(image from Pixabay)
My first blockchain steps
I’ve been interested in blockchain and especially cryptocurrencies for quite some years now. Years ago I invested a bit of my savings I could miss at the time and started to buy some coins and do some trading. With the hype of 2018 the value of my crypto’s tripled. I was very enthusiastic. Then the bearish market came and soon I was back where I took off. For a long time I left all that was left in a wallet and stopped trading since it wasn’t really my thing. I’ve learned that making decisions on emotions isn’t very wise.
My discovery of Hive
About a year ago I was searching for some articles online when I stumbled upon Publish0x. The article was great and I spotted that the author had earned quite some dollars with it.
It reminded me of SteemIT where I had created an account in the past, but I never really did anything with. I decided to check out if SteemIT still existed and it did. But I soon discovered that a lot of the content was Chinese and found out about the takeover that had taken place.
That’s when I discovered Hive; a fork of SteemIT. When browsing Hive I saw numerous communities.
And a lot of them were quite active with photography.
Since I had picked up my old photography hobby during the pandemic, Hive looked like a perfect platform to share my photos, get some reactions and even make some money with it.
On August 18th, 2020 I created my first blog. My enthusiasm grew even bigger when my first post received 123 likes and 2.76 Hive. I made my first money by doing things I like!
Back then I didn't know anything about curation and audit trails. I was less enthusiastic when the following blogs didn’t receive as much as the first one. And I also didn’t get a lot of reactions where others made much more and received loads of comments. I really had to work on building my own network.
Discovering Hive
I'm curious by nature. In the first few weeks on Hive I dug into the concepts of the Hive blockchain. I really learnt a lot. I discovered 
It also helped to promote my posts in their discord channel.
Over time I discovered more tribes like 
Being on Hive I discovered a lot of other cool blockchain stuff. Either on Hive or on other blockchains. For instance I discovered some play-to-earn games like Splinterlands, Cryptobrewmaster and dCity.
Later on I discovered Noise.Cash via several posts on Leofinance.
It’s funny to see how these blockchain initiatives replaced my old social media and gaming habits.
And I’m even making money with it now…. Speaking of which….
Earnings
I would be lying if money isn’t one of the motifs to be active on here. When I started on Hive I invested what was left of my earlier crypto adventure which was about $400 US Dollar. I didn’t want to invest any of my savings. My goal was to generate more tokens by being active on the platforms.
I started out staking Hive, later on I added Leo and this year I joined Proof of Brain.
To get an insight of how I was doing I started registering my totals on a daily basis which I still do at the moment (only not daily anymore).
The graph above shows the accumulation of Hive, Leo and POB tokens over time from the beginning of November 2020. In nearly 10 months I managed to gather almost 2000 Hive, and 1800 Leo tokens.
Two months ago I started adding POB tokens to the graph which has grown exponential.
My focus was on gathering more tokens, not on the value of the tokens. Although I did register that too. At the peak in March the total account value of Hive and Leo neared the value of $4000 US dollar.
Then the prices went down for a couple of months. When I was daytrading this would make me very nervous, but now I just paid attention to the graph above that showed me I kept increasing the amount of tokens.
The upward trend on the end of the graph comes from adding POB to the graph, but also a recovery of the Hive price.
Additional earnings
But this is not all. This is only Hive, Leo and POB. As I mentioned before, Hive introduced me to some games. I used the earnings from these games to invest in other platforms. For instance I used money I made in Alien Worlds and Noise.Cash to buy CUB which is now auto-compounding in a Kingdom.
After using my BCH I set my goal on joining the 1BCH club with my Noise.Cash earnings.
When I add the value of both Noise.Cash and CUB my crypto portfolio has a total value of over $4000 at the moment. That is 10 times my initial investment of $400 USD!
Not bad for doing things I already did on non blockchain platforms…
The future
There is still a lot to learn here. I'm discovering new things every time; new games, platforms and financial/crypto projects on Leofinance.
My network has grown (almost 250 followers on Hive and over 2850 users on Noise.Cash), so I have a lot more interactions with other users.
I don't know what next year will bring, but I'm pretty sure I will still be around here.
Thank you all for making this place what it is today!
FriendlyMoose
Photographing is my passion. Although I like photography in general, nature photography is one of my favourite subjects. I often go out with my camera for a hike to capture the beauty of nature.
I'm using Hive and Noise.Cash to share my photos on a daily basis.
If you want to see more of my photography, then check out my channels:
FriendlyMoose photography on Hive
FriendlyMoose photography on Noise.Cash
I would love to read what you think of my photos in the comments. You could also contact me if you have any other remarks or questions in the comments of via Discord (friendlymoose#5717)