Allow this to serve as my inaugural welcome to the Steemit Community.

In a world of handles, gizmos, dApps, and Tor Browsers, I'm somewhat old-fashioned (which incidentally happens to be my favorite cocktail). I'm kind of like a Quaker who enjoys studying Blockchain, or perhaps a futurist whom composes essays on a typewriter.

https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUFdQiEUN9pXCBVp6p9WqxUG23s9QxccfgUVMoy6WEMMq/truetype.jpg

To me the world is teeming with screens, veils, and filters. If anything, I'd like to jump out of the screen and be seen, felt, and heard but the more I look into communication patterns, the more it seems self-evident that a portion of this is inevitably digital. So Hello dApp World!

First off, when I found out the majority of handles on Steemit were like a bundle of AOL usernames (which is to say catchy, quippy, nicky, and the like) I wasn't the least bit disappointment to have chosen my full real name on this dApp; in fact, it is my hope that sharing my name will help building out my brand via my website, youtube, twitter, facebook, medium, telegram, steemit, etc., and can lead to me receiving collaborative writing and research projects surrounding the subjects I enjoy most: Philosophy, Technology, Innovation, Security, and Spirituality.

https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbBAPiBR8A2o2hgsHXwp2DfcQuH9renYqKMgveHSJByTA/blackrockcity.jpg

Just for the record, I learned about Bitcoin in 2011, and attended a conference to discuss its application at Burning Man in 2012, so I've been around for a little while... Essentially, I'm an Author, Musician, and Comedian. You can buy my collection of short stories on Amazon (Kindle Edition) for $4.99, or you can purchase a .pdf version on my website for $1.99... consumers choice. It's actually pretty good, I recently re-read it and am not disappointed to carry it around as a sort of "digital luggage" for as long as the internet keeps blowing steem.

https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmY6bhrUxk5fU1p6miuBZ697FZBzDaRgKzerum36VerwAb/horsenbuggy.jpg

Steem in itself is a funny concept, and rather anachronistic, but appropriately so, not dissimilar to how engines have been calibrated according to "horse power". Now digital bandwidth is being analogized to "steem", which is what the trains blew out. Not entirely unrelated to this matter is the rather phenomenal feet that is the USA's train infrastructure, few people understand what a big undertaking that was... Now we code out digital tracks via new languages like Solidity, Java Script, etc., and build out blockchains instead of railroad tracks, but they still blow "steem".

I don't really expect to make any money on this platform, though I suppose it is possible. It seems like these $1K posts are restricted for highly laudable Reddit users, and or high-powered brands that somehow can Jedi-Hack the SEO game and write the type of articles that get 3K upvotes. That may never be me, and that's all well-and-good.

One might ask, what is the purpose of a digital currency such as Steem? One might also ask, how did China's Governmental Organizations come to recently rank it number two in the world behind only Ethereum? Well, I'll venture a guess, and that is simply that it is a blockchain in action. There is real utility here; Steemit is often referred to in shorthand as a sort of "Facebook on Blockchain". If that's the case, I'm honored to get out in front of such a trend, and to join the fray with my fellow Steemiters.

I'm going to keep posting my blockchain based research articles, as well as the art that I make, such as short films, comedy sketches, and books that I write.

Look forward to growing with all of you. Let's see if this post can earn me a quarter :)

- Joseph