steemit community in Colombia. After a lot of deliberation, the first community in our country was born: @steemitcolombia

I’m proud to be part of this team of hardworking and intelligent people. I’m also a moderator of their discord server and judge of the contest "Amo mi país" (I love my country), which are great assignments that I want to accomplish in the best way possible.

The community is still very small, but everyday we’re working hard to make it bigger and better.

My efforts don’t end here. I spent some time reading from other steemians to find ideas and inspiration, in order to improve the rewards of my posts as well on how to promote steemit in my country. One day I found a friend @clixmoney . He shows me his experience from his long journey of earning revenue from Internet. With that information, his journey inspired me to create a different kinds of post, which included a share revenue celebration, a change.org petition, and a creativity contest. His job as a community builder has gave me a lot of insight, which I had applied in my local community.

I can say that my life changed when I knew all of these amazing people who share the vision of changing the world by helping people, little by little, working hard everyday. This is my small contribution to create a better world and if more people works to help others, certainly the world will change for the best.