How I got to 50k HP without investing money
Shame on all early dolphins
I found Steemit in July 2016.
I have seen people come and go; I am still here, still voting manually.
I never invested money and yet I am sitting on 50k HP.
This is my story on Hive.
Sometime July 2016
It was a hot summer night, I could not sleep because my room was too hot and I was in my underwear, only.
I stumbled upon a new website where people got paid money for their posts.
1 STEEM was traded for 2$ and a short post with just some words could get you paid 30k US$.
The first account I interacted with was 
He just had had a payout of 30k USD worth of STEEM and was giving away coins for comments.
I felt like Neo in The Matrix; Sitting in my dark room, only the computer screen shining at me, I had opened the door to a new era of internet, forums, monetary transactions.
The late 90's - early 00's internet boom was long over, but this was going to be as revolutionary and this time I was early.
Crypto felt like the Internet 2.0 and it was a wild place.
I spent the next week diving into BTC faucets, Steem, mining, Linux... I was determined to get a piece of the pie early and I was expecting it to only become more desired as a currency.
SP inflation was at above 100% so all I cared about was staking Steem, while staying honest;
Every interaction I ever had on chain would be logged as long as this chain existed and this was a huge chance to build a reputation from scratch and I tried hard to always be aware of that.
I was sure being honest and friendly would pay off at some point; as lying and being dishonest would at some point come to light... I was not going to trip up...
I tried a lot of things, secretly made multiple accounts, tried different posting formats, was in steemit.chat constantly and tried to talk to everybody.
I encountered bots like 
For the moment I was obsessed with getting more stake as quickly as possible and I got really upset at some point, when I did not get enough votes for my shitposts.
Steem was held by only very few people and those whales had all the power. One of their votes was worth hundreds of dollars, but they would only vote on a few accounts over and over again, racing for who would be the fastest to gain the best curation rewards.
With an early hardfork this was slightly mitigated by introducing the curation reward cutoff.
Still, the important votes came from a few accounts and they kept upvoting the same content, daily.
There were the early dolphins like 
The whales responded sometimes and explained how Steem would work almost like a trickle down economy; The whales would vote the dolphins, power them up and the dolphins would later power up the minnows and over time stakes would get distributed broadly.
There simply wasn't enough time in the whales' schedules to look for posts. Even though each of their clicks was rewarded with 100$... It felt weird and almost like they had won their stake at a bubble gum machine. I thought these guys must be multi millionaires and extremely busy. But this was also a chance for me...
I had high hopes and was looking forward to the day where I could maybe upvote 0.01$.
Everybody was rushing to get a piece and I thought with a lot of luck I might still get there one day. Little did I know...
Next episode
Next episode I am going to write about my first big payout - the 1000$ post.