What's your Steem origin story?

I think this is a great question! I'm always curious how people end up here on Steemit. I can barely explain it myself, but I'll give it a shot.

So here we go!

(Pro tip - if you just want to pretend to read, just quickly scroll down the post - the images tell the journey as well) ;)

My Steem journey started with a game:

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How did a game get me Steemit?

I'm not a huge gamer, but I have over the years consistently played one game: Sid Meier's Civilization series. When Civ 6 was released, I was excited to try the new version, but found my computer wasn't powerful enough to run the game. Since it was time for a laptop upgrade anyway, I went ahead and ordered a new machine with a strong enough GPU to allow me to play Civ 6.

By the time the computer arrived, I had started hearing about bitcoin and bitcoin mining. I wasn't about to make a purchase of something I didn't quite understand yet, but I thought, hey, maybe my new fancy Civ 6 ready GPU might be powerful enough to try to mine bitcoin.

Enter NiceHash!

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Bad, bad idea.

I soon realized the heat produced from bitcoin mining would melt my lap and my laptop before I made one dollar's worth of bitcoin.

At this point I understood that I would need something a lot more powerful than my laptop to make any progress mining. I researched application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and discovered that Bitmain made the best mining machines.

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Only one problem: Bitmain was out of stock on all legitimate websites for months.

As I had been researching, I also was learning more generally about the crypto space, including altcoins. The more I learned the more comfortable I was entering the space. I finally took the step to open a Coinbase account.

After my account was up and running I made a small deposit from my bank, bought some bitcoin, immediate transferred it all to Bittrex, then made my first crypto purchase.

Out of the 1000+ choices in altcoins, any guesses what my first purchase was?

I went with Golem (GNT) of all things!

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Golem lead to a few other cryptocurrencies and eventually to an idea:

What if I ran a crypto experiment with the Top Ten coins for one year, starting 2018?

Just buy a small amount - $100 of each - and track them throughout the year, reporting monthly, like a lazy man's index fund.

My first/only idea on how to share this experiment was to go to this little video sharing site I know of...

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...but this happened to coincide with a change in policy: now I would need one billion followers and one trillion views to be able to monetize my videos.

Not super motivating.

But, as I was researching for the experiment I was watching crypto commentators on YouTube including the super grumpy Hive account@cryptovestor, who started mentioning a strange crypto project in his videos: steemit.com.

So...I opened a Steemit account: Hive account@starthere. This is where I would share my experiment.

So that's what I did. And it's still going.

I've been doing monthly update posts tracking the Top 10 Cryptocurrencies for One Year.

The idea was to use Steemit to drive traffic back to my YouTube channel, but after YouTube increased the monetization requirements to impossible, I quickly stopped making videos. The videos were a lot of work and stopped being worth my time.

I almost dropped out of Steemit too, if it hadn't been for the Hive account@newbieresteem and Hive account@themesopotamians initiatives and the kindness of strangers like Hive account@davemccoy and Hive account@beeyou, and others.

Feeling a bit to boxed in by Hive account@starthere, I opened the Hive account@eoj account, which has really helped my share my non-crypto self. I dragged my much more talented than I wife Hive account@suitcasemama in as well and am working on getting my sister Hive account@silvertogold to start posting too.

And nearly a year later, I'm still here. And very surprised to find I'm a bit addicted to the platform. I easily spend more time on Steemit than any other site now - amazing, considering I hadn't heard of it a year ago.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Thanks to Hive account@sndbox for the great idea! If you want to find out more about the challenge, check out the original post here.