Minnow Hell
This is the first of several posts that I'll be doing based on my experience as a minnow here on Steemit. It is aimed at other minnows, and specifically those who have only been on the platform for a week or two. My first 2 weeks on Steemit are something I've dubbed Minnow Hell, and the objective of these posts are to help early day users to avoid the mistakes I made, and maybe even share a few tips I only learnt after they were no longer useful.
Is Powering Up really such a bad idea?
OK, so first up... let me apologise for the very click-bait title... It IS 100% true though (assuming you've got less than 15SP and Steemit is still delegating free Steem Power to you).
Let me explain
If you started your Steemit journey as I did by registering a free Steemit account (and waiting for a number of days before being approved), you will notice that you have ~15 SP (Steem Power), and if you look on http://steemworld.org your Steem Power looks something like this:
on http://steemd.com it looks like this:
What that means is that you've actually only got 0.1 SP of your own, but Steemit is giving you another 14.90 for free. The reason for this (I assume) is that with just 0.1 SP, I doubt you'll even be able to update your profile, let alone post anything. You see, Steem Power pretty much determines your life for you on Steemit, and in your early days on Steemit, the most noticeable effect it has is going to be on your bandwidth (read about Steemit Bandwidth here: https://steemit.com/faq.html#How_does_bandwidth_work_on_the_Steem_blockchain).
In their FAQ, Steemit claims that "Normally everyone's bandwidth allowance is quite high", which is unfortunately only true when the network isn't busy. When it IS busy you will frequently be running into errors like this:
and when you go have a look on http://steemd.com , your bandwidth might look something like this:
Does that mean I had to 75 hours before I could use Steemit again? Luckily not... Fortunately I would generally just need to wait an hour or so and I would be able to comment/vote again. The one day I was completely unable to use Steemit the entire afternoon/early evening though.
OK, so just buy some Steem and Power Up?
According to the FAQ:
If you are unable to transact for extended periods of time, or you are frequently running into bandwidth limits, then you will either need to reduce your usage to stay within your limit, or purchase more Steem Power for your account through a third-party exchange such as BlockTrades.
which is exactly what I did... I got so frustrated not being able to post/comment/upvote that I bought a small amount of Steem (it was near $5 then, and with the South African Rand being what it is... ZAR500 got me about 8 STEEM). Pretty shitty in the bigger scheme of things, but still a 50%+ increase over what I had, and would alleviate by bandwidth problems by at least 50%! Unfortunately, this was not to be.
Remember the 14.90 "Free" SP that Steemit gives us? Well, that is only temporary, and all the SP that you earn from curation and author rewards while being added to your base of 0.1, is also deducted from your free 14.90 in equal amounts... leaving us with a total of... you guessed it... STILL JUST 15 SP!
)So what's the solution?
Fortunately you do have options (other than turning off your PC and coming back tomorrow when your bandwidth is looking better).
1) Use any SBD that you earn on upvote bots (such as @MinnowBooster and @SmartMarket over on https://steembottracker.com/#paid )
- My reasoning for this is that by doing so you increase your author rewards (both SBD and SP) on each post you've boosted like this.
- Remember: Converting your SBD to STEEM and powering up simply reduces your free SP (getting you over your 15SP target sooner, yes... but losing the SBD you would have gained from author rewards which you can use to repeat the process again)
- NB: DO NOT USE the "bid bots" over there until you are 100% sure you know what you are doing.
2) Use your SBD/STEEM to buy SP Delegation from 
- The delegation you get from
- P.S. The minimum amount of delegation you should request is 2 STEEM (giving ~17.5 SP for 90 days at the time of writing), I don't know what happens if you request less than that, but there's a warning on
Disclaimer
I've been on Steemit for less than 2 months now, and could be talking out of my ass... however, I like to think I've learned from my mistakes and my advice will help you avoid the mistakes I made. If any veteran Steemians reading this notice any errors in my thinking... please correct me wherever I went wrong!
Connect with me on Social:
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@braaiboy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BraaiBoy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/braaiboy
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braaiboy/
Some other useful posts for life on Steemit:
- Introducing GINA - This is a MUST HAVE, and if you don't have the 0.001 registration fee from author rewards yet, then hit me up on Discord and I'll send it to you.
I've written a very cool dice game (OK, that's my biased opinion) where you can win free SBD every couple of hours.
- please go check out @PlayDice: https://steemit.com/@playdice
- NB: Unless you've taken my advice in this article, don't play the game, as you probably won't have enough SP to reach the minimum 0.006 UpVote value required to play.
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