170 days on Steemit - What's to come?
Today is Saturday, December 30th. Day 170 on Steemit, which can be converted to:
14 688 000 seconds or 244 800 minutes or 4080 hours or 24 weeks and 2 days or even 46,58% of 2017.
The year is almost over and I thought about a little Steemit review post. All the tv shows right now elect the person of the year, word of the year and so on. I can claim for sure that the blockchain and crypto mania played an important part in my life this last year. Getting invested in 2015, we bought some new coins in 2016 but what's far more important is that I saw, or let's stay I tried to understand, the real value behind the blockchain technology. A friend of mine works at a bank and at their cafeteria they can pay with Bitcoin now. That was in July this year. Right after this meeting I went online and checked if our patients could pay with BTC for their treatments but I got lost with all the different solutions. It would have been great, to be the first or one of the first dental offices in Germany to accept payments with cryptocurrencies. Maybe in 2018!?
On July 14th 2017 I joined this new social media plattform called Steemit. It's been a bumpy ride in the beginning. Why are there Steem, Steem Power and SBD? Power up, different keys, convert SBD into Steem, author rewards, payouts... Actually the community does a great job educating their new members. Several guides, helpful comments and steemit.chat helped me out to conquer Steemit in the beginning.
Photography
My passion is photography. Most of the time photography is in the top 5 in the tags section. Several contests take place daily and it's often easy to participate. Sometimes you have to create your own post or just upload the appropriate image into the comment section. In the beginning being successful on Steemit for me meant, getting rewarded for my published photos. The feeling is amazing, when people from all over the world like your photos. My top 5 contests are hosted by 
A special shoutout goes out to 
DTube!
Besides my passion for photography, I shoot some videos once in a while. You can count the views on my YouTube videos on a couple of hands. Is there a better reason to start DTube? Even though it's still an early version of the service, it works really well after the latest updates. I'm excited to see how it will turn out in the future!
Dental tips
As my nickname suggests I work as a dentist. My inital thoughts in my introduceyourself posts were that I will definitely share some dental information with the community. I hesitated for a while because I wasn't sure what people might think of the posts or my opinion. The blog posts should have a greater benefit for the readers than most medical information on the typical webpages. I posted four dental posts:
- Dental trauma - Protect your teeth with a mouthguard
- CBCT, 3D Printing, Robots - Evolution of the dental industry #dentaltip
- Protect your teeth the right way! Connection between stress, sleep apnea and teeth grinding. #dentaltip
- No drilling, no pain - Non-invasive caries treatment via ICON #dentaltip
It's not my place to say if they were successful or not. The last one got the most views and the highest payouts.
The German community
The deutsch category is one of my go-to places when I visit Steemit. After clicking send on my introduceyourself post,
, 
and 
commented on the post and I received 150 votes! Other Steemians I interact with regularly are 
, 
, 
, 
, 
and 
. I'm happy to see the German community growing and it's great that some awesome projects like Steemworld by 
or Steemian by 
and the ChainSquad GmbH are developed by German users.
Expectations and predictions
That's a tough one. Whoever is here for the money will be disappointed in the future! That's my guess. I would like to see some changes in the design. Yes, I know, it's been a topic for a long time. As far as I can tell, there's a huge effort behind the scenes to improve the usability and implement new features in the near future. The presentation of the SMTs, smart media tokens, was a great step forward regarding the overall potential of the Steem blockchain. Let's see how they are used in 2018 and if Appics, the first application using the new SMTs, will succeed.
Will Steem let go of its underdog image and climb up to the top 20 or even top 10? I don't know, but I hope so. If it will get easier for new users to sign up and buy Steem directly, if influencers from other social media sites will join Steemit and if the site will not be the new paradise for spammers and haters, I see a bright future for Steemit.
Saying thank you was one of the most successful posts on my blog. I will keep that in mind for next year for sure!
My own goals for 2018 regarding Steemit are quite simple: Post at least 3-4 times a week, invest in Steemit and engage more with other users from around the world.
Have a great New Years eve everybody😃
Sebastian
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