Yesterday I visited a close friend nearby for a night walk and chat. It's been difficult to be able to spend time with friends these days as everyone's just busy with life. Anyway, he's the guy who actually got me back into the cryptocurrency game again years ago by asking me about Ethereum.
Looking back again.. boy, was I an early bird or what? The mining difficulties for both Bitcoin and Ethereum are insanely high now. I remember mining about 30 ethers per month with just my desktop gaming PC back in March 2016.
But I'm not very disciplined and a helluva disorganised person so all the mining was just half-baked and short-lived. Can't complain about the super early bird advantage though. Low risk, high reward. It's just pure early-game advantage like being the first to find an undiscovered gold mine. Or being the first player to arrive in World of Warcraft and slaying / looting everything precious before the masses.
So how about Steem? Mining difficulty as a witness is probably about the same as any computational hashing. Mining for curation and author rewards on the other hand is a little bit more unclear in terms of difficulty. After all, it's not like we have to produce some certain post the network is looking for just to be counted as a legit contribution. We're dealing with human-beings here, not machines.
Or another way is to just accumulate Steem Power. I know I've been saying this for two years now, but I'm just always puzzled looking at users powering down to zero. To put into perspective of everyday users, SP is quite the equivalent of acquiring more and more mining machines. More Steem Power, more virtual hash-power, more passive earnings. It's just perfect. No need to fuss over any hardware at all as it grows. I remember going all around town to source for graphic cards and spending time building ether rigs. What a pain in the ass.
If you think it's now too difficult earning Steem Power through author rewards, know that it's not the equivalent of mining on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Here there's virtually zero upfront cost required with the mining of author rewards, so the non-guarantee makes sense.
To make Steem mining more similar to the passivity of Bitcoin / Ether mining, one would need to risk some cold hard capital and set-up auto upvotes to support accounts / projects in order to earn the rewards. But that's just too much of a limited use case for Steem. The super early bird advantage here is just to use the platform and stay in the game. There are really no rigid limitations here despite a growing difficulty, simply because Steem mining isn't bounded by mere computational capacity. Human relationships and creativity will always be here for anyone to mine, anytime.
Not to be taken as financial advice.