It is not often I read a news article and then discover, I recognize two people in it and have spent some time drunk in Poland with one of them, but there you go. Both the first and the fourth people mentioned are ex-Hive, though neither have been seen around here for "awhile".
It wasn’t until 2017 that she got hooked on the world of blockchain. Though she had a sales job in the tech industry, Thompson never felt like she earned enough money, so she worked a few “side hustles.”
One gig involved blogging for a platform that paid her in cryptocurrency.
This is Lea's reference to Steem and Hive, a place that probably collected her close to 100K and helped finance her Bitcoin holdings. Of course, it could be that it was the newspaper that omitted the name of the site, but maybe not too. Then, people rarely remember those who helped them get to where they have been trying to get.
However, what is interesting to note is how important the blogging has actually been for so many people in crypto. A lot of "normal people" came into crypto in 2017 and where they came in was through Steem, because that was the lowest point of entry. However, there are other avenues now, but those avenues focus almost solely on the earning potential, not the learning potential from the industry.
Even the games like Splinterlands where a lot can be learned by way of financial planning and economics, the concept is narrow in the sense that it is about learning a game. A player doesn't actually have to interact with others to build their knowledge base, they can just play. However, those who really want to Get involved and get the most out of it will inevitably not go it alone in the game and will instead, turn to the community interfaces to learn more and improve their chances of both winning in the game and, winning in the economy of it. This exposes them to a far wider perspective of crypto and will inevitably lead them down multiple paths of knowledge expansion, that will push into other domains.
The "blogging" side of Hive is incredibly undervalued, because while the blogs or articles themselves might not be individually world-changing, as a collective community of people interacting and making moves together, they become trend makers. Sure, Hive trends currently might only be limited to Hive applications for the most part and largely internally facing, but that is not a problem if there are lots of people internally.
What I find interesting from the article is that it focuses on buying tokens, when for example, Lea got into crypto without buying, she started in blogging. In fact, her first post doesn't mention crypto at all, it is her being Lea - not "girlgonecrypto". But, this is why it is so valuable to participate because no matter what you come in as, with a little hustle and will, there are many paths that can be found that could change the trajectory of your life.
I am of course biased as a writer here, but it does pain me a bit at times when people say that the blogging side is of little value, because without this side of the community, applications like Splinterlands and LeoFinance would have had an incredibly hard job building a support base for their products. And for example in the case of LEO, they have attracted relatively large investment staking into their platform. Not large in terms of the crypto industry, but large in the sense that most of that value are holdings in other tokens that the Hive community has decided to park there. I know that for me at least, it is significant and it is there because through posts, I have gotten to know 
The more people who come into crypto, the more important the content side becomes, because not only does it inform, but it also forms the interface for the communities to build around, which will be vital for projects of all kinds going forward, because unlike the traditional financial markets, *crypto is social. It isn't just buy and sell, it is about distribution and empowerment and that means, there has to be more than distribution of tokens, there has to be distribution of information and opportunity. That gets organized through the visible communities, not the anonymity of the exchanges.
Hive has changed the lives of many financially, but it isn't just the earnings on platform that are important, it is the knowledge that allows for earnings off the platform too. On top of this, I know quite a few who have changed their approach to their lives in many ways, seeing the world quite differently than they did earlier and, building a confidence in their ability to interact well with the world that was missing in them before. I am definitely one of these people.
While people seem to be too ashamed of being on Hive to mention it, what is going to be interesting in time is that at some point, many people are going to be jealous of those who got in early and built their presence. Not just on Hive, but across all the applications it enables.
Personally, I don't know why there aren't more people here, other than they look at the earnings themselves and think it is not worth it. For the earnings, it might not be, but for the learning, it definitely is. If crypto and blockchain are indeed going to change the world, those who have skills that can support development and uptake are going to be in very high demand at all levels of the industry.
This is always the case in emerging industries and we are yet to emerge, because at the moment most people are still looking at it from the tokens on exchanges, not the industries the tech is going to disrupt. It is no longer just a "Buy and Hold" industry and unless you have an enormous amount of capital, that won't get you as far as learning and building.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
