Crypto TidBits Ive Learned While Hanging Out On Steemit
The crypto-learning curve is steep, and I have gained lots of knowledge by hanging out on Steemit. Before spending time here, lots of crypto talk seemed like jargon that only people who "understood computers" could understand. Now I see that crypto currency is simply electronic money.
Here is a list of some of the knowledge I've picked up.
Steemit is not the same as Steem
Steemit is an application on the steem blockchain. Steem is a currency. Steemit is simply a tiny little part of the whole Steem project.
An Exchange and a Wallet are different
Having a wallet at an exchange is like filling a personal wallet up with cash and then giving it to someone else to hold for you. For some people this makes sense, as banks hold our fiat for us, but exchanges are not like banks, they are more like check cashing places, or the tiny little huts all over Tijuana that exchange dollars for pesos.
Exchanges are not banks and you can have your own wallet that is not a part of an exchange. All of us here on steemit have a steem wallet. Similar ones are available for every coin you would like to hold.
Gold is cool but silver is gold
Silver is undervalued and more rare than its market value lets on. Lots of people who hold crypto like to buy and hold silver. Whenever someone asks me what I can by with my crypto I like to respond: "Silver... and dollars."
Silver is not an investment that gains value, it is an investment that retains value.
Free money exists
Yes Manna really does give you a quarter every week. Yes swift really is trying to figure out a similar Universal Basic Income Program (although yesterday they asked me for a government issued ID which made me think... no thanks).
There are also airdrops, blogging sites, and research pages that pay you to use their site. Everything I have found so far pays pretty much pays half pennies and nickels, but they are there, and have the potential of growing.
You can invest with a little bit of money
You can invest with $5 USD, $10USD and with even just your time.
A traditional bank will charge me money to hold my money unless I give them a certain amount of money when they say, yet we all pretend it is still my money.
Here (Bitcoin), I can drop $5.90 USD into a wallet in 2014 and watch it grow to over $200 USD by 2018.
You will still deal with fees to turn your fiat into crypto, but once your fiat is in a wallet, there are no fees that chip away at your investment.
One Billionaire Can Affect The Market
Sometimes coins go up, and sometimes coins go down. One billionaire playing with the market can make the whole system go up and down and all around. They can buy a whole lot of coins and make them worth more, than turn around and sell them. Everybody else that has low buying/selling value is affected by their movement.
White Pages are where you can learn all about a coin
Are you looking to invest some fiat or some of your well earned SBD into a different coin? How can you know if a coin is good or not? Blog posts and dtube videos are a good place to start researching, but those will usually just give you somebody else's opinion. In order to form your own opinion, you must read the white pages of the project.
There you will learn how many coins will ever be developed, what the useful qualities of the coin are, how the coin will work, and everything you need to know so you can make an informed decision before investing your money.
If you don't find the information you need in the white pages, it means that they project isn't fully formed. The project may still be a "good" project, but an incomplete white pages means there is a lot more work to be done.
Dust exists on Steemit
If your comments and posts don't earn at least $0.021 then the income disappears and turns to dust. The threshold varies slightly depending on various factors, but if your comment or upvote aren't worth a certain amount, the profits simply disappear.
Decentralized
This simply means that the information is kept in many places and not just in one centralized location. I don't know why this boggled me so much. Probably because I couldn't imagine huge companies having all of their information at just one center. What if that center has an emergency of some sort and gets taken out? What happens to all the info?
Centralized places depend on back ups and other systems of protection. Decentralized means that you can't destroy it at the center because the information exists in many different places.
A MarketCap is the most value a coin can hold
The Market Cap of Steem right now (May 6 Sun 9:41 PM Pacific Time) is: $903,772,962. That means that the most money our collective Steem project right now is worth: $903,772,962.
If you are trying to earn billions this year on Steemit, then the market cap must go up. When the value of steem goes up, the market cap goes up as well.
Crypto is Small
The market cap of steem being $903,772,962 is not really a lot of money considering that the US alone gave $390.05 billion dollars to Charity in 2016 according to Charity Navigator
Crypto has a lot of growth potential. We are in this game early. This is also why some say that the whole project could still get scrapped - there really is not that much wealth in crypto if you compare it to the wealth available everywhere else.
HODL
Hold on for dear life. And also, it does not matter what your coin is worth today, it matter what your coin is worth when you are ready to cash it out.
Its nice to look at my steem wallet and see me creeping towards thousandaire status, but I also realize that the value of it can change drastically within days.
What is a blockchain
Information is stored together in blocks, kind of like a rubics cube. The block is put together in such a way that if you try to change one bit of information on it, the whole puzzle gets thrown off. Once a block is put together, it is attached to the blocks that came before it.
This means that once a block is set, changing information becomes a nearly impossible task. Blockchain technology is simply the way information is stored.
Alt coins are NOT like small companies
But this is still a really good analogy anyway. Each coin has its own system and set of rules. By being a holder of the coin, you are a supporter, user, and part of the coin.
Passwords Are Important
As high tech as the systems are, they still need wallet addresses and passwords to make them work. We can't use our fingerprints or iris scans to access our money just yet - we still have to rely on passwords.
Don't lose them!
