It's been one intense summer being a relative crypto newbie. At the start of my journey the only info I had was from a few articles promoting Ethereum and of course the Bitcoin.
So I bought a couple of Litecoin as it was the only coin I saw that was affordable to buy without jumping through hoops to get verified. I then learned about shapeshift and traded litecoin for Digibytes. I guess I got lucky, as digibytes price was just starting to rise on the (manipulated) news that it would be used in Minecraft somehow.
I kept a close eye on my few hundred dollar investment, dreaming of it going "to the moon!" and although the dream was soon over, I somehow managed to sell my holdings near the top - marvelous!
I thought about buying a new phone with the profits but it was too late ..confidence from my early crypto success drove me to further expore the trading platforms. I quickly became fascinated with this whole thing and experienced my first fomo (fear of missing out) for Ethereum. I went "all in"on it mid May.
Mid July was messy as I didn't know how to handle the declining price. I was like "why would people sell if its going up?" Knowing little of trading patterns, market caps, momentum and how massive whales could buy or sell so much, so fast. I cashed out.
Along came Chaincoin! Yes (dont judge me!)
There seemed a genuine movement afoot that kind of made sense to me and a lot of others. Well, it was exciting time to say the least, as the chaincoin hodler count ramped up and up due to a few youtube videos from Max Lee. We all bought into it and the thing reached fever pitch - our coin raised in value so very rapidly! I honestly thought it would only reach 1 dollar.
I have to say I didn't sell at the top as I was a little naive, but of course it soon became obvious that there were many that had zero intention of "hodling" at all. Whatever went on, paranoia set in with the group and I wasn't taking chances, so on the second wave up I took some great profits while maintaining a sensible "hodl" amount.
I wont waffle on anymore about that right now, I'll just say, Chaincoin is still of interest to me and I am optimistic with the new dev's and team involved.
So, I got to thinking about the strength of community which led me here to Steemit and STEEM! I admit I was very dubious about it at the beginning thinking it was a platform that was being used for promotion of overly biased views, political or otherwise, literally bought and paid for - fake news. It doesn't seem that way in reality so far, so my feeling is that Steemit is worth my interest, as I believe it does indeed have the potential to be huge and will be - what we make of it.
Will it become a major social platform in the future? Who knows ...I think I will stick around here for a while to find out, rather than use snotty overlord controlled social networks that only want to serve up corporate pizza and sell your data to ad companies - Contemptible bounders!!!
I have no doubt that there will be more sites/addons/apps utilizing the Steem platform (if i understand it correctly, still a lot to learn here) and I envision a network of such working together perfectly well if more developers become and stay interested along with the creativity of this growing community.
This is why I am buying Steem right now while it is absolutely undervalued.
Thus ends my late summer rant/hybrid article thing