Like many others, I awoke on the 24th of July to find that on my Poloniex account, I was the proud owner of ETC (Ethereum Classic) coins.

Initially my thoughts were to keep the ETC in the off chance they become worth something long term. In the end I decided to sell them and buy Steem Power.

What changed my mind? Basically I read this article: Tutorial : How to access your ETC and sell it for ETH ! Fight back and Profit!

This article made me realize that: I’m a technologist and crypto currency nerd and I couldn’t find a good and easy way to recover my ETC. If I can’t do this, how many other people are like me? If there are many like me, maybe ETC is only valuable due to the laziness of the ETH holders. (Note: I’m just sending all my ETH to Poloniex and letting them split between ETH and ETC for me.)

My thought process was then the following:

Maybe I should just keep the ETC and then I can hedge my bets in case ETC becomes more popular than ETH.
Why would ETC become more popular than ETH? I bought into ETH because of the smart people behind it, the community and the vision they espouse. I can’t see ETC out competing ETH in these areas.
What does ETC give me then? (from the manifesto)
- Openness – I think ETH and ETC both share the same openness. ETH has the advantage in having the key people not being anonymous.
- Neutrality – I can see the argument that everyone should be on an equal footing, but change will need to occur and open source is voted with your feet. The emergence of ETC is testament to this.
- Immutability – I own Bitcoin and can’t see ETC being different enough. Is this just another Litecoin?
If I had just gotten the money instead of this free ETC, where would I invest it?

Initially I thought I would just convert the ETC to ETH and store it. However I noticed a new coin appearing on the Crypto Currency Market Capitalization charts: Steem. Like others, I use price as an indicator of quality: ‘If many people think this coin is valuable, is it?’ So my investigation into Steem began.

As this isn’t an article on why Steem is so good, the summary of why I settled on Steem is:

In my daily readings of crypto currency news, I began to see more and more articles being hosted on Steemit.com.
The problem with starting a new Social Network is how to you overcome the Network Effect and get sufficient content? The Steem solution of paying people to produce and curate content appears to be genius.
I’m a long time lurker and never poster on social media. If Steem can convince the likes of me to write apost, how many others are like me?

And so my Steem journey begins as an eager investor, often reader, sometime curator and rare poster. I’m excited to see if and how Steem changes me.