Awesome Milestone Reached
I have to admit it, if you had asked me about a month ago I would not have seen this coming. Well, I always planned to reach Orca status on Hive, but I didn't really see it being possible in the near term.
It turns out that the Steemit fiasco has some positive side effects, namely for people like myself who were well into the dolphin range, but quite a ways off from the next level.
With the current prices, I was about boost myself up to over 100,000,000 Vests, which is the entry point to being considered an orca on the platform. I guess now I have a little bit of influence?
Well , I think it's more of a personal goal/achievement more than anything else. For me, having a larger stake means that I can better reward deserving posts and having enough skin in the game to be taken seriously on the platform. If people know that you've actually put your money where your mouth is, I think it adds a bit more legitimacy to your commentary; clearly you don't want the platform to fail.
Of course all voices are important. All I am trying to say is that I see a lot of people with 10HP, who have nothing to lose, constantly bad mouthing everything and shit-posting all the time. They complain that the system is broken and no one up-votes their stuff. It makes it hard to trust that their heart is in the right place.
Through Thick and Thin
There have been plenty of times when I got so depressed that I wanted to quit. Some of you may remember a post I made from about a year ago lamenting the loss of over a million bucks in Crypto and basically saying goodbye. I made so many bad decisions, such as buying in to this project at the highest possible price.
I basically clicked the power-down button as my heart sunk deeper and deeper. It may seem a bit dramatic to some, but I was extremely depressed. I had poured my entire life into this cryptocurrency thing through 2016 and 2017. I bought about 30,000 USD worth of video cards and built countless mining rigs. I was all in! I watched my investment grow and grow, until.... You all know the rest of the story. I was by no means alone.
In the end, I stopped that power-down. The coins that I sold, I bought back. However, that little bit of time away from the platform helped me to level my thinking a bit. Previously I had kept going over and over again in my head how I had not only lost all those profits, but 90% of the investment. Not even counting the 1000s of hours I put into learning how wallets, keys, blockchains and mining worked.
Then in a moment of clarity it hit me...
If I can see the money as already being lost, then I rid myself of the attachment and move on fresh
So that's what I did. I detached myself emotionally from that loss. Sure I could have sold my BTC in December of 2017 and bought enough Hive to be one of the largest whales on the platform but I didn't. I also could have picked the right lottery numbers, but I didn't.
I have to say, that was extremely liberating.
Whatever it is that I released in my brain, it made Hive fun again! I was able to get that feeling back that I had when I first started to use the platform. So yes, it has been a really bumpy ride, but to be honest I wouldn't change much because I learned some really valuable life lessons.
I plan to keep growing my account over the next months and years to come. Who knows, maybe someday I'll reach that enviable Whale status! Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I'll continue doing what I originally came here to do - write posts, make friends and engage with the community. This is where Hive shines!