Two Year Blockchain Anniversary!

Hi fellow Hiveians,

Happy two year anniversary to me! 4/11/18 is when my account was created. I waited like 2 weeks for Steemit to make my account lol, common problem for many of us. Feels like yesterday when I was stoked that my account was worth a few pennies to a dollar. I would text my friends that I've been trying to get into the space and show them the increasing value.

That screenshot was taken on 4/16, 5 days after my first day lol. Do I remember those days! I had no idea what all of the different pieces of information on that screen were.

I didn't end up writing a 1 year anniversary post for my event last year but I decided to write one this year. I procrastinated it for a while, which is probably why I never ended up writing it last year, so to change it up this year, I'm starting this in February so I can get some thoughts down as they come in lol.

• I again procrastinated and it's now April, a few days before my official 2 year anniversary. A whole hell of a lot has changed between now and then!

We're no longer on Steem for one! I honestly didn't see this one coming when I started this post in February. I'm glad it did so we can shed the unfortunate association with the gaming platform among a litany of other things (that I don't want to go into) that drew negativity. 12 or 13 more weeks of power down drama to endure and I think we can finally be free of it all.

Quite a few changes over the time I've been here! You know what's never changed though? The proverbial carrot-on-a-stick in front of a horse that is "SMT" roll out. That's been talked about since I joined 2 years ago lol.

Communities

One thing that's pretty awesome are the communities that are all over the place here. When I first got here, there was a lot of loose connection between them like Discord and posting with names and tags. It progressed with Steem-engine, now Hive-engine, which was great. Now that the communities have been officially rolled out, it's a lot easier to organize among ourselves. Couple that with badges and I feel like we're a lot more official now.

Communities I'm actively participating in:

DIY / Build-It
LEGO
Natural Medicine
STEM
Excel
Splinterlands
Curie
Skate Hive

Goals I've reached:
Dolphin! This was a really cool one to get to. I did end up buying quite a bit of Steem (for me at least, ~4K I think) and haven't done so in a while but I think I'm at a point where I can continue to put out content, reward others content and be satisfied with what I'm doing. It would be really cool to reach the Orca level or somewhere up there but that's quite a ways away and not worth the financial investment for me at the moment. Sometime in the future hopefully, though it's very tempting right now with Hive getting really killed in the markets unfortunately.

One of my posts reached over 40$ value! Top earning post. This was I think the closest one of my posts was to making it on the trending page. I personally abhor the trending page because it's just filled with generally a hell of a lot of utter trash, but getting onto the trending page somewhere is a goal for me, so a post can be worth while on there, at least in my eyes.

450 followers - It doesn't sound like a heck of a lot compared to some of the other big accounts but it's a good amount that I'm certainly hoping increases in the near future.

The future I envision:

I envision the future of the blockchain here as well as others as very important to the lifestyle that is being promoted. I really enjoy my time here but at the same time, I exercise caution as well. Things being permanent on the chain once you click "submit" is absolutely something to be cognizant of. I'm not sure if I will ever post a legitimate picture of myself, at least for the foreseeable future. The space we all enjoy though is an important step in the right direction for decentralization as well as giving power back to the people. Can you imagine a day where there are 100k active Hive users, legitimate users? That's a drop in the bucket compared to the traffic that the mainstream platforms get but what we do and learn now will help us in the future when the tech becomes a lot more mainstream and the userbase here goes way up.

Nested in here, as it is in many of my posts, is a little giveaway for lucky people reading it. Not everyone reads it all, so if the first person that can comment on this and let me know what post it was that got me 40$ wins 0.5 hive. I don’t keep a lot liquid lately, so I can give out more votes. Would still like to reward someone who notices this!

I think two of the people that honestly kept me on here in the beginning were @crypto.piotr and @krnel.

Piotr is an excellent organizer and person that engages with many hundreds of people, often with his own money from fiat. He's very dedicated to the environment and helps so many people, it's inspiring. I try to stay engaged with him when I can and help his project hope but I don’t do it as much as I would like!

KrNel was someone who was awesome to engage with. He organically posted his way up to Orca and engaged and voted the people who commented on his posts, meaningfully of course. It was very rare at the time, or I had the wrong pages subscribed to, that accounts of that power engaged with the people that comment on his posts.

There’s also dudes like @chekohler and @edicted, who I’ve done a lot of engagement with as well over time. They've given me support on my comment farming when I was an almost exclusive commenter, though that has been scaled back recently since I'm trying to post more and engage with more people on here. I still like stopping by their pages every couple days to see what they've got going on and where I can drop some of the things popping in my brain. Che is always good for a laugh and edicted is always good for sobering market analysis, not always correct but certainly often.

As I get older, the time certainly goes by quicker than I would like but one thing I've really enjoyed is having this space as my online social interaction versus the mainstream platforms. There tends to be more of an actual interaction in my opinion here, instead of bots just intentionally inciting arguments which happens on the big platforms. I've also connected with people from literally around the world. Australia to South Africa to Venezuela to Greece, it's been pretty awesome the different groups of people and their ideals and how we are way more alike than what people might think who don't interact with such a diverse crowd.

Here's to two more years on the platform, and even further!

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