How I got to 50k HP (in 5 years)

in #hive3 years ago

How I got to 50k HP without investing money

Shame on all early dolphins

I found Steemit in July 2016.
I have seen people come and go; I am still here, still voting manually.
I never invested money and yet I am sitting on 50k HP.
This is my story on Hive.

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Sometime July 2016

It was a hot summer night, I could not sleep because my room was too hot and I was in my underwear, only.
I stumbled upon a new website where people got paid money for their posts.
1 STEEM was traded for 2$ and a short post with just some words could get you paid 30k US$.

The first account I interacted with was @johnsmith.
He just had had a payout of 30k USD worth of STEEM and was giving away coins for comments.
I felt like Neo in The Matrix; Sitting in my dark room, only the computer screen shining at me, I had opened the door to a new era of internet, forums, monetary transactions.
The late 90's - early 00's internet boom was long over, but this was going to be as revolutionary and this time I was early.
Crypto felt like the Internet 2.0 and it was a wild place.
I spent the next week diving into BTC faucets, Steem, mining, Linux... I was determined to get a piece of the pie early and I was expecting it to only become more desired as a currency.
SP inflation was at above 100% so all I cared about was staking Steem, while staying honest;
Every interaction I ever had on chain would be logged as long as this chain existed and this was a huge chance to build a reputation from scratch and I tried hard to always be aware of that.
I was sure being honest and friendly would pay off at some point; as lying and being dishonest would at some point come to light... I was not going to trip up...

I tried a lot of things, secretly made multiple accounts, tried different posting formats, was in steemit.chat constantly and tried to talk to everybody.
I encountered bots like @wang (worth its own post), the early miners and I met a few Steemians that I interact with till this day. Some I would later meet in real life and even visit in their homes...

For the moment I was obsessed with getting more stake as quickly as possible and I got really upset at some point, when I did not get enough votes for my shitposts.

Steem was held by only very few people and those whales had all the power. One of their votes was worth hundreds of dollars, but they would only vote on a few accounts over and over again, racing for who would be the fastest to gain the best curation rewards.
With an early hardfork this was slightly mitigated by introducing the curation reward cutoff.
Still, the important votes came from a few accounts and they kept upvoting the same content, daily.

There were the early dolphins like @stellabelle and @papa-pepper, raking in several thousands for each post and I was getting cents, if I was lucky. Looking back, my posts were terrible, of course.

The whales responded sometimes and explained how Steem would work almost like a trickle down economy; The whales would vote the dolphins, power them up and the dolphins would later power up the minnows and over time stakes would get distributed broadly.
There simply wasn't enough time in the whales' schedules to look for posts. Even though each of their clicks was rewarded with 100$... It felt weird and almost like they had won their stake at a bubble gum machine. I thought these guys must be multi millionaires and extremely busy. But this was also a chance for me...

I had high hopes and was looking forward to the day where I could maybe upvote 0.01$.
Everybody was rushing to get a piece and I thought with a lot of luck I might still get there one day. Little did I know...

Next episode

Next episode I am going to write about my first big payout - the 1000$ post.

Sort:  

I'm making more playing splinterlands than writing shitposts in a sea crap.
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I found Steemit in Aug 2016 and I was fully dressed! (but I was called @sift666 back then)

Following you now for more installments

looking forward to this documentation. I'm really curious how people came to Steem back then. How they survived, which were the biggest hurdles. This valuable information for finding potential new people and telling them about Hive.

I got on STEEM at the same time in 2016 and the way I found out about it was it shot up to 3rd on CoinMarketCap and I was like what is this..... Started doing research and did an introduction post which got a decent upvote. Within a couple of months most people left. The price crashed from over $3 clear down to $0.07. It was brutal.

ah right, it was a top coin once... Thx for sharing! 3-0.07 is crazy is brutal yes. Coinmarketcap still works for promoting projects. Even if it is only featured in the recommendation. Getting on the first site of CMC could also boost visibility. I wonder if the Hive promotion campaign has considered this.

Not to talk negatively because there are some cool things that have happened with HIVE but it is very misdirected and most people have learned to keep their money away from HIVE because of a lot of the Witnesses that are in control. They just have this chain setup to feed themselves and direct proposals towards themselves and their buddies.
LeoFinance on the other hand is taking a more respectable path to creating something that can actually grow and create a return for the community.
Nice profile picture by the way! This was me at the ski slopes recently!

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That doge 💪 nice

Yes, sure it is not governed by expert systems as in futarchy systems/prediction markets where you bet on the outcome of your proposal. Like, "my marketing campaign will increase the number of users by 10000 - deadline 6Month from now" and depending on whether you over or underestimated, your reward goes up or down. Vitalik Buterin writes a lot about those systems because they are collision resistant...but you need smart contracts for that. So sure, right now it is a popularity contest and probably have some degree of abuse of funds. You made me curious for Leo finance, I will look into it. Thanks!

Congrats on 50k HIVE.

Very interesting potted history.

life is weird

@tipu curate

So you finally leaving Hive?

I could not sleep because my room was too hot and I was in my underwear, only.

It's strange that you remember such details... Maybe the ladies are more interested in this bit.. 😄

Otherwise.. you know I love stories of the old days, I told you so in Krakow!

Congrats Felix. I particularly appreciated this passage:

Every interaction I ever had on chain would be logged as long as this chain existed and this was a huge chance to build a reputation from scratch and I tried hard to always be aware of that.
I was sure being honest and friendly would pay off at some point; as lying and being dishonest would at some point come to light... I was not going to trip up...

Like you I'm still here from those days with maybe half of your stake, still shitposting but rarely these days and never lucky again, feels like fighting for few cents with 3k or more followers, aint that a bitch.

Very interesting, looking forward to the next episode!

Those were the days.
I met a fellow blogger who visited Singapore.
He told me his friend cash out early and bought a motorbike.

Das war also die alte alte Zeit von der damals immer alle geredet haben. Na dann, bin schon gespannt auf den Rest der Geschichtsstunde.

I was in fairly early and remember some passive payouts. I think my best ever was worth about $200 at the time. My Steem was worth $100k briefly. Some may not realise there was a 2 year power down originally. And they complain 13 weeks is too long :)

It's been a fun journey. Didn't imagine I'd be an orca back then.

I was there on STEEM in July of 2016 as well. It was pretty nuts. I remember at one point they had to shut off account creation so it was like we were in a gated community going wild. I was commenting so much people thought I was a bot. Hahhahah

I'm looking forward to the next leg of the story. Pretty impressive you worked your way up to 50K HIVE over that time without bringing in outside funds and not having to cash out.

Here is the latest shit: !BEER


Hey @felixxx, here is a little bit of BEER from @quekery for you. Enjoy it!

Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your BEER.

Nice milestone!

Would be interesting to read your story, especially because your direct style ads all the flavour to it.

Wow🥰🥰 my friend. This is a lot of achievement and also a great inspiration for everyone else here on this platform. We are born to learn and survive at the same time. Weldone Brother. Greetings

Thanks Bro 🤗🤗

It feels like such a long time ago, I'm glad I missed those very early dayz TBH!

I actually joined steem just around November 2017 and it sure has being difficult.

Your growth has being quite immense. Congratulations