I made it to Steem! (And how I got here)

Several months ago, I was playing a non-retail version of World of Warcraft on a private server named ExcaliburWOW. The server only runs the version of the game that goes to level 70 on characters, a popular expansion called "The Burning Crusade." I was looking for a way to transfer my Druid character from Alliance (the good guys) to the Horde (bad guys). Apparently, the preferred method of payment was in Bitcoin.

Up to then, I had heard very little of the cryptocurrency. But like most people, it was related to MTGox and the hacking years ago, and I had thought it all but dead.

I looked into getting some bitcoin to make my character transfer and lo-and-behold, it was worth hundreds of dollars! I couldn't believe it. Something didn't make sense.

In the course of learning more about how to acquire some through Coinbase, I felt reluctant to spend it on the character transfer. In fact, I bought more of it and tried to trade the highs and lows in Coinbase. But Bitcoin seemed stuck at it's price, and so I Googled videos and blogs to learn more about daytrading.

That's when I found out about Poloniex. Upon starting an account, I fell down the alt-coin rabbit hole. The DAO was just beginning, and my tax refund was coming. It was made to be.

I was all in. I bought 225 shares of Ether, which translated to 22,500 DAO Tokens. I told all my friends and family about the biggest crowdfunded project of the century, and that I was on the ground floor of something big.

When the DAO token launched, I was 50% over my investment for the two months of investment. I was shocked. I was thinking of what I would do with my riches, once the first smart lock was installed on an airBNB home.

And then it happened.

The DAO became DOA - Dead on Arrival. A hacker figured out how to siphon away $50m in Ether to a ChildDao. I held fast, hoping that it was something easily corrected. I bought high, and ended up selling low.

Now I was 50% in the red for the quarter. That's when I started looking at the other altcoins. I've made 2 btc on a pump and dump on a coin called Navajo, and lost all of it over a month due to everything from Bitcoin pumps, to altcoins getting wrecked by Ethereum hardforking. Today, I am down just about 10%, which I don't find all that discouraging. I've learned how to look at trades, whether they are pump and dumps (avoid them on the rise up) or spreading my investments into altcoins when Bitcoin falters.

Crytpocurrency is the wild west of investments, something we might never see again in our lifetimes. I'm not an early adopter but a just-in-time user, and happy that I came across STEEM during Polo's addition of it to their exchange. I am also a writer, always looking for a reason to write or something to fulfill my passion.

Why not fill it with STEEM?