I thought it would be nice to bring some levity to Steemit, as the platform seems to have been inundated with the dark-side the last couple days or so, the shadow of greed has reared its ugly head. For those of you who don't know who the man above is, that is the former CEO of GAWMiners, and creator of Paycoin (XPY) one of the great crypto scams of all time. In terms of pure scam, it might be the greatest, but that's another argument. Mt. Gox was more of a theft, and the Dao/Ethereum fiasco could probably be considered a hack, although from my understanding it wasn't a hack at all. Those who are more technically savvy than myself please correct my ignorance. Almost two years ago to the day that I preordered my mythical Vault Breaker, which to my knowledge never actually physically existed. Myself, I wanted the physical piece of equipment at my house not in some data center. However, all VB owners ended up with cloud mining contracts through GAW's now infamous Mississippi data-center.
I was one of the lucky ones. Since I preordered, when my VB's were converted to hashlet power, I paid a highly discounted price, and managed to get out when XPY officially launched with my investment intact. Others, buying in when the price of the hashlets had sky-rocketed, and trusting enough to fall for the long con, lost everything. If you want the full story see here.
I had heard very little about Steemit prior to the meteoric price rise a few weeks back. When I joined, it may have been the day of the hack, perhaps the day after, and needless to say tensions were high. It also coincided with the make-up video, which received its fair share of blow-back concerning the monetary value attached to it.
"Envy, the shadow of greed that is." -Yoda
Then I moved. And had very little to no interaction with the infernets for several days at least. It was actually nice to not be inundated with a bunch of useless shit. In that same time frame, Steemit seems to have become a somewhat embittered animal. I see whinging, greed, rage-quitting, identity theft type situations, bots and anti-botters everywhere, down-vote patrols and whatever else. From the perspective of someone who is very new here, and understands how the cryptocurrency community can be, this place kind of sucks right now. For someone who doesn't get crypto, and isn't into 'free money' (i.e. people looking to scam), I'm not sure you could pay them to stay. There is just a lot of hate right now. You can almost see the market psychology setting in as the euphoria is over, and now it's time to get down and dirty and make things work. Interestingly enough, I saw the exact same thing happen in the Adzcoin/Startpeeps community. I helped crowdfund the Startpeeps (Now Adzbuzz) project on Startjoin and was there from the word go. I watched the euphoria wear off over time, as behind the scenes development went on for almost a year. People became disillusioned with the project, became bitter, name called, didn't make money like they expected. This seems to be where Steemit is heading, and this is a natural progression of the community I feel. I just hope things turn around because it has a bit of an ugliness these days.
Coincidentally, prior to finding Steemit I had been blogging on another platform which works around a revenue share and high powered paid SEO. I was getting decent views on my articles, for myself I have no preconceived notion that I will attract tens of thousands of followers. I just prefer to write as an outlet, and blog stupid shit with and for my daughter. If I make anything on the side, I usually buy bitcoin, or some other altcoin with it. When I saw that Steemit was another free platform for blogging I of course jumped at the chance, as another means to spread my shit around. Make a few more bucks, buy some more bitcoin, rinse and repeat. I vaguely knew that the currency Steem was somehow associated with the platform, which I thought was great because I have been interested in crypto since early 2013. I really wasn't prepared to see people making $1,000's. It has kind of been a blessing and a curse. My posts get zero traction, which is fine, they were getting zero traction on my other platform, but now there is this 'other people are making money why am I not? 'is it me?' weird expectation underlying every post I make. It has, meaning I have, placed a subtle pressure on myself to 'make money' now that there is the opportunity to do so. And I feel it affects my writing.
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