By August of 2016 I had heard of #bitcoin, but didn't really know much about it. A digital money that could be used instead of National Currencies and there was a lot of debate about how well it would do in the future. I even spent one day mining it, but had no idea what I was doing or why.
A marketing professional once told me that most people have to hear about something 4-7 times before they will actually do anything to check it out. I had read about Bitcoin several times, but usually people were still talking about Mining and I had no idea how to get involved.
Then one day I heard about Steem (now #Hive) on a podcast, and since I had the time and the interest to check it out, I signed up and it opened a new world. It was pitched at the time as a Blogging site where you could learn about crypto and earn a small amount of crypto using it. At the time Steem was 5th or so on CoinMarketCap and the top 3 tokens were Bitcoin, ETH, and XRP. Eth was still a baby and traded at about $11 in Aug of 2016.
There was very little talk about Smart Contracts yet, and if there were I wouldn't have understood. There were no NFTs, no Defi and nearly all the tokens were some form of digital asset. There were only 200 coins listed on CoinMarketCap.
*funny side note, Bitshares was still at #19
The most used Exchanges at the time were Poloniex and Bittrex, so many we use now were not even launched yet.
When I made my first and second crypto purchase I bought Bitcoin, sent it to Bittrex, traded for Steem and sent it in. And later that year I bought my first Bitcoin that I intended to hold for $695 and pfunk said it was ridiculous. :)
I am still thankful to this community, to this platform for all of the education, for the questions answered and for opening this strange and fun crypto world to me.
Historical Crypto Prices Aug 2016
I know many of you had been in crypto for a long time before that and some joined us later, but five years later, likely the most valuable thing about this entire experience has been the crypto community on the platform.
I gravitate to #LEO now and spend most my time on the platform reading about crypto projects, predictions, and learning to understand things like "Impermanent Loss".
These days I do more reading than writing, and pick up some tips here and there as well as notice "What People Are Talking About" because in this market, hype matters perhaps as much as anything.
There are now 11,000 tokens listed on CoinMarketCap, 361 "markets" (exchanges, dex, etc) The Sum Total of all the projects listed on CoinMarketcap current is over 1.5 Trillion.
We can now deposit funds nearly everywhere or buy BTC at the mall.
What a crazy ride its been guys, and I know some of YOU were noobies with me in this journey, for those still HODLing, Buying and Earning... Congratulations!
I can't wait to see where we are at in 5 more years.