Have you ever thought about miniscule random events that have a major impact on your life? I have had two such encounters in my 34 years here on plant earth. I guess if you think about it, all life changing occurences are based on a number of small random events but for the sake of arguement I will focus on the two most impactful in my life.
The first are the random events leading up to the night I met my husband. I was working at retail chain and I happened to run into a girl I graduated high school with. I had not seen her since graduation and we weren't particularly close. We decided to meet up after I got off work that night so I ended up going to her house and she decided she wanted to go hang out at the dormitory of the college she attended to meet up with some other friends. I agreed and went along. She left me on the front steps of the boys dormitory to go to the lobby of the girls dormitory to phone her friend Shane (now my husband)! While she was gone trying to call him, he came outside to smoke a cigarette. We began talking and I did not realize that this was the person my friend was attempting to get a hold of. I know it may not seem like much of a story but when I think back it's difficult for me to fathom that if I had not ran into that one friend, that one day, that my life would have been completely different!
The second random but impactful occurrence (and the main topic of this post) is how I found my way to Steemit. I had heard of cryptocurrency fairly recently but never really gave it much thought. Very few of the YouTubers I listen to talk about it but it was something I had at least heard about. What makes my arrival to Steemit random is that I wasn't even watching one of my normal YouTubers, in fact, it was a video by someone I had never heard of and it just happened to play due to the nature of YouTubes auto-play based on recommendations. As they were discussing the platform I found myself very intrigued and decided to sign up. The first day I didn't do much other than lurk and comment on a couple of posts. I wanted to get a feel for it first. I'm glad I did because through lurking I learned of the introduce yourself tag so I was able to properly tag my post which made it successful :)
The other concepts I am learning and why I am so grateful to Steemit's platform is very similar. It is slow-rolling and I'm basically teaching myself from scratch! It has been a very fun process and I'm loving every minute of it. Like all things, trial and error definitely plays its part. I learned by reading various blogs the concept of mining using your own computer. I was able to successfully download the file and use an idiot proof tutorial to help me get it set up. It Worked!! I was in business. I quickly discovered though that it was not going to be profitable and I would likely just end up damaging my new computer. So I stopped that but was detrmined to find other options.
Getting to the meat of this post I would like to provide you some gems that I have learned along the way by merely browsing this platform. I have discovered this info from a variety of users but I want to put it here in one place for the newbies that come into Steemit (likely from alternative social media sites like myself that don't have the foggiest clue about all this cryptocurrency stuff). I do want to apologize in advance that I do not remember some of the user names which supplied the information. I wish Steemit had a favorites button so I could refer back to old posts. Maybe in the future!
The first one is Minergate- I really love this one because it has by far got to be the easiest one out there. When you go to download the software the website analyzes your computer and tells you which one to download. Easy peasy! Once installed it has smart mining available which will automatically start mining the most profitable cryptocurrency based on your computers hardware and the exchange rate. You have the option of manually mining any specific coin they have as well. You can mine from their website directly but I don't recommend it because the h/s rate is extremely low. The software mines it much quicker and some of the cryptocoins have a blockchain height low enough that it is more feasable to mine with a lower grade computer (I hope I described that accurately). This is how the software running looks. As you can see it has a very user friendly GUI.
The next two are ones that I just stumbled upon today. They are Genesis Mining and Grantcoin . Genesis Mining appears to be stricly a cloud mining service. The idea is that you pay a one time fee for their service and a remote computer does the mining for you saving your hardware from untimely demise ;) So it appears to be the more you pay in this one time fee, the higher your h/s rate is ultimately leading to better profits. One thing I really like about is downloadable links to wallets all in one place! No longer am I fighting with google trying to locate the what and the where. It's all here -->
The next one is Grantcoin which a non-profit that is really taking the reigns in philanthropy. 
Thanks for reading! I enjoy learning new aspects of the cryptocurrency world as I'm very fearful of our current economic system and it's ultimate collapse. I am happy to compile and share things I've learned over time! So..If you enjoyed this piece please don't forget to upvote, re-steem, and follow me 
