Well, hello everybody! It's me, 
First and foremost, obviously, Splinterlands happened. When SPS was released and the daily airdrop started, things went completely nuts. Before those events, I held a region that I had paid 7,500$ for and a mediocre Champion Level collection worth maybe another 10,000$. In a matter of a few weeks, that added up to assets worth almost a million dollars. Things were crazy and they kept getting crazier by the day, a week of playing Splinterlands earning me more than my (great paying!) job earns me in the whole months.
But with that mind-blowing success some rather bad things happened as well. First of all, I realized that I had to work out my tax. Earning some tokens on a random blockchain that basically nobody outside of the crypto world has ever even heard about is one thing, earning thousands of dollars a day is something completely different, especially as I intended to take enough profit to pay for everything I had ever invested in Splinterlands. Figuring out how everything worked literally took me months, trying to find a solid tax advisor, working through countless articles all coming to slightly different conclusions. In the end, I've had a legal opinion created for me by a consultant specializing in crypto law so I finally had some peace of mind about that whole matter.
But figuring out taxation for my Splinterlands earning was only a part of the equation. It also made me realize just how much German tax law hates Hive and anything associated with it. Receiving (at least parts) of the Hive staked as Hive Power and all the 2nd layer tokens you earn on top of it - it's quite the nightmare if you don't know how to handle everything. To be frank, I've panicked a bit when I realized just how complicated that whole stuff was and just as with Splinterlands, it took a long time to figure out how I could use Hive without burning myself through taxation. By the time I got there and would have been prepared to start blogging again, other things had happened as well, though.
I was foolish enough to more or less openly tell people I considered my friends about what was going on in Splinterlands. I didn't mean to brag or anything, it just felt like something important was happening in my live and I just wanted to share it. I'm not going to talk about some of the things that happened during that time, but it's terrifying how people change when they realize that there's potentially a lot of money to be extracted from a friend. Some of my relations turned toxic really fast and if I've learned anything from all that it's that it's best not to talk about it if you are lucky in live, period.
So I went quiet completely, only talking in the Splinterlands Discord and removing myself from all other blockchain business. With things cooling down a bit and a lot of free time at hand over the holidays, I finally had a long internal discussion about whether I want to start writing articles again or not and finally settled with a maybe. I felt like I at least wanted to share a short explanation about what made me disappear so suddenly and, frankly, by now I miss blogging quite a bit. It has been an integral part of my life during most of the pandemic and I've met some awesome people around here. I'm not sure yet if I'll return to any of these old places again and neither am I sure if I'm really prepared to start blogging again on a more frequent level but we'll see about that.
Either way, I'm still alive, I'm good, and I've won 3 Splinterlands tournaments in the last 7 days which kinda makes me talk a lot more about that awesome game again ;-)
So for now, thank you all for reading and I just might see you again really soon - cheers guys!