I have learned so much while reading blogs on steemit that it makes the income I earned on Steemit that much more valuable to me. I have been a part of a steep learning curve and would love to share my knowledge. If you have a question about what I wrote, or have a question you have been chewing on but haven't quite figured out the answer, let me know in the comments perhaps we can learn together.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog today ❤️
This is one of the best and most easiest to understand post I read untill so far. There is a lot I do not understand yet, but this is a good start. I would like to know what 'a white page'is. Thanks for taking the time to write this down.
Thank you for taking the time to read. Every time I finally understand something, it feels like it should have been easier to understand!
White pages contain the information you need to know for investing/using a crypto system (blue pages exist too - but I haven't caught on to the difference). If you go to the top right of your screen, to the right of your picture, you will find three lines, click on those and a drop down menu appears.
It shows you blue pages, white pages, and SMT white pages (social media tokens, which will be added to the blockchain soon). The Steemit specific white pages seem to have a discrepancy as they say that you can only convert SBD to Steem and NOT Steem to SBD - but im sure Ive bought SBD with STEEM before. Still, you can find lots of good information regarding the project there.
If I click on the 3 lines this is what I see (see picture).
The FAQ of Steemit (I use a smartphone).
As I just joined I believe there was a diffetent 'reward' system also. So it might be before it was possible to buy STEEM with SBD?
Mine looks different. Sorry I couldn’t offer more help.
That's a lot of info girl! I'm still overwhelmed by the crypto world, so I leave it up to my husband. Luckily, he's got a pretty good handle. I do believe in the power of silver though, for certain! I'm always checking my change when I get cash back at the store! 😁
I had a list of three things I wanted to share and then the list kept growing and growing.
I kinda knew but didn't really know that not all steemit bloggers know (or care) about crypto further than: "I get some when I blog" Lucky your husband is paying attention, it makes the learning curve easier then someone close by is learning the same stuff as you.
Resteemed, really great stuff in here! Thanks for sharing metzli!
Thanks for the re-steem.
Steem is the first crypto that I own and I "only" invested my time in it.
I have been learning a lot on crypto as well, anyway, I still don't feel to trade anything, because I am not sure where the value is coming from. I don't want to invest in something that I don't know.
Did you open a wallet somewhere else and are you investing in other crypto? If so which ones?
Airdrops, blogging sites, and research pages pay you to use it? Which ones?
And what is Manna? I clicked on the website...It is a new crypto you are investing into?
I have not "really" done any trading, unless you count the time when SBD was worth $10USD and I used it to buy some litecoin, and then later, used the lite coin to buy Steem. Or the other such times when I played around on my computer and phone and switched currencies around - fun, but I didn't even know if I was gaining or losing. It has to do with learning to measure your gains to bitcoin instead of measuring them to the USD or other fiat - I can almost understand the why/how.
I have opened other wallets, and I am only playing with investments, a few dollars here and there, which is why I was vague in my post, I was writing specifics but then realized it made me sound like I had more sound knowledge than I feel I do. I have a bitcoin, lite coin, BTS (I don't know how to work that wallet... its like a mystery that I like to sit on my computer and stare at sometimes), Manna (please sign up using a referral, it gives you and the referrer a little boost in income), Swift, steem, music-coin (which I was really excited about then dropped) and I think that's it..
Airdrops, just kind of happen when they do, and you can read about them here on steemit under the "crypto" tag. Some of them are shady and I wouldn't give them my info, some of them sound good. Airdrops are one of those things that if you don't catch them when they are happening, then you miss them. I don't know of any pending airdrops right now.
Blogging sites are steemit, and Sola. Sola is still starting out, their platform keeps changing and they tend to have a troll-like audience. I do admit that their audience simply might not like what I share on there (lots and lots of articles about the Native American Experience). Still, I see lots of snark, and anonymous accounts there.
There is Presearch for research page. They pay you a part of a token anytime you do a search under their account.
And manna is a Universal Basic Income experiment. Their aim is to give a basic income to everybody. They have some lofty goals and I hope they succeed in them. If their plan works out like they want, everybody will be earning about $1000 per year just for being alive. Manna's money comes from investments, and fundraising. Their white pages have lots and lots of info. All I am doing there is letting them put coins in my account every week. Its been about 35 cents per payout, but im hoping it becomes more significant.
@taskmaster4450 tends to blog a lot about the age of abundance and they often talk about other coins and opportunities. That blog is where I first heard of manna and presearch.
Thank you for taking the time to read my article and for asking for more details :)
That's so cool! I just subscribed Manna from your link. I hope you will get a bonus out of it.
Can you see it?
I can see that you signed up but I can only tell ya you because you told me.
Manna to the moon! Lol.
Wow @metzli. I am impressed. You know so many already about crypto. I just know like 20% of what you have written here. I am slow in learning about money and business except household money and bills. lol. This is informative and I need to even dig some more some terms here. Good job for making all these points for us :)
Thank you. The more I learn, the more I realize that I only understand a percentage of what is going on.
I do look forward to investing in some alt-coins aside from Steem.
I need to bookmark this page for future reference. Crypto is such a strange world I don't know if I'll ever really understand it, but this helps!
It took me a long to time to begin to kind of understand crypto.
I learned the most through steemit.
You've really know enough on crypto and other online businesses
That is really impressed @metzli, I can see that you have learned a lot about crypto. I need to be read this post again and again to have more knowledge about crypto. Thank you for sharing this.
How is your family and your side. Stay lifted darling
There are lots of blogs here filled with lots of knowledge. I am grateful that I was able to catch some of it.
Thanks for stopping by.
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