In search of a good tree

My journey into the cryptosphere began in early 2013 when I was six weeks shy of giving birth to baby number 4. By then I'd learned about honest vs. dishonest money and come to terms with the fact that our fiat economy, at least partially, was the latter. I'd even spent a few years trying to establish a barter economy using silver tokens as the exchange medium. I think I'd heard about Bitcoin before, possibly as early as 2009, but the day my friend mentioned it turned out to be fateful, as I got home from that encounter and immediately looked it up, then got involved.

The very first scam I fell for hooked me because it promised a rate of return on a principal investment. In fact, every other scam or failed enterprise or dead coin I ever got burned by attracted me with the same promise--that of providing a rate of return based on a principal investment that I would never have to touch.

Proof of stake coins were a huge deal for me, and after bagholding several failed ones (and by failed, I mean the wallets won't even run anymore), I was fortunate enough to discover a winner, Diamond (DMD), which for the past few months has been faithfully minting a bit of extra investing and spending money for me each month. Now that coin seems on the verge of hitting the big time, having recently crossed the $1 per coin milestone. I've sold DMD at all kinds of prices and will continue to do so with absolutely no regrets because I'm only selling the newly minted coins, never my principal investment which I worked very hard to build up.

Diamond is what I call a tree. You acquire a certain amount, and then you let the coin sit in your minting wallet and new coins get produced each and every day. You never cut down and sell the tree; you simply harvest and sell the fruit, leaving the tree intact to continue producing fruit indefinitely.

Steemit is also a type of tree. I can build up my Steem Power to the point where every time I write a post or a comment and upvote it, the tree produces fruit which I can use to either make my tree bigger or sell as fruit, again, never touching my Steem Power principal. The drawbacks for me of the Steem tree are first, that I didn't get in early enough to be able to truly afford it (Kudos to all of you who were buying up Steem back when it was only worth a few pennies!), and second, that I have to work pretty hard to get the fruit. No fruit is produced unless I actually sit down and post something. Having to work a bit for the fruit doesn't make it a bad tree, but it does compare a bit unfavorably to my Diamond tree which is going to produce no matter what I do.

There is another coin I hold that I was fortunate enough to be an early adopter on: NEM. Right now, NEM has soared into the fourth position on CoinMarketcap and lots of people are buying it for the first time because there is a lot of upward movement ahead. NEM is a great coin to have bought right at the beginning, but it is not a tree. I don't have enough to run a supernode, and although there is an ability to harvest new coin with the wallet, I have never been able to get that working consistently. NEM is a very technologically advanced coin and the people who hold it and make it work for them tend to be very technologically minded. For me, I have this great coin that is worth a lot, and which I've sold off a little at a time, but once I sell it all off, it will be gone. There is no principal that produces fruit. It's all in the size of the tree and how big or small a branch will I lop off today in order to spend the money on something else. Although I am glad to have NEM, honestly its greatest value to me has been that its rising price has allowed me to buy real trees. NEM basically funded my Diamond acquisitions, is helping my family get out of debt, and more recently it has funded my early investment in the VIVAconomy, and it will also fund some fiat trees I'm currently investigating.

When I started reading more about the VIVAconomy the big lightbulb moment for me was the realization that this is a tree! I bought a few crowns in the ICO, and then bought a few more. Assuming everything works as planned according to the whitepaper, and yes, there is still the risk that it won't, the crowns will produce lots of fruit which can be harvested at regular intervals.

But even for those who are priced out of crowns (like I would have been if it hadn't been for NEM), there are other aspects to the complex VIVA ecosystem that serve the purpose of a tree. The main one is the VIVA Investment Pool (VIP). A user (called vivo in the VIVAconomy) can slowly buy up VIVA coins at $5.50 apiece and then send those coins into their VIP account. That account will compound (now weekly, but soon daily) and when it matures (after a year or whenever the vivo determines there are enough coins in it), it will pay the vivo 24 VIVAs a day until it runs out.

Not only that, each vivo will soon have the opportunity to put their computers to work for the VIVAconomy, earning straight VIVA coins or VIVAs added to their VIP accounts. So even if you can't afford to buy some VIVA coins now, once the worker node program is released you can earn some by having your computer do some work. On a practical level this is not too different from leaving your computer running all the time in order to have your wallet mint proof of stake coins like DMD. It's a different mechanism, but the end result to you is more coin in your account. The VIVA project will also be launching its own social media platform similar to Steemit and you'll then be able to blog and comment and earn VIVA or VIP by getting upvoted.

With all those opportunities to earn VIVA coins, I would look at the VIVAconomy as a supertree, because it can produce fruit in several different ways and with all kinds of different entry points. For those who have means right now, there are crowns, but for those who are just getting started (hey, I missed out on the big opportunity to easily mine Bitcoins by getting on the train in 2013 rather than 2009), there are lots of opportunities to prosper just by getting involved.

Although I will always be on the lookout for new good trees, especially of the crypto variety, I think it's possible that I have finally found the good tree that will be able to keep me going financially for a long time. VIVA, where have you been all of my crypto-life?