https://www.winni.in/sparkling-vanilla-fondant-cake/pd/33242?rfcid=447
This is a slight adaptation to a post I did on blurt 2 days ago. One year ago and two days today I was introduced to block-chain social media. And because of that I found POB, and HIVE. If I don't burn up in a ball of flames here on HIVE because of that maybe I will do my one year post for POB also. Remember blurt is a sister chain you may not always lover her here but she is still family and two siblings can co-exist without threat to each-other. And that is part of the reason I still post here on VYB and even liked POB was that there was a bit of an acceptance for other thinking and posting without the consequences of the down vote. But sadly without economics things have really slowed down.
- Note all @ALL USERNAMES here pertain to blurt users I can not guarantee that they corrispond to
One year ago today I started on Blurt (and probably the first time I have used a sourced image since that time on this post). I must say it has been a good year and full of hope for more from the price of blurt. But it has not been disappointing either if you look at it from a whole.
How did I get started on blurt:
Around this time last year at some point I was chatting with @jacobgadikian about being interested in getting into crypto or bitcoin. I knew he was involved in crypto currency but I really didn't know what he was into or even what blurt was.
Jacob and I go back about 18 years. We were roommates when we studied abroad at the University of Ghana. We had some good adventures and found a good bit of trouble. 6 months after that we were both back in Ghana and working to start a business there that didn't work out. From that time we went our separate ways. He found his way to Asia and I found mine to Ghana.
When we talked in April of last year I was pretty broke as my business in digital marketing solutions for Hotels was beat up pretty bad from covid and I was trying my hand at a few things to make some money online. I was doing some wordpress web development and also uploading a lot of my photos to stock photo sites. I was not seeing much of a return though.
During this convo Jake was saying even with the blurt price being down I could make up to $10 on a photo post on blurt and that got me interested.
Within a few days he added me to a group chat on Facebook and also the discord for blurt and introduced me. I went and did a very simple intro post on blurt and was welcomed very warmly everywhere.
My early days on blurt:
To be honest I had such a warm welcome to blurt that after the first few posts I was feeling a little let down and it was looking like the earnings were not going to be that great.
Jacob challenged me to learn as much about the community as possible and to learn about what kind of posts get the best rewards. Prior to joining blurt like I said before I was mainly focusing on monitizing my photography online with stock photo sites. So I tried the same approach here posting a photo and then a bit of a caption. But I really wasn't putting so much effort into and personalizing my posts.
I had not found my voice yet, my audience and I had not learned about what sort of posts get good votes.
Eventually I found my voice and found that longer form posts with more photos and descriptions do better.
I also did not yet see the value in curating and it took me a while to understanding it, the powering up process and how votes were divided and distributed. That first week was a long one waiting for my BP rewards from my first posts so I could try my hand at curating too. I was very sceptical about blurt at first and even the sign up process using my credit card and the initial blurt I got with it was the only time I think to this day still I have got crypto from fiat.
After about a month or two I reported all of my learning back to Jacob and my interest in gaining more BP to be able to curate more. At this point I received my first Delegation from him and I was very surprised and honored. Overnight I became a whale with 1,000,000 in voting power. During this time on blurt before the last HF this was a substantial upvote I think in the early days my vote was close to 400 blurt if I remember right. This is when I started curating #blurtafrica.
Why did I start my #blurtafrica curation project?
This question and answer is dedicated to @practicalthought I am finally getting around to answering it. This post in general also is somewhat inspired from his lead.
I feel a strong connection with everything I do and Africa since it is where I have chosen to live. I am not living in Africa on a fancy expat contract so with entrepreneurship and when money is hard I often feel the struggle also even though I may have more of a safety net than many of those around me. I could see how blurt could be a big game changer for me and many Africans and I wanted to contribute to that growing community and help others while also helping myself. It is also where my interest is tied so the subject matters of many of the posts resonated more with my interests.
Many of the votes I give today are around $1-2 that means that the author gets $0.5 to $1. In Ghana for instance $1 now is almost 8ghs. The minimum wage in Ghana is 240gh a month. This is about the same as $1 a day or getting one of my votes each day on a post. This means that someone could easily make a Ghana minimum wage with one post a day that is relevant to #blurtafrica. This is by no means a livable wage but I am not the only voter on blurt thankfully. But this still could be life changing money if teamed up with curation and additional rewards.
A lot of the posts in #blurtafrica in my early days read like text books or self help articles, they lacked personality, and were smelling a little un-genuine and were very difficult to tell if they were copied or not from one source or another. I tried to steer with my vote authors to post more interesting and personal content with relevance to Africa and that identity. I think that @megadrive #instablurt movement started taking off in this time also and helped to move things to a more individual side with selfies. I think with a little push from many directions including my vote the community moved away from just posting a single selfie to providing a story with pictures and finding their voice also. It has been a nice journey to look back upon.
Have I bought or sold blurt?
Yes I have, and I am not ashamed of that. I learn best by doing, even if that lesson is sometimes hard. I don't think I ever really sold blurt before the HF making for 25% liquid blurt from each post. I have never powered down any blurt. I started a power down once to get some liquid to try to add some accounts for some friends and people I knew or because my liquid ran out but upon mentioning this on discord I had some nice donations.
I think that I started buying and selling small amounts of blurt when I discovered Proofofbrain and HIVE. I was then trying my hand at HIVE engine with some liquid blurt, sometimes I would sell a little blurt and buy a little POB, sometimes I would sell POB, or HBD to buy blurt. I even took $30 in BCH from noise.cash and bought some blurt. At the end of last year before the major price increase I bought a bit of blurt and during this price crash I have bought again. I have probably bought close to 10,000 blurt and sold at most maybe around 2,000.
What were some of the struggles in my blurt experience?
