Hi m8 @nathanmars
I've been somewhat inactive the past 3 days so only just saw this and some of your other recent posts.
I can see you're really speaking from the heart in your video and for me one thing that was super interesting was hearing your journey in the early days. I only found your blog about 3 months b4 steemfest and then obviously we met in Krakow. So I didn't know all of the history of your journey b4 that point. Btws, I agree @hashcash is such a nice dude. I spent some time hanging with him near to the end of SF3.
I'm really sorry to hear about your experience with scammers in the early days. I've been around on steem for a long time too and experienced something similar during the bull run. I worked in a discord community where I gave my time for free, helping editing people's creative writing to a high standard. I mean I really gave my all to steem at that time. Between curating for curie, running a literary segment on Wshares discord show and running writing workshops in promo mentors, I was 40+ hours/week on steem activities. While dealing with the chronic illness that limits me.
Anyway, I've always been a bit of a cynical person. Not negative, just very wary, so I was lucky to be able to spot the two people who were scamming promo-mentors for their vote and I got them kicked for plagiarism. Also, one of them kept pestering me on discord for a delegation (I only had about 1000 sp at the time), he said to run a poetry competition and something just didn't seem right. So I did my curie style checking on his posts and found out that they were stolen.
On the positive side, I do think steem has many wonderful, genuine, decent people, but also - and partly because of the draw of higher rewards during the bull run - many unscrupulous people.
I feel like blockchain (and decentralisation) in general can offer a level of freedom that hasn't ever really been attempted before. What this can mean is the freedom for people to build amazing, world changing projects. But also that same freedom allows takers to leach value, and scammers to scam.
But I can see a future where steem can impact so many lives positively, especially in a future of mechanisation and increasing automation through AI. I've allways pushed for the idea that crypto/Blockchain, and particularly steem, could change global wealth inequality.
Ha ha, anyway.... I'm gonna cut this comment short b4 I end up in a full on rant 😉
It was good to hear your thoughts and I can really see where your coming from even more clearly after hearing your journey. We're on the same page brother.
I will give as much time as I can to helping push Seven77 and steem on twitter. Keep doing what you're doing Nathan, you're an awesome steemian 🙂