The best thing you can do for yourself is to understand Blockchain. I am using an analogy here. Blockchain is to the internet as bitcoin is to amazon.com. Bear with me here, this is my analogy, my first stab at explaining what blockchain "means" to the future of humanity.
One month ago, somewhere in the middle of May 2017 I discovered the concept of Blockchain... and down the rabbit hole I went... still deep in it, hence, this very post here on steemit. (I love the idea of steemit!)
So, I highly recommend for anyone to go down the rabbit hole with me.... eventually you will whether you want to or not.
Let's go back when I was 16 years old in 1982, I was in a K-mart store and hating life because my MOM wanted to buy something after she picked me up school... so of COURSE I would never walk down the aisles with my mom, so i went off on my own to sulk in all my 16 year old teenage glory of "the sulk". As I walked down the aisles feeling sorry for myself I came across what looked like shelves of typewriters (if you're too young to know what a typewriter is, well, lucky you, and google it), but there was also a very curios and equal number of televisions on the shelves above these "typewriters" and the screen was filled with letters... I thought to myself, "is POSSIBLE that the 'typewriter' will let you type to the TV and not directly to paper!?, Could this be possible?!".... so i gingerly reached up and hit a key (the letter "E" of course, the first letter of my name) and magic! An "E" showed up on the TV! This is going to change the world!
That little story was of course about a commodore 64 computer connected to a TV, and boy! did it ever change the world! I had a very small inkling of the change only because I had just written a report for my high school english class on a typewriter and could see that electronic paper would change the world... but this blockchain... is big.. world shifting big! Even in the face of everything that has come since 1982.
The "internet of trust", a term I ran across in one of the 100's of youtube videos and/or articles I found in my rabbit hole sojourn is a very good analogy in my mind. Think of "bitcoin" as the first "website" on the INTERNET OF TRUST. Just like the first website "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, according to google in 1991", bitcoin is only one of millions of coming "websites". There are already over one thousand cryptocurrencies (tens of thousands more to come, as many as there are languages) and thousand of blockchains in the works are being released... this is a game changer, the largest we will most likely see in our lifetimes, larger than the internet itself. So what? What is "actionable" with this information. Well first step, for me, was to buy bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum. Second step was to try my hand at posting... here in steemit. You decide for yourself, but do yourself a favor and see how you can catch THIS wave... or just wait, it will crash right on your head.
Please comment, this is my first post, constructive criticism highly sought.