The first one like I said was after the initial honey moon period finding the value in consistent posting even though rewards felt low. I think that users like @offgridlife and curators like @r2cornell really helped to push me through this phase. @offgridlife was always ahead of the curve and showed that an inquisitive mind, creativity, and branching out into other networks can really make this work and had shown dividends in real world purchases like his VW Golf and Kayaks.
HF7 was the next one and this really changed the economics of the system and caused a little unease in the curators like myself and @r2cornell when we saw our votes drop significantly. But we held out and trusted in the economics and mathematics of @rycharde. With these changes smaller fish had a bigger vote and the whales came down a little bit to meet more in the middle. This was good for the community and even rewards on posts in the long run, and blurt has since went up so the reduction in vote has worked itself out in the end. This was the first time I saw a little bit of potential for friction in the community and where people get very sensitive about the $ involved.
The next development was the development of the upvote service conflict. As a young curator I was a little taken aback that the ability to delegate your stake was all of a sudden under fire. I was a little nervous that if delegations were taken away not only would I lose a lot of my income potential but so would the community that I vote for and curate. I had some conversation with Jacob about this at the time and even voicing my interest in growing my project as the community was growing and delegating out my stake that I had earned along the way to new projects growing out of the community.
Jacob has always had an interesting way of dealing with conflict and this really showed in his actions at this time. He said that I should not worry about anything happening to delegation and as any great leader does in this sort of system he voted with his stake. During that conflict he doubled my delegation to 2,000,000 blurt. I then started delegating my own earnings to some projects growing out of #blurtafrica community.
For a while after that conflict things seemed a little stale on blurt and then we are all aware of the the most recent issue that festered from this upvote service and delegation demonetization with the conflict that broke out and the subsequent exit and power down of some whales.
What has been some of my highlights along the blurt journey?
Of course each time I received my two large delegation was amazing and I felt honored to be trusted to use one of the cofounders stakes while he continues to build other baby blockchains.
I was also equally honored by many of the smaller delegations that I got along the way and the ones I still hold today to grow my voting power to vote in the #blurtafrica community.
I thank so much these accounts that have generously delegated to the community cause:
@chibuzorwisdom @fortune93 @princekeys @sabion @toluwabori @umarubj
The next major mile stone was finding my voice and finding the posts and stories I like to tell are also of interest to voters and readers.
I think my friendships and admiration for @offgirdlife and @practicalthought have been big highlights.
I started kind of shy and interaction has always been a little slow for me here but I feel like lately I have really grown to find some nice interaction with other posters @elkezaksek @freakeao @blurtconnect-ng @blurttribe @world-travel-pro (just this week) @bestkizito @photoblurt @blurt-mexico (what happened to you?) @angelica7 (the most positive person on the whole internet) @ononiwujoel @mineopoly @blurt-bot @blurtmob @gabikay @nabeeel and so many more. Please don't worry if I did not mention you here the appreciation is there and I could go looking for usernames all night.
The other great times were hitting my miles stones. 10k blurt, 50k blurt, 100k blurt, and 250k blurt. Those all felt good with the encouragement from the community. Part of what I love about blurt is that individual success is not looked down upon and it is celebrated much like community success.
What have my earnings been like?
I think this is very important and not only for my own reasons but also to keep everyone looking at moon and keeping going on blurt with consistency and quality posts and curation. Lets face it even though we are all for the growth of the community earnings are also important to each of us.
Here is where I am sitting at today with just under $10k in my blurt wallet. I have a bit more in some liquidity pools and also in my HIVE-Engine. I have had a bit of liquid blurt sitting there and I will probably do a big power up soon. Most of this can be attributed to curating with my delegated whale stake but in the early days most of my earning was from posting and it is possible to rise quickly in blurt with quality posts. I think that some of our Nigerian brother have also shown us that they can build nice communities and curation projects with even smaller stakes and I am sure they are seeing some return and growth from that. This current value is at $0.026. I will give an idea now about what this would look like as blurt grows. Lets round my blurt to 360,000 just for simplicity. Once again this is building off of @practicalthought last post. And it is interesting that our number for our first year are very similar, this means that our blurt experience is also consistent and re-creatable.
$0.01 - $3600
$0.05 - $18,000
$0.10 - $36,000
$0.25 - $90,000
$0.50 - $180,000
$1 - $360,000
$5 - $1,800,000
$10 - $3,600,000
Currently if I am consistent with posting and curating I can make $20 to $50 a day on blurt. Which in Ghana if it was all liquid into fiat I could retire on a little farm if it was to continue like that.
Will I ever sell my blurt?
Of course.... I am here to see a gain and even though I am investing and long term HODLing it is still important to take your gains. I have set some goals for sale though to keep things in check.
When blurt reaches;
$0.10 I will sell roughly 10% of my current holding. I told my wife I would buy us plane tickets to visit my home and family in the US.
$0.50 I will sell 25% of my holding and leave the rest powered up to continue voting and growing with the community.
$1 I will sell 50% of my holding and take some cash to help out my retirement fund, enjoy some, invest some in physical things (land and mini excavator) and make some more diversified crypto investments. I will continue to hold the rest of the blurt for curation.
Ok I think that this post is getting really long so I will leave it there. Thanks blurt for a great year and I hope to meet more of you along the way.
Man... your story is so more similar to mine than I had ever imagined. Blurt gets up to ten cents and I'm buying plane tickets. I wonder how I will pay my kid's college tuition and retire, but if Blurt goes up any more than I don't have to wonder. I don't think I make $20 a day. It's more like $5 a day but that's for doing something I would have done anyway, have fun and document it.
That is an amazing story. Blurt has a very bright future. So happy to have met you, only wish it was sooner and Blurt as well. But I feel I've gotten in very early and blurt is gonna have an amazing year.