Steem what?

Steem is the first #crypto-currency I've been involved in. Sure, I'd heard of #Bitcoin but thought it was something for the underworld and the real techies out there. Never in my dreams did I think I'd start doing something that would let me get my hands on these fabled "coins"

How it started

My brother-in-law phoned me from Australia one afternoon and started babbling on about this new product called #Steem. He said to get my miners set up on #AWS and let the good times roll. I had no idea about what he was talking about and after he patiently explained what I needed to do, I still wasn't much the wiser.

He kindly set up my AWS account and servers and got me connected to the #Steem #blockchain so I could start mining.

This was quite late on in the initial mining event for Steem and he said I only had 3 days to try and get as much STEEM as I could. The top 20 miners on the blockchain were getting rewarded, which he said was generous and not that common.

I left the servers running 24 hours a day for this period and managed to harvest quite a bit of STEEM.

He then said I should sell a little bit of it, or convert to BTC, to cover the costs of the AWS. I duly did this and left a few hundred STEEM hanging around for a rainy day.

A little later on he sent me some links to the whole concept of STEEM and what the website / platform was trying to achieve. I thought "cool idea, could be massive when it takes off".

A few weeks later he told me the website was launched and that I should start writing articles, #upvoting other articles and generally get involved with #STEEMIT.

Last Week

Last week I get another frantic text from the bro-in-law - "STEEM is climbing, if you've got any left, I'd think about selling some more." I took a look at the markets and yes, it was rocketing up. It had been down as low as 0.0003 and now it was climbing up through 0.002 and even 0.005. I did sell a little more and then stumbled back across the #Steemit website. Wow, lots of posts and lots of money being made for some great articles. I thought, "I need to get involved again...". I've written a few articles since but nothing that has set the world on fire. As they say, practice makes perfect, so I thought I'd share this article, my introduction to STEEM.

Future

I have a feeling this thing will be MASSIVE. It's a great concept and by encouraging people to upvote accurate / interesting articles, it'll reduce the signal to noise ratio massively. There's nothing more irritating than trying to sift through a whole load of spam when trying to find something out.

I'm hooked and am looking forward to seeing how things turn out. I'm not involved from the mining side any more, it doesn't seem to be worth it. I am interested in the article and voting side of things. It's an exciting new community.  I'm glad to say I was there from the start and even if I don't make my millions from participating, it's a whole bunch of fun!