First of all, I would like to congratulate all of you Steemians, we are all early adopters of what I think is the next big thing in the world of cryptocurrencies and open economies (it is so early that I was even able to select the user name I really wanted, not the system generated or the overthought one).

This is in fact a Re-introduction since my first post was a little like a failed test, I failed to make a good introduction, I didn’t realize the importance of showing my verification photo and I even failed at tagging the post properly.

Disclaimer: I’m not a native speaker and some grammar errors are expected but I’m doing my best effort and guess with time I’ll get better at it.

So who am I?

This is me at my home workstation.

My name is Arturo (@ar2ro), I’m 30 years old and I’m from Venezuela, a country with some of the most beautiful beaches and natural landscapes, home of the best chocolate and some of the most beautiful women in the world but sadly also the country with the highest inflation rate at the time, reaching 700% so far this year and one of the lowest salary wages, about $22 a month, we also can’t freely exchange our currency into another one.

This is the reason I’m looking into the world of cryptocurrencies (I’m a total noob). Previously I was looking at Bitcoin but I found it to be just to difficult, it requires high upfront investment and I really doubt it to be profitable at the time, at least for beginners, and the thing is I am a beginner and I am pretty much broke.

So overall I’m really glad and feel really lucky to have found Steemit in such an early stage.

Currently I’m chasing a career change into coding so I’m planning to use Steemit for two main purposes:

Document my path into learning to code.
Generate some income in order to make a living while I learn to code and land my dream job.

The SteemChallenge.

Sorry, this is nothing like Drake’s Controlla Challenge but I was a big fan of this so I decided to call it the SteemChallenge.

The SteemChallenge is about me making enough money on Steemit to attend the SteemFest 1 - 11/12/13 November 2016 – Amsterdam (and repeating the process after that).

I’ve seen how some posts makes hundreds, even thousands of dollars. It’ll be hard at the beginning, I’m starting from scratch, I don’t have a followers base outside Steemit and I’m not much of a great writer either, anyway I’m very enthusiastic about this, I have nothing to lose but very much to win.

The good news is that even if I don’t make it to SteemFest 1 this is something I can continue doing and perfecting in order to make a living in the long term.

More on the SteemChallenge in an upcoming post but these are the basic bare bones:

Make some initial profit on Steemit.
Convert that profit to USD.
Make really short-term investments.
Take the extracted amount and part of the profit to buy more Steem.
Meanwhile continue to generate value on Steemit
Repeat.

If it all goes well I’ll be able to attend the SteemFest 1 in November, if I can’t I’ll still be doing something valuable, and this is something I can continue doing and perfecting in order to make a living in the long term.

So my plan is to accumulate about $50 in Steemit to start the challenge, once I’ve completed at least one round I’ll document in detail the complete process so anybody can replicate it – so follow me if you’re interested.

For the record I’m starting with:

0 STEMM
4.180 STEEM POWER
0 STEEM DOLLARS
$2.71 Estimated Account Value

So lets see how it goes for me...

My Toughts and dreams about Steem being the future of pretty much everything and why I’m loving it.

I really think Steemit is taking cryptocurrency to the masses and it’s providing a way for anybody with basic Internet connection to generate wealth, this is something even most governments can’t make for them people.

Unlike another Cryptocurrencies (talking about Bitcoin here) where you need to invest thousands of dollars upfront just to start mining or learn how to trade it, in Steemit you just have to write about what you already know and love, communicate, engage and help others.

These activities are easy for anybody to start with, they creates immediate value for you as you can convert your earned Steems to actual money, but you’re also generating value to the community which ultimately creates value for you in the long term. Meanwhile you are taking part in a new, big, exiting and groundbreaking social platform.

I’ve read a couple of times that after just about 6 months Steem is now the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum and hundreds of users are registering everyday on Steemit, so I guess it’s just common sense to expect that Steem will overshadow other cryptocurrencies. The good news is that by being early adopters we can contribute to something that’s going to be huge and can profit from it.

So whats next?

I see Steemit as just the tip of the iceberg, I’ve read that an app pretty much like twitter is being developed right now, and there are limitless possibilities for apps that can be developed on top of the Steem Blockchain.

So here is where I start dreaming about the future. Applying the concept of Steemit to the areas I know I can immediately think of some future implementations:

Web development:

Nowadays more and more websites are starting to look like “The million dollar homepage”. If you don’t know what this is, back in 2005 there was this guy who created a webpage with 1,000,000 of pixels on it and he sold each pixel for $1, the result? A webpage full of ads and $1,000,000 on this guy’s pocket.

Websites full of ads are so annoying that several ad-blockers have been released and even new web browsers like Brave block ads by default. But wait, web publishers also need to make money right?.

I guess here can come Steem to the rescue. What if using the Steemit model people can generate Steem by publishing quality content on their website instead of recurring to ads in order to make a profit? I guess free web hosting is also possible under this model.

Rewards to the Open Source community

GitHub is full of high quality Open Source software and its community is highly engaded in the platform, in fact Steem is on GitHub. Endless hours of work are invested into these projects, millions of Stars and forks into popular repositories.

What about a platform where open source developers and contributors can be rewarded with Steem for their efforts?. This could give a really big boost to the open source software development.

Other posibilities:

How many of you get followed on Instragram by spam accounts? Who isn’t sick of Facebook ads and the way they monetize our personal information? Could Steem be the answer to this??

As I say I think possibilities are endless and I’m pretty sure every one of you can think of an implementation in your area of knowledge.

I just wish I get to know enough about coding when all these projects start to emerge so I can step in and contribute in some of them or maybe even start my own.

Steemit may cause my first tattoo

I’ve been thinking for a long time on getting a tattoo, the only problem is I can’t decide what to get, I also want it to be something truly unique.

You may be thinking, what does Steem have to do with this? Well, Steemit passwords are pretty hard to remember and as you all know the passwords can’t be recovered (this is one of the golden rules of Steemit).

I’ve lost so many passwords to so many sites and services in my life, in fact I was unable to access my Steemit account for like three days because I forgot where I stored the password.

So this makes me think, what can be more unique that my really long Steemit password?

So I think I might be getting something like this:

The end

Thanks for reading

P.S. If any developer gets to read this post, can you please guide me as to where can I start learning about the Blockchain technology from a developer point of view? I’ve been looking on Google for this but I can only find very vague information. Thanks in advance.

P.P.S. I’m still a little confused about how the payouts are calculated. I mean I saw these two posts with very high payouts, $46,973.86 and $31,543.06 respectively:
[piston.web] First Open Source Steem GUI - Searching for alpha testers
THE FIRST STEEMIT MAKEUP TUTORIAL- bringing Youtubers to Steemit!! Tara is back!
yet both posts reflect 0 votes, meanwhile I’ve seen posts with several votes and payouts of less than $1.
Does anybody knows how these payouts are calculated?