When I was younger I didn't know much about business. I didn't know much about anything really. In highschool I remember standing outside on Tuesday mornings on the corner, smoking cigarettes and talking with my buddies about what happened the night before on WWF Raw... At the time, CD's were still fairly new and CD burning technology was state-of-the-art. Apple was going through hard times, microsoft owned the PC world with windows 3.1 and its massive Windows 95 upgrade and names like Amazon and Ebay still hadn't gained any traction. I learned about Google in high school and it was steadily gaining traction while competing with names like AOL and Netscape Navigator.
What does a high school kid from an inter-city school know about the future? Not much or right now I'd be a millionaire. These days I'm a history teacher and every time I research a new time period I kick myself and wonder why I wasn't more interested in the past when I was younger, I simply didn't see the value in it.
In college I studied business and I read a book called 'Rich dad, Poor dad.' We often make excuses for our ignorance and I remember saying to myself, well, the reason you haven't made it yet is cause you never had a rich dad. Its too easy to make excuses, its much harder to take responsibility for your actions and act on your gut instincts. I remember in high school telling my parents to buy Amazon stock. They shrugged it off thinking, what does a high school kid know about stocks? Later I pushed them to buy some Ebay. If I used it and everybody I knew used it, wouldn't it be worth buying?
If you've made it this far, stay with me a bit longer... I'm talking about missed opportunities here and regrets, I couldn't be alone in having them could I? After graduating college I remember going to my buddy's house and seeing something amazing... It was called an Ipod touch and I had never seen anything like it! At the time Apple had been making a comeback first with their G4 line of computers and quickly followed by the Ipod classic. But this! This Ipod touch was like nothing I had ever seen! It was touchscreen and had games and it simply blew all other handheld devices out of the water as far as I was concerned.
I knew it was the future, I knew it would become a phone like no other phone ever seen before but I couldnt put two and two together and say, hey, I can ride the wave, I'm going to give all my money to Apple and load the boat on Apple stock!
See, knowing the future isn't enough... If you know the river is changing course, you have to figure out where its going and put yourself in the way of it, you have to act and you have to be ready to ride the wave!
Enter Bitcoin... I heard about this thing in about 2010 and even made an effort to get my hands on some. When I figured out that it was extremely difficult to buy and that it couldnt simply be stored on your computer but you actually needed some ungodly long code that gave you access to it, my mind shut down for some reason, I told myself it was too difficult and that it would never work. If I had a better understanding of history and truly understood what it was, I would have bought as much of it as I possibly could have. Another missed opportunity.
Fast forward to 2016... A friend of mine and I were talking about cryptocurrencies and wanted to learn more apparently my friend had another buddy who was approaching millionaire status simply from investing a large sum of fiat in 2013 into Bitcoin when it was about 500$ per coin. After talking with him I and seeing how confident he was and how much money he had made I decided to put my money and brains to the test. I purchased some Bitcoin and exchanged it for ETH, the hottest cryptocurrency of the time. I began learning about blockchain technology and the differences between BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies like BTS and STEEM.
I realized that BTC was too slow, it was too expensive to buy and it was too expensive to trade because of huge miner fees. ETH was only remotely better.. It seemed to suffer from the same problems as BTC but was simply speedier, easier to transact and was more flexible in the sense that other tokens could be created and piggyback on its blockchain.
When I learned about Steemit and Steem I was amazed. A social network, powered by blockchain which operated at 100,000TPS and offered writers and content creators the ability to get paid for simply posting their work I was shocked. I was amazed. I didn't believe it and I felt there was some sort of catch. It took a while for me to understand the system but I realized that what you see is pretty much what you get. The Steem blockchain serves as a way to transact, a cryptocurrency (Steem) and a way to permanantly store written and pictorial information on a blockchain. It has so many properties in addition to those of Bitcoin or Ethereum. It has so much raw potential. Steem is a game-changer and the largest platform Steemit which sits on top of it is absolutely fantastic considering its still in BETA.
Steem and Steemit are the future, I can see it, I am a part of it and if you are reading this, you are too. Enough said, welcome to the future, happy you've made it this far! The time is now... Don't sit on the sidelines... Act!
Thanks for reading! Thoughts and comments are appreciated.